Bureaucracy, case geography and the governance of the inebriate in Scotland (1898–1918)

This article considers the late-Victorian and Edwardian legislative treatment of problem drunkenness in Scotland under the 1898 Inebriates Act. It examines the uneven enactment of the law, by geography and gender, and exposes how mundane questions of bureaucracy, of finance and jurisdiction, intersected with the institutional management of people convicted under it. I present an analytical framework of case geography to examine the ways in which bureaucratic and not simply medical interventions came together to shape people’s unfolding futures. Their removal to – and oftentimes between – institutions produced and did not simply resolve bureaucratic challenges. In conclusion I call for a greater awareness of the ways in which such mobile lives shaped policy: they tested the geographical imagination of government and with it the viability of this inebriate system.

have got done at all'. I use these files and other parliamentary reports to analyse how things 'got done', how women were selected and treated.
Archived sources never were simply spaces of record; they were spaces of action, shaping unstable and unfolding futures, a dyad of 'imperative and information' (Vissman, 2008: 8). Section three advances a distinctive analytical approach of case geography to theorise the circulation of the lives that became entangled in this system. On the face of it the reformatory stands as an archetypal space for disciplining those deemed unable to live with the freedoms of self-regulating liberal subjects (see Disney, 2017;Salter, 2017). In the course of their reformatory sentences several inmates were identified as 'unmanageable', often due to perceived mental defectiveness, and were moved to other institutions.
Circulation also reflects, therefore, 'the impossibility to discipline' (Kotef, 2015: 5). Such transfers were less as an attempt to discipline mobility than to discipline through it (Moran et al., 2011: 449; also see Philo, 2014: 495). Here I subtly shift from case histories -the pasts that brought people to reformatories -to case geographies, to the work of mobility in the unfolding management of individuals when multiple futures were possible. Drawing on the work of Tania Murray Li (2007: 277) I therefore examine not only the 'practices' and 'effects' of power, how the policy took hold, but show how this movement across authorities and their archives tested earlier bureaucratic settlements. Section four considers the entanglement of these mobile lives with unfolding bureaucratic battles that shaped the Act's undoing, and shifted the 'programming' of the problem to be regulated (Li 2007: 277).
Responding to work on mobility in carceral geography, I argue that sighting circuits of 'people, objects and practices' can open up a site like the reformatory, placing it in a wider bureaucratic as well as institutional system of 'risk containment' (Gill et al., 2018: 197). Understanding how offers a response to Peters and Turner's (2017: 2) challenge to consider movement when analysing spaces 'of relative stasis'. In addition, if the analogy of the circuit appears rather 'flat' (Gill et al., 2018: 197) my moving examples reveal contingent and volatile efforts to determine the geographical horizons and responsibilities of government across putatively different hierarchical scales. Their movement raises interpretive challenges around agency and resistance (Moore, 2018), for files record ways in which the subjects of disciplinary power challenged contemporary legal and medical categorisations (see Hands, 2013). Whilst I refer to individuals by their institutional admission numbers, this is not seek to deny such agency but rather at once respect privacy and emphasise the force of categorisation (see Moore, 2010). Given the complexities around historic terminology and diagnosis, I do not adjudicate on records of behaviours as evidence of mental ill-health or, reading against the grain, conscious resistance to reformatory discipline (see Parr, Philo and Burns, 2003;Wolch and Philo, 2000). Instead I suggest these can be approached at a broader scale, because by tracing these complex and disruptive lives across authorities and institutions it becomes possible to show how together they exercised a cumulative restraint on attempts to delimit inebriety.

FRAMING INEBRIETY
This section focuses on the decision matrices that shaped the local operation of the legislation and restricted its field of vision to a distinctive group of working-class problem women. The 1898 legislation supplemented the Habitual Drunkards Act of 1879, which had led to the licensing of a series of private retreats for wealthy problem patients. Under that earlier Act only by self-certifying before a justice of the peace could individuals be admitted for treatment. Critics complained this mistakenly protected freedom of choice at the very time when people's capacity for right-judgment was wanting (Valverde, 1998). Medics, keen to recode alcoholism as a disease rather than a vice, had championed institutional treatment to stop problem drinkers drifting 'like tangle in the tide' (Sutherland, 1899: 718).
Their ambitions were never realised, for the new legislation decisively framed inebriety as a problem for criminal justice, correcting that anomaly of freedom with the force of criminal prosecution and reformatory sentences of up to three years (Beckingham, 2010). Girgenti's administrators did not want to admit known thieves or prostitutes, nor anybody with an infectious or contagious disease. They wanted people who, if freed from their drink habit, could 'take their places in society as self-supporting citizens' (BPP, 1904[Cd. 1983 X.793: 15). Between January 1901 and March 1903 they reportedly rejected 108 of 200 qualifying cases (some individuals qualified more than once) (Anon., The Scotsman, 1903: 8).
The remaining 92 resulted in 66 admissions to an institution caught between a practical ability to rid the streets of problem drunkards and an ideal to reform its inmates (BPP, 1904[Cd. 1983 X.793: 15). It risked becoming a 'glorified combination of prison and poorhouse' (NRS, HH57/64, 1627/225, 3 December 1901. These tensions were tragically embodied in the very first admission to Girgenti.  1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 In  The emergence of problems within reformatory populations significantly affected the system. The response in 20 Girgenti cases was to transfer individuals to Perth, a 'cumbersome' bureaucratic process that involved 'an application to the Sheriff and attendance before him at Kilmarnock, and also the taking of the inmate to Kilmarnock' (GCA, TD1576/1/1, Girgenti Third Annual Report, 1903: 10) (see Figure 2). Importantly the Corporation's visiting committee admitted that this ability to transfer inmates had induced them to admit women they might otherwise have rejected. They always stated they wanted 'hopeful subjects for treatment', and squarely blamed the Act for restricting them to women 'degraded in the social scale, many being prostitutes, and the larger number Her personal case file (NRS, HH19/1) is one of just three retained in the National Records of Scotland. It records her separation from her husband, a miscarriage, syphilis, and her mother's asylum treatment and subsequent suicide (see Hands, 2013 There was no organised system for treating such individuals who had in some senses been brought into view by the Inebriates Act and, who in turn, tested the Act. Moving them only complicated the geography of local jurisdiction, and invited the involvement of the likes of Dunlop in shaping a future that had emerged because of the Act. The two other extant Perth case files, which Thora Hands (2013) analyses in detail, record women transferred from Greenock. They offer tantalising glimpses into attempts by women to shape their own treatment. One, a spinner with 40 convictions at Dundee, had initially been sent to
Another complained in two suppressed letters at the length and nature of her sentence. She told her mother, 'my one prayer is to have my health and I will put up with the rest for it is an awful place to have anything wrong with you' (NRS, HH19/3). And to her sister she complained of her treatment by Dunlop, who Hands (2013) notes had refused her request for early release. It is unwise to ascribe too definitive a politics to diagnoses and responses to disruptive behaviour. Yet, as Hands (2013) argues, such letters reveal how apparently unmanageable women assessed their treatment and made claims about their transfer and even release. And by placing these in a broader geography of displacement, we can more accurately understand institutional failures to stabilise individual agency, to adapt the argument of Patrick Joyce (2013: 162). We can put the individual at the centre of the strains that ultimately broke the Inebriates Act.

FAILURE
Questions of governmental responsibility exposed a fundamental question of what and whom the reformatory was to treat. Local authorities had plenty of evidence to caution them against burdening their own ratepayers. Those that retained an interest put their energy into agitating for legislative reform based on clearer separations of responsibility. In October 1905, for example, Aberdeen hosted a meeting to consider a reformatory north of the River Tay, which concluded that responsibility for establishing such facilities lay with central government. In a critique of the jurisdictional framing of the Act, it agreed that magistrates should have powers to commit inebriates to institutions (PKCA, PE1/1/29, Town Council Minutes, 1905: 737, 19 October 1905. A further meeting in Dundee the following February resulted in a similar demand and a shared commitment to new legislation (ACAA, Town Council minutes, 1905-1906: 120, 19 March 1906ECA, SL1/1/355, Town Council Minutes, 1905-06: 407, 23 May 1906 Field, 2013: 37). The philanthropic body admitted the men for farm work and industrial training without approval from the council, which then refused to meet its fee obligations. This had the effect of stopping the release of Treasury support. Dunlop used the case to revisit the 'unsatisfactory nature' of the Act: 'The provision of the reformatory is at the good-will of a charitable association, the onus of bringing the cases is at the good-will of a procurator fiscal, and the earning of the treasury grant is at the good will of a local authority. With such complications it is hopeless to expect good working'. While Glasgow gave way, the case highlighted the serious problems of a patchwork system with multiple This gave Scottish experts their platform, but the proliferation of inquiries only made it harder to produce the consensus necessary for decisive legislative change.
Frictions over reforms exposed the unsatisfactory sorting of governmental responsibilities. Disagreements continued over the role and jurisdiction of police and Sheriff  , 1912, -1918, , 17 February 1913. But the reformatory was struggling, suffering financially from reductions in government support and increased competition for laundry contracts: its Honorary Secretary James Nicoll told the Scottish Office that they were forced to undercut competitors' tenders, so vital was it to keep the women in work (NRS, HH57/68/1, 1627/691, file dated 14 July 1909). The managers even asked Dunlop to issue a nationwide circular advertising space. Though it had earlier helped advertise Hairmyres, the Scottish Office now rejected this request as 'bolster[ing] up a system, which apparently is a failure' (NRS, HH57/69 1627B/109, dated 12 May 1919). The writing was on the wall.

CONCLUSIONS
I have sought to make a case for bureaucracy as a political space, across which attempts were made to settle governmental responsibilities between the multiple intersecting scales and agencies of the state: to put power in its place (Daley et al., 2017).
John Carswell, convenor of Glasgow Corporation's Inebriates Committee, complained from the off that they were not able to deal with the non-criminal inebriate (Carswell, 1901: 659).
They had wanted to establish a reformatory facility. But as the law reserved inebriety for criminal justice they instead received 'only the flotsam and jetsam of our towns'. As we have seen, Section 24 worked to target a particular group of problem public women, many of whom who were ultimately judged unfit for reformatory treatment (GCA, TD1576/1/2, Girgenti Second Annual Report, 1902: 9). In short, the Act produced a population that its own developing systems struggled to treat.
By reading archive documents as spaces of action and not simply record I have opened up the reformatory and shown how forms of mobility shaped individual experiences and the very future of the system. The movement of people, from police cell to courtroom, reformatory and often on again, unsettled the geographical horizons, the 'horizontal' and 'vertical' jurisdictions, of governmental authority (Beckingham, 2017: 28). Importantly, these 'iterational practices' (Mountz, 2010: 58) provoked a series of bureaucratic as much as medical battles. They became the Act's un-working. To show how, I have linked surviving records together to recover the influence of the inebriate, whose body became a very moving archive with a powerful unfolding case geography. By tracing the emerging frictions involved in their management, I have demonstrated how geographical work can highlight the impacts of those caught in such circuits. Individuals' behaviour was subject to medical observation, and social and legal judgments also repeatedly written on to and read from their bodies. It isn't necessary to adjudicate on the causes of these behaviours in order to see how such people shaped and did not simply suffer policy decisions. For cumulatively they tested the very viability of the inebriate reformatory, their cases straining the settlement of local and national government. They exposed, however briefly, the limits of the liberal state.