Answer to: What can you tell us about the justice system in the Victorian society? How were criminals treated?

Punishment in the Victorian era can often be classified by most as a form of capital punishment. It was very direct, and crimes were always accompanied with a form of physical or psychological torment. There were no attempts made by the general public to try to reintegrate the criminals into society, but rather take them out of it, or cripple them so that they couldn’t not be accepted. Some of these dramatic measures included hanging (to simply remove the person from society), imprisonment (to isolate the person), or deportation (to let another community deal with the criminal).

By the time that Queen Victoria was on the throne, however, fewer crimes carried severe death sentences. From there on in, they decided to change the punishment from cruel and demeaning to those that reintegrated the person into society. However, there were still some more barbaric forms of punishment in play, such as hard labor, physical punishment, conscription and hanging.

Treatment of criminals, however, was still cruel. Prisoners who were lucky enough to be sent to prison instead of death were fed a meager gruel that carried barely 100 calories. It was usually made from the leftovers of the prison guards, and many prisoners either resorted to cannibalism or to death by starvation. Few criminals ever survived the prison, unless they escaped, like the convict in Great Expectations.

Answer to: What were the conditions in jails like in the Victorian era?

In the 1850’s, conditions in jails were abhorrent. The cells were crowded, and all the prisoners were herded together without any distinction between them. Women and men, sane or insane people, or even those who had not been convicted of a crime, were crushed into cells that were much too small for them. The jails were dark, and completely filthy.

Those who could not pay their taxes were sent to ‘debtor’s prison’. The conditions here were slightly better, as there were fewer offenders to prosecute and imprison. Here, they were forced to labour to make household items like potato sacks or straw baskets.

In the 1860’s, the jails increased greatly in quality. They were expanded to become almost spacious, and there was heating and regular cleaning of the cells. The cooking became higher quality, and the prisoners were almost better fed than many Londoners. Schooling became available to the prisoners, and they could borrow books from libraries that were established inside the prisons. It became so that if one was struggling and not earning enough for a high standard of living, you could commit a crime and have access to warm lodgings, and good food for free, both of which were of better quality than the conditions experienced by many non-criminal Londoners.

source: http://members.tripod.com/ajsmith_2/