In the 21st century, prisons are considered an undesirable land use, built in the middle of nowhere, out of sight and out of mind. In the past, things were very different. In Europe during the Middle Ages, jails were often located in castles, like the Tower of London, which held prisoners from 1100 until 1952. In those days, imprisonment was not the main mode of punishment, and most convicts were only jailed temporarily before being fined, beaten, executed, or banished. Castles were centres of political and military power, as well as the most secure buildings in the region.

This had started to change by the late 18th Century. As law enforcement became more systematic and professionalised, the need for larger, purpose built prisons grew. These were built on the urban fringes where there was available land, but were still relatively nearby given the limitations of transportation. They were soon swallowed up by urban growth. 

It was in this context that Victoria Prison was placed on a hillside above what would become Central. It was in fact the first permanent building built by the British upon taking over Hong Kong Island in 1841. It came into use before there was even an official police force. 

The location chosen by Captain William Caine—the military man appointed as Chief Magistrate—made perfect sense at the time. He built it on a rocky outcrop that would be naturally defensible in case of riot. Victoria Prison, which doubled as the Magistrate’s residence and the courthouse, was soon joined on the hillside by other government buildings including the Records Office, the Land Officer’s house, the post office, the barracks, and by the mid-1850s, Government House. Victoria Prison was therefore part of a cluster of official buildings visually projecting political authority over the town that was rapidly spreading along the coast. 

Punishment in public

The first years of colonial rule were essentially a chaotic mess. Hong Kong attracted pirates, robbers, kidnappers and human traffickers, while the soldiers and policemen charged with keeping order were themselves often drunk and disorderly. Some of the jail’s earliest inmates were policemen caught drunk on the job. To exert control, the authorities turned to harsh punishment. 

Every Wednesday, prisoners were marched from the jail to the Upper Bazaar (near present-day Graham Street) where they were publicly flogged between 20 and 100 times with a rattan cane. People were often beaten for the most minor offences or for being too poor to pay fines. Afterwards, many prisoners were branded on the earlobe with a hot iron and deported to penal colonies in Tasmania (for Europeans) or Labuan, an island off the coast of Borneo (for Chinese). 

Petty criminals were put outside the prison gates with their legs clapped in stocks for passers-by to see, and presumably laugh at. Another common punishment was to cut off prisoners’ queues, partly to prevent suicides, and partly for humiliation. Public executions were watched by large crowds well into the 1870s, formally ending only in 1893.  

At a time before mass media or mass literacy, making a public spectacle of punishment was seen as the best way of deterring crime. While some objected to indiscriminate and excessive flogging, there was widespread support for the practice among the commercial sector, who were convinced it was necessary to protect their property. Jail, which provided shelter and three meals a day, was viewed as luxurious compared to the living conditions of the average coolie, and therefore not intimidating at all. Elites complained when Governor John Pope Henessy, a committed prison reformer, abolished public flogging in the late 1870s. 

It was therefore not only normal for a prison to be within walking distance of the city centre, it was integral to the functioning of early colonial law enforcement. The compound that came to be known colloquially as Tai Kwun was a one-stop shop for criminal justice encompassing the prison, the Central Magistracy (from 1847), and the Central Police Station (from 1864). It underwent multiple expansions, reconstructions, and modifications, becoming a rabbit warren of closely packed buildings.

Apart from a failed attempt to send prisoners to Stonecutter’s Island in 1864, which was abandoned after 30 prisoners drowned and 100 escaped, Victoria Prison remained Hong Kong’s only prison until the 1920s. By then, urban development had crept up the hillside and surrounded the complex so that people could look out of their windows and see into the prison yards. 

In 1921, an abandoned quarantine station in Lai Chi Kok was converted into a minimum security men’s prison. A women’s block was added in 1931. Then in 1937, a maximum security men’s facility was built at Stanley, and all prisoners were transferred out of Victoria Prison. From then on, Victoria Prison was no longer used to detain convicted criminals, but to hold destitutes, debtors, detainees awaiting trial, and illegal immigrants awaiting deportation, including Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and 1980s. 

So the question is, what changed, and why? 

Prison as education

Let us rewind the clock to 1877, when Governor Hennessy was trying to reform the prison system. He arrived in Hong Kong with progressive ideals about using the criminal justice system to reform criminals, instead of to simply intimidate the population. He ended the deportation of criminals and public flogging. (However, flogging continued to be administered inside of Hong Kong prisons for another century, ending only in 1990.) 

He believed that prison should transform convicts into productive citizens through discipline and hard labour, and that prisoners should be able to earn early release for good behaviour. He advocated separating young offenders from adult criminals, and housing prisoners in individual cells instead of cramming them together into large rooms. 

These now familiar elements of prison systems emerged in Europe over the course of the 19th Century, but Hong Kong was decades behind the curve. To local elites, Hennessy’s ideas were outrageously lenient. Even those who found flogging barbaric by European standards thought it was necessary in an uncivilized place like Hong Kong, “where the criminal classes are far less humanized,” as Chief Justice John Smale wrote. Nevertheless, Hennessy pushed his policies through with the backing of the Colonial Office, which sought to bring Hong Kong’s prison system into line with practices in England.

To be clear, Hennessy and his contemporaneous reformers did not want to make prisoners comfortable. He still believed that prison should be a deeply unpleasant experience, and in fact reduced prisoners’ food rations. The hard labour that he believed was morally improving did not have to be useful, it just had to be painful. Prisoners were made to do the shot drill, a pointless task involving lifting a heavy cannonball to chest height, walking a few steps over, and putting it down, over and over. Prisoners also had to turn a stiff hand crank 12,500 times a day, or walk on a treadmill for hours, though neither piece of equipment did anything useful whatsoever. (The treadmill was nothing like a modern running machine, it was a massive heavy cylinder that functioned like an endless ladder.) 

Fast forward again to the 1930s. By then, Victoria Prison was both unsustainably overcrowded and increasingly outdated. In 1931, the government allocated HK$4.5 million to build Stanley Prison and sent the Superintendent of Prisons to Malaya and Shanghai to learn about best practices. However, mere months after it opened, certain Legco members were already blaming a rise in crime on its excessively comfortable facilities, while calling for prison life to be made harder. Prison reform was therefore a nonlinear process, beset by constant tension between liberal modernizers and punitive hardliners. Still, by the early 20th Century, the belief in public punishment had faded.   

A landscape of dams and prisons

After World War II, prisons were built in increasingly remote places in close connection with reservoir construction. While this might seem strange, there is a certain logic. Prisons require a lot of infrastructure: roads, power, water and sewer lines. While it may be difficult to justify building all of this hardware for a prison, when it is installed for a reservoir, the prison becomes feasible.  

When the Tai Lam Chung reservoir in Tuen Mun was finished in 1957, the construction workers’ barracks just below the main dam was repurposed into Tai Lam Prison, a drug rehabilitation facility.  Throughout the 1960s, drug users were put to work afforesting the hillside, building dykes, bunds, roads and paths, as well as fighting forest fires, with the idea that working outdoors would be rehabilitative. The Tai Lam Women’s Prison opened next door in 1969, followed by the Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre nearby in 1972. 

In Lantau, the now defunct Chi Ma Wan Prison was built just north of the Shap Long Reservoir in 1958. The construction of Shek Pik Reservoir in the early 1960s generated another cluster of prisons. The Shek Pik Training Centre for juvenile offenders (now called the Sha Tsui Correctional Institution) was built in 1964, followed by the Tong Fuk Correctional Institution in 1966, and Shek Pik Prison in 1984. As at Tai Lam Chung, prisoners from the Chi Ma Wan and Tong Fuk prisons planted trees and built roads throughout the 1960s and 1970s. 

In 2006, Tai Kwun was finally decommissioned and revamped into a cultural venue. Since its reopening, its history has drawn newfound public attention. Visitors can now tour the old cells and view the flogging stands on display. There are numerous exhibitions and tours about the compound’s architecture. Still, it is also worthwhile to think about the geography of incarceration. Where are prisons built in the first place, and what does that say about the society that built them? And how much of an improvement is it really, to locate prisons out of sight and out of mind?

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Sources:

Frank Dikötter, “A Paradise for Rascals: Colonialism, punishment and the prison in Hong Kong (1841-1898),” Crime, History & Societies, vol 8. i.1, 2004.

Purcell Miller Tritton LLP, “The Old Central Police Station and Victoria Prison Hong Kong: Conservation Management Plan”, June 2008.

Alain Le Pichon, “Crime and its Punishment in Victorian Hong Kong”, French Journal of British Studies, vol. 12 i.3, 2003. 

John Pope Hennessy, address in “Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, No.7 of 1877”, 17 September 1877.

Florence Mok, “Catchwater colonialism: reshaping Hong Kong’s hydrology, infrastructure, metabolism and landscape, 1937–1968”, Urban History, 18 March 2024.

Allan Brodie, “The Castle or the Green Field, Dilemmas and Solutions in British Prison Planning, 1780-1850”, Prison Service Journal, No. 246, November 2019.