We need your feedback – take the Prison History survey!

Prison History needs your feedback… so, how are we doing?

As we come to the end of the first year of prisonhistory.org, and to the end of the first month of Your Local Lock-Up, we’d love to hear your feedback and know how we’re doing.

Have you been able to make use of our data on 19th-century prisons or lock-ups, or of our lists of prison records? Have our news articles increased your interest in prison history?  Or have you found our blogs on using different types of records for prison research helpful? We want to know.

Is there something on our site that you’d like more of – such as our ‘How to’ guides for prison research, our ‘Go Explore’ blogs on local prison history, or our feature articles on our own discoveries in Britain’s prison history?

What do you think of our user-generated content – such as Your Stories?

Please tell us so that we can give you more of what you want and need.

Create your own user feedback survey

Alternatively, we are always happy to receive feedback and other questions about anything to do with the project or prison history more generally via our Contact Us form.

What should we do next?

Our survey also includes questions on what you think we should do next.

We have loads of ideas related to our mission – to expand our understanding of the practice and experience of imprisonment in the British Isles. But we’d like to know what you think.

For example, we have included Wales, Scotland and Ireland in our Lock-ups database. We hope that contributions from those nations will help us to gauge whether there is interest in expanding the geography of our 19th Century Prisons database. What do you think?

Lock-up red filter for feedback article

There are a number of related record classes which have not been included in the Prison History database. One of these is criminal calendars – lists of prisoners scheduled for trial at Quarter Sessions or Assizes, drawn up by keepers or governors on the eve of the sitting of the courts. So many criminal calendars survive. They are a key source for family historians. But they are not always easy to find. We could, at Prison History, create a definitive, rationalised list. How appealing is that proposal?

Another idea is to develop new datasets on the experience of imprisonment. We could, for example, build a database of 19th-century prison library catalogues. Would that be of interest or of use to you?

Please tell us what you think by completing our survey or contacting us. We want your thoughts and feedback.

Help keep us active and free

We can’t develop the Prison History project any further without more funding. To make the case for new datasets and for more useful content on prisons and their archives, we need to show that there is interest in the project and, crucially, that people are making use of our data and resources for various purposes.

So please tell us how we’re doing, what you like about the site, what you like more of, and how you have used our data. Better still, send us a Story about what you have done with the help of Prison History.

And, if you have information on prisons or lock-ups, please consider contributing to our database, or sending us your story.

Your feedback helps us enormously – every contribution, message and survey response is important.