The Act was drafted by the prison reformer John Howard and the jurist William Blackstone and recommended imprisonment as an alternative sentence to death or transportation.

[2] The prison population in England and Wales had swollen following the initial fighting in the American Rebellion and the government's attendant decision, by the Criminal Law Act 1776 (16 Geo.

[3] As early as 1777, Howard had produced a report to a House of Commons select committee which identified appalling conditions in most of the prisons he had inspected.

'[a]"[5] This plan was adopted by Jeremy Bentham as particular to prisons, poorhouses, lazarettos, houses of industry, manufactories, hospitals, workhouses, madhouses, and schools.

A series of letters written in the year 1787, from Crecheff in White Russia to a friend in England,[6] is also elaborate to the Liberal ground of that time.