John Howard

John Howard was born in 1726, the son of a prosperous London upholsterer, and inherited enough money never to need to work. He was a nervous, methodical, deeply religious man who kept notes about everything. In 1756, sailing to Lisbon after the earthquake, his ship was taken by a French privateer and he spent weeks in a French prison, an experience he did not forget.

In 1773 he was appointed High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, a mostly ceremonial post, and took it seriously enough to visit the county jail. He found prisoners who had been acquitted but were still locked up because they could not pay the fees the jailer charged for their keep. When he asked the magistrates to pay the jailer a salary instead, they wanted a precedent. So he went to look for one, county by county, and found none, only filth, starvation, jail fever, and men, women and children kept together in the dark.

He gave evidence to Parliament in 1774, and two Acts followed. Then he simply kept going. He visited prisons across Britain, then across Europe, over and over, weighing bread rations and measuring cells, and published his findings in The State of the Prisons in 1777. He was said to have travelled some fifty thousand miles.

He was a hard, unhappy father to his only son, who later went mad. He died of typhus at Kherson, in what is now Ukraine, in 1790, after visiting the sick there. The Howard League for Penal Reform bears his name.