Alexander Maconochie Of Norfolk Island
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: First Edition Thus
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Some minor silverfish damage to FEP, rubbed edges and some chipping to DJ.
In the brutal world of nineteenth-century convict transportation, one man dared to imagine that prisoners were human beings worthy of dignity and reform — and paid dearly for it. Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island chronicles the remarkable life of Captain Alexander Maconochie, a Scottish naval officer and pioneering prison reformer who, in 1840, became superintendent of the notorious British penal colony on Norfolk Island, a place synonymous with savage punishment and despair. Driven by radical humanitarian convictions, Maconochie dismantled the system of arbitrary floggings and indefinite sentences, replacing them with his revolutionary mark system — a merit-based scheme that rewarded good behaviour with earned freedom — only to be dismissed by colonial authorities who viewed compassion as a dangerous weakness. John Vincent Barry, himself a distinguished Australian judge and legal scholar, brings both rigorous historical authority and profound moral insight to this biography, situating Maconochie's struggle within the broader arc of penal reform and the slow, painful evolution of Western justice. Barry illustrates how Maconochie's ideas — radical and ridiculed in his own time — planted the seeds for modern concepts of parole and rehabilitative justice that the world would only embrace a century later. This is a story of institutional cruelty, visionary courage, and the terrible cost of being right too soon — and it leaves the reader asking how many such visionaries we have silenced in the name of order.
Author: John Vincent Barry
Format: Hardback
Published: 1958, Oxford University Press
Genre: Biography
Edition: First Edition Thus
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Some minor silverfish damage to FEP, rubbed edges and some chipping to DJ.
In the brutal world of nineteenth-century convict transportation, one man dared to imagine that prisoners were human beings worthy of dignity and reform — and paid dearly for it. Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island chronicles the remarkable life of Captain Alexander Maconochie, a Scottish naval officer and pioneering prison reformer who, in 1840, became superintendent of the notorious British penal colony on Norfolk Island, a place synonymous with savage punishment and despair. Driven by radical humanitarian convictions, Maconochie dismantled the system of arbitrary floggings and indefinite sentences, replacing them with his revolutionary mark system — a merit-based scheme that rewarded good behaviour with earned freedom — only to be dismissed by colonial authorities who viewed compassion as a dangerous weakness. John Vincent Barry, himself a distinguished Australian judge and legal scholar, brings both rigorous historical authority and profound moral insight to this biography, situating Maconochie's struggle within the broader arc of penal reform and the slow, painful evolution of Western justice. Barry illustrates how Maconochie's ideas — radical and ridiculed in his own time — planted the seeds for modern concepts of parole and rehabilitative justice that the world would only embrace a century later. This is a story of institutional cruelty, visionary courage, and the terrible cost of being right too soon — and it leaves the reader asking how many such visionaries we have silenced in the name of order.