Design and reform: the ‘separate system’ in the nineteenth-century English prison

The key to the immense changes during these years was a particular method and ideology of imprisonment known as the ‘separate system’. At a time of increasing centralisation of government and the introduction of administrative uniformity in many spheres, it was a system which was to have immense and far-reaching implications. Broadly speaking, the prisons that were entirely rebuilt during this period are those which are still in use today. As a case study in how social ideas were embodied in a particular built form, this chapter examines the separate system prison and the process by which it was institutionalised in nineteenth-century England.