General Prison Registers for Two Irish Prisons, 1840-1910

Blum, Matthias and Colvin, Christopher L. and McLaughlin, Eoin (2025). General Prison Registers for Two Irish Prisons, 1840-1910. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857702

This project presents a hand-collected dataset of over 18,620 individuals incarcerated in Kilmainham Gaol (1837–1910) or Clonmel Gaol (1848–1929), derived from surviving General Prison Registers for these two prisons held at the National Archives of Ireland in Dublin (NAI/Pris1/3 and NAI/Pris1/33).

Data description (abstract)

The dataset provides detailed, standardised records of prisoners, including demographic, physical, and judicial information such as age, height, offence, birthplace, residence, occupation, religion, and literacy.

The dataset offers a comprehensive resource for studying social, economic, demographic, and anthropometric history of Ireland under British rule. Prisoners' names are anonymised to comply with data-sharing agreements. Recidivists are only included in this dataset the first time they are entered into the prison register.

Year of conviction ranges from 1858 to 1910, and the year of birth is from 1840 to 1859. The average age of the prison population is 34, and ages range from 16 to 70.

Data are described in more detail in E. McLaughlin, C. L. Colvin and M. Blum, 'Anthropometric History: Revisiting What’s in it for Ireland', Irish Economic and Social History (2021).

Occupations are classified into five categories using the Armstrong scale: W. A. Armstrong, ‘The use of information about occupation, part I: a basis for social stratification’, in E. A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-century society: essays in the use of quantitative methods for the study of social data (Cambridge, 1972).

Famine-era mortality is appended to this dataset, denoting excess mortality in a prisoner's county of birth during the Great Irish Famine. This is calculated by comparing the 1841 and 1851 censuses, as calculated by Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland starved (2nd ed., London, 1985).

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