country, such as the north west. The panic led to shifts in the behaviour of Londoners. There were cases of citizens attacking one another in the mistaken belief that they were preventing a garrotting. Some Londoners took measures towards self-defence including the purchase of personal weapons and the adoption of bizarre anti-garrotting devices such as spiked collars and cravats with razor blades sewn into them. These were lampooned by cartoons in Punch which included clothing with oversized spikes and overcoats with umbrella-like tails to prevent garrotters approaching the wearer. New legislation The 1862 panic led to significant changes in legislation. Under pressure from the press Grey set up the Royal Commission on Penal Servitude and Transportation in December 1862 to review the prison situation and determine if transportation should be reintroduced. The commission reported in June 1863 and its recommendations were implemented via the Penal Servitude Act 1864. Transportation remained largely unavailable but three and four year penal servitude sentences were abolished and replaced by five year minimum sentences. The act also compelled the police to monitor prisoners released on licence. A House of Lords select committee on prison discipline was set up and reported in July 1863. It recommended harsher prison conditions, the so-called "hard fare, hard bed and hard work" regime, be implemented as a deterrent to criminals. Under the subsequent Prisons Act of 1865, prisoners were to be prevented from communicating with one another, to be chained and bound more often, to be provided hard planks to sleep on, and given deliberately plain food. Hard labour was defined as time spent on the penal treadmill, crank machine, capstan or on shot drill (passing cannonballs along a line); deliberately monotonous and pointless work. This returned prison life to the harsh standards of the early 19th century, undoing decades of reform which had sought to transfer the prison from a place of punishment to a place of rehabilitation. The harsh measures remained in force until the Prisons Act 1898 which implemented reforms. The moral panic of 1862–63 therefore caused harsh prison conditions to be inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of prisoners for decades. The Security from Violence Act was also passed in July 1863 and specifically targeted street robbery, becoming known informally as the Garrotters Act. This undid reforms passed by a select committee of 1861 which abolished flogging for most offences and implemented bans on repeated flogging (of