Alexander Maconochie (penal reformer)

[2] He joined the Royal Navy in 1803 and as a midshipman saw active service in the Napoleonic Wars, rising to the rank of lieutenant.

The forced march in the bitter cold winter of Holland to Verdun and more than two years of miserable imprisonment gave him an experience that he used later in his penal reform.

In the peace following the final defeat of Napoleon, Maconochie spent 13 years in Edinburgh studying geography and geopolitics.

In 1836, he sailed to the convict settlement at Hobart in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) as private secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin.

The convict system, being fixated on punishment alone, released into society crushed, resentful and bitter expirees in whom the spark of enterprise and hope was dead.

His two basic principles of penology were the following: Following the Molesworth Committee's report, transportation to New South Wales was abolished in 1840 although it continued to other colonies.

Disturbed at reports of conditions on Norfolk Island, Lord Normanby, Secretary of State for the Colonies, suggested that a new system should be used, and the superintendence given to an officer deeply concerned with the moral welfare of the convicts.

He was not permitted to apply his principles to the 1,200 hardened twice-sentenced convicts but only to the 600 newcomers sent directly from the United Kingdom and who were separated from the 'Old Hands'.

In an exclusively male environment, he found he was unable to reduce the prevalent 'unnatural offence' of sodomy, and he continued to punish it by flogging.

John Barry states that "Maconochie was a pioneer in penal reform, and suffered the fate of men in advance of their times.

[3] Sir Walter Frederick Crofton (1815–1897) introduced a variant of the 'progressive stages' system of penal discipline into the Irish convict prisons.