Although The Rationale of Punishment was first published in 1830, Jeremy Bentham wrote its texts on communicating with prisoners about 1778. Bentham’s remarks concerning this work in letters to friends indicate that he was writing it from about November, 1776 to the summer of 1778.^ Specific textual evidence in The Rationale of Punishment supports a date about 1778 for its texts on communicating with prisoners. The Rationale of Punishment also includes later text, including text from after 1810.
The Rationale of Punishment’s texts on communicating with prisoners predate Bentham’s thinking about panopticon prison architecture. The texts on communicating with prisoners occur in The Rationale of Punishment, Book II, Chapter 4, in the third folio-source-group section. In that section, the evil “tumultuous noises – indecent practices – indelicate conversations” is matched to this remedy:
Keepers to be directed to punish those guilty of such practices. The punishment to be made known to the prisoners by being fixed up in the prison.^
The panopticon architecture that Bentham began to enthusiastically elaborate after 1786 emphasized constant surveillance of prisoners and their internalization of prison control. Posting a verbal description of punishments on the prison wall is a much different conceptual model for controlling prisoners.
Other aspects of the third section suggests that Bentham wrote it in the late 1770s. It includes a footnote that mentions the execution of Maharaja Nandakumar (Rajah Nuncomar) for forgery. That event took place on August 5, 1775.^ The last two enumerations in the section concern the types of prison conditions to which Howard attracted considerable attention when the first edition of his State of the Prisons was published in 1777. The section also includes a footnote citing a relevant page in that edition.^ That footnote would not provide the correct page reference in Howard’s subsequent editions of 1780, 1784, and 1792.
Text closely related to the third section of Chapter 4 also dates to the late 1770s. The first section of Chapter 4 refers to a prison regime of “diet, solitude, and darkness.” This triplet was a distinguishing feature of Bentham’s writings from the 1770s.^ The first section of Chapter 4 includes a sentence discussing the imposition of “hard labour.” Bentham published in 1778 a review of a bill concerning “hard labour” for prisoners.^
Chapter 4, which is entitled “Imprisonment,” is the first of four sequential chapters that directly address ordinary imprisonment. Those four are the only such chapters in The Rationale of Punishment. Chapter 5, “Imprisonment – Fees,” addresses the subject of legislation in 1774 and a major concern of Howard’s book. Chapter 6, “Imprisonment examined,” includes a verbatim quotation from Howard’s 1777 edition of State of the Prisons and two verbatim quotes from Jonas Hanway’s 1776 publication, Solitude in Imprisonment. It also discusses at length the merits of “solitude, darkness, and hard diet.” Chapter 7, “General Scheme of Imprisonment,” likewise invokes the triplet “solitude, darkness, and spare diet” that characterized Bentham’s writings from the 1770s.