When prison truly meant prison, it bore the name of Bedlam, of Broadmoor, of Dartmoor and Newgate, each a stone hymn to the consequence of chaos. These were not the gentle halls of rehabilitation centres with yoga mats and identity workshops, but the stark, cold ledger of a civilisation drawing a hard line against mayhem. There was no confusion, no moral relativism, no therapeutic platitudes when the iron doors slammed shut. In those days, justice was not ashamed to wear boots.

The very names of such places echo with grim resonance. Newgate, with its gallows shadow falling over London’s conscience; Dartmoor, built to house the war's detritus and later the domestic marauder; Broadmoor, for those whose minds had twisted from reason into monstrous fancy. And then the floating purgatories, prison hulks moored like grim monuments in the Thames, where men laboured and rotted alike. Devil’s Island, Van Diemen’s Land, geographies redefined as punishment.

These were not utopias, but they were boundaries. And boundaries are what civilisation must uphold if it is not to drift into sentimental ruin.

Let us be clear: there is no joy in cruelty, but there is grim relief in justice. For the real horror lies not in the existence of the prison, but in its absence. Bedlam’s howls were not the sound of oppression, they were the last echo of a society saying, “This far, and no farther.” When the cell door closed, it was a signal that civilisation would not be bargained with by the cutthroat or the defiler.

Today, by contrast, we are led to believe that law and order are themselves oppressive relics, that to detain is to dehumanise, to punish is to persecute. Prisons are repackaged as “centres of re-entry,” and violence is no longer met with consequence but with conferences. A civilisation too embarrassed to restrain its predators will soon find itself devoured by them.

Recall the fate of societies that dared to forget this: the streets of post-revolutionary France ran red when prisons were emptied by ideology. Soviet Russia redefined crime and justice until the state itself became the jailer of every free thought. In Weimar Germany, leniency toward political thuggery opened the floodgates for jackboots and blood oaths.

We do not glorify cruelty, but we reject the folly of pretending that safety can be secured without strength. Law and order are not fascist incantations, they are the iron girders without which the roof of liberty collapses. The criminally unrepentant are not misunderstood poets; they are saboteurs of the public peace, and where the scaffold once stood, we now hang nothing but excuses.

It is not barbarism to imprison the barbarian. It is barbarism to leave him free to prey upon the innocent while cloaking his deeds in the robes of victimhood.

So yes, when prison meant hulks and high walls, it also meant a world where the shopkeeper slept, the child played, and the clerk walked home in twilight unafraid. That world was hard, but it was safe. And for that reason alone, it deserves not our scorn, but our memory.

Law and order, enforced without apology, is not a lamentable past. It is the only future worth defending.