In a move that echoes 19th-century policy, the Home Office has announced it will house 500 male asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm, a 222-bedroom accommodation barge, off the coast of Portland in Dorset. The decision is supposed to reduce pressure on the UK’s asylum system, as the cost of housing migrants in hotels amounts to more than £6m a day. Although the government claims this action brings the UK into line with countries around Europe, it also draws darker comparisons to Britain’s historical use of prison hulks, infamous “floating hells” that were used to detain criminals.
A prison housing crisis at the end of the 18th century led the British government to use “hulks”, inadequately modified naval and merchant ships, as floating prisons for male offenders sentenced to transportation. On land, ever increasing numbers of inmates were being crammed inside outdated and poorly managed prisons, so male convicts were moved out on to ships in the Thames estuary – including at Woolwich, Chatham, Deptford and Sheerness – and further afield in Plymouth and Portsmouth. Some ships operated for months, others for decades.
Isolated from land, the Bibby Stockholm will have roughly the same capacity as Georgian- and Victorian-era prison hulks. During that period, men and boys received sentences for seven years, 14 years or life, based on crimes including robbery and murder, but also petty misdemeanours such as stealing sheep, loaves of bread and handkerchiefs.
Convicts complained about scanty rations – ships’ biscuits were mouldy, cheap cuts of beef were sour, and river water made them ill. Conditions were so poor that convicts died at a rate of one in four, with their bodies sold off to anatomists for dissection. The Home Office states that there will be 24/7 security on board the Bibby Stockholm, but on prison hulks, violence, sexual assault and robbery were rife.
The Home Office’s decision mirrors the historical policy of prison hulks; then, as now, they were used to save money, act as a deterrent and provide a stopgap until the housing crisis abated. But this didn’t work – hulks were in fact moored across Britain for more than 80 years. They became part of the landscape despite objections from locals, drawing crowds who visited dockyards to see the chain gangs. There is no doubt that Charles Dickens – who spent part of his childhood in Chatham, Kent – saw convicts at work, and heard the cannon fire at night when men escaped across the barren wetlands, later described in Great Expectations.
The legacies of Britain’s colonial-era practices are undoubtedly influencing policy today, shaping our government’s attitudes and approaches. Nineteenth-century prison hulks supplemented a policy of dealing with society’s wrongdoers through deportation. Transportation to British colonies – most notably Australia and Tasmania, but also Bermuda and Gibraltar – became the fate of many convicts who never returned from or survived the experience. The Home Office’s decision to send asylum seekers to Rwanda certainly promotes a policy of deportation that owes its debt to history.
Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights programme director, criticised last month’s decision, stating that asylum seekers – many of whom have escaped terror and torture – should be “treated with basic human dignity, not corralled on barges or other grossly inadequate and isolated accommodation”. Yet governments periodically turn to ships to help ease housing crises. The Bibby Stockholm has already been used by Germany and the Netherlands to house migrants and homeless people. Its website states that it provides “luxury living on board”, but it’s doubtful that the home secretary, Suella Braverman, and her colleagues will be reserving a cabin for the summer holidays.
If the Home Office expects that accommodation vessels will cut costs, it should note that prison hulks proved far more expensive than investing in prisons fit for purpose. One of these was HMP Portland, built by convicts and opened in 1848; convict labour also built the sea defences where the Bibby Stockholm will now be moored. By the mid-19th century, transportation became vastly unpopular. Prisons began to focus on reforming and rehabilitating convicts, rather than punishing them, and the last hulk in England closed in 1857. Only proper investment in immigration centres, making them safer and more efficient, will solve today’s problems.
There are obvious differences between the asylum seekers who will be housed on the Bibby Stockholm and convicts like Great Expectations’s Abel Magwitch. But the parallels are also striking: when the government begins to treat the former as criminals, rather than treating them with dignity and compassion, the difference between them erodes. Looking back to the history of Britain’s prison hulks can show us red flags and policies we should not repeat – but only if we listen.
Anna McKay is a historian of crime and punishment at the University of Liverpool
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