High Sheriff's Club:
Our top tier of donors, you want to make the largest possible impact across a number of areas. Your gift of $20,000 or more goes a long way to helping local individuals and families to receive help with anything from housing and ID replacement, to conflict resolution skills counselling, parenting skills enhancement, after-school youth programs and more.
Want to discuss your donation interests with us? -> paul.dobbs@jhsdurham.on.ca
Benefits
- Tax receipt (1st year)
- Letter of Acknowledgement
- Name published in annual report *
- Uniquely Numbered "High Sheriff's" plaque (See sample now)
- High Sheriff's card containing an image of your unique badge
- Donor Newsletter including photo op
- Personal call from the E.D. or Board Chair
- Press release *
- Personal tour of the agency facilities
- Potential naming opportunity (10 years)
* publication can be excluded if donor wishes to be anonymous
John Howard as High Sheriff
John Howard was appointed the High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. He had no knowledge of prison science per say, and so it remained for him to invent it, but he had a thoroughness and devotion to the duty, attending to every peice of official business personally, rather than to assign those tasks to Deputy Sheriff's, as had been the custom prior to him. John sat in the courts during trials, visited every cell in the gaols of his county, and scrutinized every individual prisoner's case.
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Prisons in Howard's Time
Howard said that the first circumstance that excited his activity on behalf of prisoners was that men found not guilty at their trial were sent back to gaols and locked up until they had paid the fees due to the gaoler or the Clerk of the Assizes.
Debtors were treated as criminals. The death penalty was applied for 200 different offences, from stealing a pair of shoes or a skein of thread to arson and murder.
Feeding the prisoners was farmed out to the lowest bidder and water was often supplied from outside the prison walls but filth was allowed to accumulate in reeking masses all over the grounds and in the water stores.
Spirituous liquors and beer were sold within the gaol, encouraging drunkness. Men and women were placed in close proximity, and vice was rampant. Straw was seldom provided for bedding and prisoners had to lie on muddy floors with dampness oozing into their cells. Gaol Fever was almost an exclusively British disease, costing many lives.
Current prisoners had the right of demanding an entry fee of new prisoners called a "garnish" before the "privileges" of the prison were allowed to him. This meant for much personal cruelty and inside persecution. Debtors and felons alike were in constant jeopardy of life from the foul air, filthy cells, and unventilated holes into which they were crowded almost to suffocation. Prisoner's mental health received no attention.
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John Howard's Impact
Distances, labour and even personal expense were no barrier to John. He travelled hundreds of kilometers at a time by post and horseback, night and day through England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Wight. A gaol with even one single prisoner was important enough to draw him for inspection. He recorded his findings in narrative style. He did not seek to create any association or group, but to conduct work for reform by his own hand.
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When called to the House of Commons, he was asked to be witness as an expert on prison conditions. His bearing, modesty, precision and exactness of answers filled the House with surprise such that he was called back a second time to be publicly thanked by the Speaker for his humanity and zeal.
John wrote "The State of the Prisons", printed in 1777, as his own expense, addressed in a format that the general public absrobed readily with clear understanding as to what he had discovered. It created a new interest at a near-universal level in the way prisons and justice were managed at that time.
From this work the theory of criminal law became the true practise of criminal law, and methods began to be reformed to address the filthy conditions, the means of paying the gaolers separately from the prisoner's being extorted, separation of prisoners into single cells, removal of spirits and more.
John Howard is often referred to as the father of modern prison reform as his principals and research lead to many of the core methods encouraged and practiced today.
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