Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison. GIBSON, MARY. American Historical Review , Oct2011, Vol. 116 Issue 4, p1040 1063

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Review Essay
Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison
MARY GIBSON
SINCE THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, a wave of new studies has revitalized
the field of prison history. Most notably, scholars of Asia, Africa, and Latin America
have joined historians of the Western world in the debate over, to use Michel Fou-
cault’s phrase, “the birth of the prison.”1 The new prison histories of the non-West-
ern world contest, or at least complicate, the original paradigm developed by Fou-
cault and other historians of Europe and the United States in the 1970s in several
fundamental ways. That paradigm dates the birth of the prison to the years between
1760 and 1840, when the rising middle class abolished public rituals of corporal
punishment as incompatible with its new aspirations to build a modern liberal and
industrial society. Focusing on Asia, Africa, and Latin America, recent research calls
this framework into question by introducing the factors of colonialism, race, and the
agency of prisoners themselves. Because each continent—and, more accurately, each
former colony and modern nation within each continent—has its own chronology
and exhibits its own pattern of punishment, no definitive global model has yet
emerged. But a consideration of these new themes is fundamental not only for un-
derstanding the adoption of imprisonment by a variety of political systems in the
non-Western world, but also for reimagining the birth of the prison in Europe and
North America as part of a dynamic global history.2
Because of its ambitious philosophical scope, as well as its immediate translation
into many languages, Foucault’s brilliant book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison has become the touchstone of prison history worldwide.3 Foucault’s “revi-
I wish to thank Nicole Hahn Rafter, Steven C. Hughes, Ellen Dwyer, James K. Cohen, and the anony-
mous readers for the AHR for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York,
1977; orig. French ed. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison [Paris, 1975]).
2 In the tradition of review essays for the AHR , this article will focus on books in English, with the
addition of a few key works in French that have offered important responses to Foucault. This approach
regrettably ignores research in other languages that is pertinent to debates in prison history. In the
future, collaborative efforts will be necessary to construct truly global review essays that draw on the
multiple languages of international scholarship.
3 The continuing centrality of Foucault’s work is evident in the five featured books on prison history
in this review, all but one of whose authors explicitly discuss their findings in relation to the Foucauldian
paradigm. The exception is Frank Diko¨tter, who nevertheless refers to Foucault in the introduction to
his subsequent book, Frank Diko¨tter and Ian Brown, eds.,Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison
in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2007), 9. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is the master
text consulted by most prison historians. For additional insight into Foucault’s thinking during the mid-
1970s, see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon,
1040
sionist” interpretation, largely shared by two other early prison historians, David
Rothman and Michael Ignatieff, provoked immediate debate and elicited critical
responses that ranged from mild tinkering with details to wholesale rejection. Out
of these critiques came several significant developments. The output of the 1980s and
1990s is too vast to review here in its entirety, but the contours of the earlier debates
are crucial for understanding recent books on non-Western prisons, whose authors
have admirably immersed themselves in earlier work on Europe and the United
States (in contrast to the woeful ignorance that many Western scholars exhibit about
world history).4 Among the studies that are characterized by this global approach are
five books that explicitly address the influence of Europe and the United States on
the birth of the prison in Vietnam (by Peter Zinoman), in Africa (by Florence Ber-
nault as editor and author), in China (by Frank Diko¨tter), in Japan (by Daniel Bots-
man), and in Peru (by Carlos Aguirre). Read as a group, these works shift our think-
ing about the periodization of mass incarceration and the practice of prison reform
and probe two understudied issues: the characteristics of inmate subculture and the
relation of race to punishment.
FOUCAULT’S ARGUMENT IN DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH is so intellectually provocative and
richly textured that it seems foolhardy to attempt a summary. His work as a whole
created such a paradigm shift in historical explanation that it arguably changed the
mindset of even his fiercest critics. After reading Discipline and Punish, no historian
can analyze prison history with the same innocence that was common before its
publication; even those who have never read it cannot escape the partially Fou-
cauldian perspective that pervades, sometimes imperceptibly, the entire contem-
porary historiography of crime and punishment. Foucault does more than offer an
explanation for the birth and workings of the early-nineteenth-century French pris-
on: his much more ambitious aim is to investigate how power is exercised and “truth”
is established in modern society, typified by a “carceral continuum” of institutions—
with the prison as the extreme example—employing scientific techniques to disci-
pline and normalize the individual.5
In one of the most famous openings of any book, Foucault contrasts a journalistic
account of the bloody public execution in 1757 of Robert-Franc¸ois Damiens—ac-
cused of trying to murder the French king—with the written rules prescribing the
rigid schedule of a French juvenile reformatory in 1838. He uses these two docu-
ments to argue that between 1760 and 1840, “the entire economy of punishment was
redistributed” in theWestern world.6 In place of painful corporal punishment, some-
times as extreme as the drawing and quartering of Damiens, France substituted im-
prisonment, which was intended to deprive criminals of liberty and target their souls.
Contemporaneous with the age of revolution and the consequent liberalization of
trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York, 1980); and Foucault,
Abnormal: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni,
trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2003).
4 Major works in prison history from the 1980s and 1990s will be cited in the subsequent footnotes.
5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 297.
6 Ibid., 7.
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the legal codes under Napoleon, this “new age for penal justice” signaled the end
of monarchical sovereignty, which had displayed its absolute powers through secret
inquisitorial trials, torture of defendants, and the political ritual of public execution.7
While Foucault admits that the Enlightenment project to shift the object of pun-
ishment from the body to the mind had previously been recognized by legal histo-
rians, he criticizes them for accepting the self-characterization of early prison ad-
vocates as philanthropists nobly seeking “less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more
respect, more ‘humanity’ ” for poor and defenseless criminals.8 He argues instead
that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeois “reformers” were motivated by
a desire to overthrow royal absolutism and redirect penal law against offenses par-
ticularly damaging to their class interests, most notably theft, rather than by be-
nevolence or a new revulsion against subjecting humans to physical torture.9 No
longer emanatingfrom a central authority, power became dispersed among a series
of institutions that subjected the lower classes to surveillance and discipline. Em-
blematic of these institutions was the prison, which, through a “micro-physics of
power,” required all inmates to follow a uniform daily schedule with the same me-
chanical gestures, whether in their cells, the workshop, or the recreation yard.10 Such
rigid discipline was enforced not by the outdated methods of inflicting physical pain
but by “the gaze,” the constant surveillance by guards and wardens.11 Citing Jeremy
Bentham’s design of 1791 for a panopticon prison, in which guards in a central tower
could see every prisoner while remaining invisible themselves, Foucault condemns
modern prison discipline as no less repressive than the corporal punishment of the
old regime, and even more insidious in its aim to use the body as an instrument to
regiment the soul and reshape the mind.
7 Ibid. Despite his insistence on a clear break in the philosophy and practice of punishment between
the old regime and the modern liberal state, Foucault locates the roots of modern prison discipline in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century regulations for the army, schools, hospitals, and large workshops;
ibid., 138, and more generally the full chapter “Docile Bodies,” 135–169.
8 Ibid., 16. While Foucault does not name specific French historians who he believes mistakenly
interpreted prison reform as humanitarian and progressive, Michael Ignatieff offers the following ex-
amples for the Anglo-American world: Orlando F. Lewis, The Development of American Prisons and
Prison Customs, 1776–1845 (Albany, N.Y., 1922); Negley K. Teeters, The Cradle of the Penitentiary: The
Walnut Street Jail at Philadelphia, 1773–1835 (Philadelphia, 1933); W. David Lewis, From Newgate to
Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796–1848 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1965); J. R. S. Whiting,
Prison Reform in Gloucestershire, 1776–1820: A Study of the Work of Sir George Onesiphorus Paul, Bart.
(London, 1975); and Eric Stockdale, A Study of Bedford Prison, 1660–1877 (London, 1977). See also
Ignatieff, “State, Civil Society and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Pun-
ishment,” in Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull, eds., Social Control and the State: Historical and Com-
parative Essays (New York, 1983), 75–105, here 75.
9 Foucault exempts Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer from his general condemnation of prior
prison historians, praising their “great work” Punishment and Social Structure (New York, 1939) for
emphasizing that the rise of industrial capitalism rather than the good intentions of individual reformers
led to the mitigation of corporal punishment over the centuries. Many modern prison historians also
cite Rusche and Kirchheimer approvingly, although few, including Foucault, believe that their Marxist
approach adequately explains the birth of the prison. The clearest heirs of Rusche and Kirchheimer’s
economic determinism are Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, who offer a fascinating analysis of how
imprisonment could have triumphed only under industrial capitalism, in which the value of labor—and
therefore the severity of punishment—is measured in time. Melossi and Pavarini, “Conclusions: Con-
tractual Reason and Disciplinary Necessity at the Basis of Punishment by Deprivation of Liberty,” in
Melossi and Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System, trans. Glynis Cousin
(New York, 1981; orig. Italian ed. Carcere e fabbrica [Bologna, 1977]), 182–188.
10 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26.
11 Ibid., 173.
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For Foucault, such “reform” of the individual is simply a process of normalization
shared by parallel institutions including the army, the school, the hospital, and the
workshop. Thus power is dispersed because “judges of normality” are everywhere,
in the guise of prison wardens, military officers, teachers, doctors, and employers.12
As Foucault writes in some of his most innovative and persuasive pages, this power
is not just repressive but also creative, because it produces knowledge about the
subjected individual. Thus power and knowledge (pouvoir/savoir) characterize mo-
dernity as inseparable and dialectical forces that both constrain and construct the
prisoner. Knowledge produced by disciplinary institutions makes possible the growth
of the “scientific” disciplines of criminology, medicine, and psychiatry, which count,
measure, examine, and interview their subjected populations. In a circular fashion,
these disciplines then develop new strategies for rendering these same institutions
more efficient at producing “docile bodies.”13 Such a radical philosophical critique
sets Discipline and Punish apart from almost all other histories of the prison and
explains its powerful influence on a wide array of academic fields.
Foucault, however, was only one of a larger group of historians in the 1970s who
criticized the traditional “Whig” historiography of the prison, which classed it with
other progressive components of the welfare state. The two other most influential
works were those of David Rothman andMichael Ignatieff, and in all fairness it must
be noted that Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum came out four years before
Discipline and Punish and anticipated many of Foucault’s arguments.14 Rothman
identifies the 1820s as the beginning of “a revolution in social practice” in the United
States, which saw the proliferation of not only prisons but also other institutions for
deviants such as asylums, almshouses, orphanages, and reformatories.15 In colonial
society, punishment was typically corporal—the whip, stocks, or gallows—and jails
were used simply to hold debtors or the accused awaiting trial. Crime, equated with
sin, was thought to be rooted in failings of the individual rather than of the family
or of society in general and therefore required no institutional response. With pop-
ulation growth and increasing mobility in the period after the American Revolution,
however, a new generation of reformers fomented what later historians would label
a “moral panic” about the breakdown of traditional social ties, especially within the
family. Believing that human nature was basically good, they proposed penitentiaries
as a way to reform deviant individuals in an environment that would provide an
alternative to their corrupt families. Based on a military model, American prisons
required rationalized and uniform bodily movements, such as the lockstep, as well
as complete silence whether prisoners were confined perpetually to their individual
cells (the Philadelphia or “separate” system) or worked together during the day in
silence and slept in separate cells at night (the Auburn or “silent” system).
In A Just Measure of Pain, Ignatieff constructs a similar narrative for England,
12 Ibid., 304.
13 Ibid., 138.
14 Rothman, however, cites an earlier work by Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of In-
sanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1965), in his introduction to David J. Rothman, The Discovery
of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971), showing his familiarity with
Foucault’s general perspective. Calling Foucault’s analysis “fascinating and suggestive,” he nevertheless
criticizes it for divorcing ideas from their social context (xvii–xviii).
15 Ibid., xii.
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starting with the period before 1775, when punishment was characterized by whip-
ping, the pillory, or hanging. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
theories of reform inspired both by the Enlightenment and by evangelical Protestant
religion condemned the barbarity of traditional forms of punishment and inspired
several waves of prison construction, culminatingin the opening in 1842 of the Pen-
tonville Penitentiary, the internationally acclaimed model of the new disciplinary
regime.16 Based on the Philadelphia or cellular model, Pentonville rigorously sep-
arated inmates from the outside world and from each other; when permitted outside
their cells for chapel, they wore masks to prevent corrupting communication and
occupied separate boxes, enabling them to be seen only by the “gaze of authority”
of the chaplain and the guards.17 Isolation and silence were expected to encourage
examination of the conscience, and religion the reform of character. Faced with
increasing social unrest and perceived “crime waves,” the centralizing English state
rebuilt its entire prison system at the same time that it was establishing new police
forces. More than Rothman, Ignatieff emphasizes the class dimension of the tran-
sition in punishment as the state sought to discipline the new and increasingly radical
working classes through a massive building program of new penitentiaries.
Despite differences of tone and national framework, the three works by Foucault,
Rothman, and Ignatieff share some common features.18 They all date the birth of
the prison and the corresponding curtailment of corporal punishment to the period
between 1760 and 1840, the era of the Enlightenment and European/American rev-
olutions. Suspicious of the self-proclaimed humanitarian intentions of liberal re-
formers, they interpret the purpose and the effects of the new penitentiaries in a
more sinister light. Rather than guaranteeing the rights of inmates, the new par-
liamentary states of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries subjected the
lower classes to intrusive, secretive, and dehumanizing regulation of both the mind
and the body in the so-called “reformatory” prison. Inmates underwent demeaning
rituals upon entrance to prison that stripped them of their identity, followed by the
severance of contact with outside society and the prohibition of communication ex-
cept with wardens and chaplains (even contact with guards was minimized and highly
regulated). That the new penitentiary was recognized as a failure in all three coun-
tries by the mid-nineteenth century but was nevertheless perpetuated until the pres-
ent day only strengthens the revisionist argument that its main purpose is the exercise
of power rather than humanitarian reform or even the reduction of crime. The three
authors differ over the sincerity of the reformers (with Rothman being the most
sympathetic and Foucault the least) and the identification of the source of disci-
plinary power (the state for Rothman; the state on behalf of the industrializing
classes for Ignatieff; dispersed for Foucault). Despite these quibbles, the influence
of the revisionist analysis has been so strong that even today historians of prison,
16 Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850
(New York, 1978).
17 Ibid., 39.
18 Ignatieff provides a useful overview of the claims of the revisionist school in “State, Civil Society
and Total Institutions.” Although professing to be an “unrepentant member of the revisionist school,”
Ignatieff in this essay admits that “the revolution in punishment was not the generalized triumph of
Weberian rationalization which the revisionist account suggests” (78) because there was a “gulf between
the reformers’ rationalizing intentions and the institutionalized results of their work” (83).
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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
including those studying non-Western nations, feel compelled to read and respond
to its claims.
THE RESPONSE TO THE REVISIONISTS’ ARGUMENTS, and especially to the philosophical
approach of Foucault, took several forms. Many subsequent works of prison history
incorporated the general revisionist perspective but criticized Foucault, Rothman,
and/or Ignatieff for their analysis of specific issues; others rejected their pessimistic
evaluation of prison reformers, returning to the earlier Whig or progressive inter-
pretation; and a third group simply took off on paths left unexplored by the three
pioneering works. Historians of France tended to adopt the first approach, producing
an early and noteworthy response to Foucault in the 1980 volume L’impossible prison
(The Impossible Prison).19 Edited by Michelle Perrot, L’impossible prison included
a long review of Discipline and Punish by the historian of medicine Jacques Le´onard,
a reply by Foucault, and a roundtable discussion between Foucault and a prominent
group of historians.20 A general sense of admiration for Foucault pervades the re-
marks of the participating historians, with Le´onard particularly praising his expli-
cation of disciplinary techniques for “its spirit of synthesis that recalls certain writ-
ings of Marx.”21 But for the most part, the historians raised the kinds of critiques
that have continued to echo through the historiography of prisons: that Foucault
ignored other types of punishment that coexisted with the new penitentiaries (for
example, the old-regime bagnes or hard labor camps, which continued into the mod-
ern era); that he failed to make distinctions between different categories of pris-
oners, schools of lawyers, and types of courts; and that he emphasized the theories
of reformers—such as Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon penitentiary—rather than the
everyday reality of prison life. Perhaps most vexing to historians was Foucault’s re-
fusal to locate the origin of the disciplinary power that circulated through society and
manifested itself in the prison and parallel institutions. If it did not emanate from
the state, was it wielded by the bourgeoisie? And if so, by which sections of a ruling
class that was by no means homogeneous? Finally, as Perrot argued in her intro-
duction, the nineteenth-century French prison system never resembled the ratio-
nalized machine described in Discipline and Punish but rather remained “a world of
chains, overcrowding, and disorder.”22
A minority of historians continued in the Whig tradition of championing the
19 Michelle Perrot, ed., L’impossible prison: Recherches sur le syste`me pe´nitentiaire au XIXe sie`cle
(Paris, 1980).
20 Michelle Perrot had already written a pioneering article titled “Delinquency and the Penitentiary
System in Nineteenth-Century France,” Annales ESC 30 (1975): 67–91, reprinted in Robert Forster and
Orest Ranum, eds., Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, trans. Elborg Forster and Patricia
M. Ranum (Baltimore, 1978), 213–245. Appearing the same year asDiscipline and Punish, this essay does
not mention Foucault; Perrot’s call for research focusing on prisoners themselves, who “have disap-
peared from their own history” (215), and her careful detailing of available archival sources for such
a study contrast with the Foucauldian tendency to focus on elite discourse drawn from published texts.
21 Perrot, L’impossible prison, 25. While other historians have compared Foucault to Marx in a neg-
ative way, criticizing them both for having constructed grandiose philosophical theories that ignore the
messiness of the primary data and that have attracted undue adulation from bedazzled fans, Le´onard’s
words constituted a compliment and an acknowledgment that the philosopher had constructed a more
daring and wide-ranging argument than is possible with the tools of a historian.
22 Ibid., 61.
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goodwill of prison reformers even in the face of the strong and popular revisionist
argument that bourgeois self-interest constituted the main motivation for replacing
corporal punishment with incarceration. In his overview of French policies toward
crime during the last two centuries, Gordon Wright pronounces Foucault’s hypoth-
esis to be provocative but unproven, and thereforedeclares a continued preference
for the “older orthodoxy” that attributes the birth of the prison primarily to the
circulation of Enlightenment beliefs in reason and humanitarianism among Euro-
pean elites.23 In the monumental history of English criminal law by Leon Radzi-
nowicz, the volume on penal policy (co-authored by Roger Hood) attributes the birth
of the prison to classical legal principles of the Enlightenment (rather than to the
disciplinary sciences of Foucault) and emphasizes how progressive and competent
administrators had significantly reformed punishment after 1750.24 William James
Forsythe, in a pair of books tracing British reform theories, legislation, and par-
liamentary commissions from 1830 to 1939, offers perhaps a more nuanced critique
of Foucault and Ignatieff by admitting that many innovations of prison reformers—
for example, the use of the treadwheel in mid-nineteenth-century England—seem
odd and distasteful to modern historians and certainly had the effect of asserting
discipline over inmates.25 Yet he warns that historians who deny the fundamentally
humanitarian impulse of prison reformers, and the philosophical integrity of their
theories, risk underestimating their successes and obliterating the distinction be-
tween relatively good prisons on one end of the spectrum and notorious networks
of confinement such as the Nazi concentration camps and the Russian gulag on the
other.26
A third approach to the revisionist school has been to acknowledge it briefly but
focus on exploring dimensions of prison history left out of the original iconic texts.
Most notably, women’s historians almost immediately criticized Foucault, Rothman,
23 Gordon Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty: Two Centuries of the Crime Problem in France
(New York, 1983), 22.
24 Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from
1750, vol. 5: The Emergence of Penal Policy (London, 1986). For an excellent review that places Radzi-
nowicz and Hood’s approach within the larger discussion on prison history, see Martin J. Weiner, “The
March of Penal Progress?” Journal of British Studies 26, no. 1 (1987): 83–96.
25 William James Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners, 1830–1900 (London, 1987); Forsythe, Penal
Discipline, Reformatory Projects, and the English Prison Commission, 1895–1939 (Exeter, 1990). Like
Forsythe, Margaret DeLacy accepts some conclusions of the revisionists (or as she labels them, the
“radicals”) in her study of Lancaster, including their critique of nineteenth-century prisons for rarely
achieving rehabilitation. However, her findings more often echo the traditional Whig school in em-
phasizing the importance of the character of the warden and the quality of the staff for the proper
functioning of individual prisons. DeLacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850: A Study in Local
Administration (Stanford, Calif., 1986).
26 Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners, 229. Institutions of confinement for political criminals have
mostly been ignored by prison historians or are considered marginal to the evolution of the “normal”
modern penitentiary, with its subordination to the rule of law and its mission to rehabilitate “common”
criminals. Yet several of the books under review here have begun to question the traditional distinction
between the punishment of political and common criminals by emphasizing the political role of colonial
and postcolonial prisons. The distinction also became blurred in Nazi Germany, where Nikolaus
Wachsmann has argued that the “normal” prison system did not remain autonomous but became highly
politicized as it collaborated closely with the concentration and death camps run by the police; Wachs-
mann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven, Conn., 2004). These works point to
the need to problematize the categories of common and political crime and bring the most extreme
institutions of violent incarceration into the wider debate about the birth and development of the modern
penitentiary.
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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
and Ignatieff for drawing their paradigms exclusively from sources and debates about
the appropriate punishment of men. As early as 1982, Patricia O’Brien produced a
history of both male and female inmates in French prisons; it remains one of the few
studies to compare the experiences of the two sexes. While acknowledging a large
intellectual debt to Foucault, O’Brien nevertheless seems more influenced by Perrot
in her determination “to construct the history of the prison from the inside out.”27
Agreeing with the revisionists on periodization—that the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries saw the birth of a centralized penitentiary system in France—
she differs from them in shifting her focus from theorists and administrators to crim-
inals of both sexes, whose daily routines and subcultures were not always consistent
with national policy.
Several years later, explorations of women’s prisons in the United States by Es-
telle Freedman (1984) and Nicole Hahn Rafter (1985) emphasized the gendering of
punishment in a nation where prisons were decentralized and therefore policies dif-
fered widely among localities.28 While taking no explicit stand on the revisionist
school, Freedman tends to sympathize with the good intentions behind the demands
of female reformers in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century for sep-
arate prisons to protect women prisoners from neglect and sexual violence. Begin-
ning in 1874 and accelerating after 1900, many states in the American East and
Midwest responded by establishing separate reformatories for women, administered
by “prison matrons” along “maternalistic” lines, which replaced the military model
of men’s prisons with a family model.29 In her comparative study of New York, Ohio,
and Tennessee, Rafter criticizes Rothman for not recognizing that women prisoners,
who were usually held in “custodial” annexes to male penitentiaries, were initially
forgotten by male prison advocates of the early American Republic and were only
later addressed by female reformers in the late nineteenth century.30 Yet she gen-
erally agrees with the social control thesis of the revisionist school, taking a less
charitable view of prison matrons, who in her view were intent upon disciplining
working-class women to remake them in the matrons’ own image—that is, moral,
domestic, and obedient middle-class women. Rafter’s book is especially useful for
adding the variable of race to the discussion. She points out that the new, more
comfortable female reformatories were reserved almost exclusively for white (and
usually American-born) women, while African American and immigrant women con-
tinued to languish in the custodial prisons, where conditions were miserable and
opportunities for education and work were minimal.
A second unexplored area that quickly received attention in response to the re-
visionist model was the “prison before the prison,” or institutions of control before
the late eighteenth century.31 Pieter Spierenburg is the leading proponent of the
argument that no sharp break in practices of punishment occurred during the rev-
27 Patricia O’Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton, N.J.,
1982), xi–xii, 9.
28 Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1984); Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control (1985; 2nd
ed., New Brunswick, N.J., 1990).
29 Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers, 95.
30 Rafter’s book provides both an in-depth investigation of female prisons in these three states and
statistics on the conditions of female incarceration throughout the United States.
31 The phrase “prison before the prison” is taken from Edward M. Peters, “Prison before the Prison:
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olutionary era because penal confinement already existed in the early modern pe-
riod.32 According to Spierenburg, the workhouses of Holland and northern Ger-
many, as well as the bridewells and houses of correction in England, constituted
penitentiaries in the modern sense of requiring labor and seeking reform of inmates.
Admitting that these “prison workhouses” differed from the modern disciplinary
prison in modeling themselves on the family rather than the army or the factory, he
nevertheless proposes a new periodization in which the decline of corporal pun-
ishment overlapped and coexisted with the rise of imprisonment from the seven-
teenth through the nineteenth centuries. This alternate reading of the birth of the
prison derives from not only his extensive archival research but also his preference
for Norbert Elias over Foucault as the theorist who best explains historical change.
A historical sociologist writing in the mid-twentieth century, Elias argued that Eu-
rope underwent a “civilizing process” in the early modern period, in which state
formation encouraged elites to develop both self-control and compassion for oth-
ers.33 According to Spierenburg, this theory explains both the slow change in modes
of punishment over time (as nation-states gradually replaced feudalism) and the
growing preference for imprisonment as European sensibilities rejected as barbaric
traditional practices of punishment that inflicted pain and suffering on the body.
While Elias has been employed more often by criminal justice historians trying to
explain the drop in murder and other violent crimes since the Middle Ages than by
those writing on the birth of the prison, Spierenburg is perhaps the only critic of the
revisionist school to propose a sweeping philosophical alternative to Foucault.34
The publication of two prestigious collections of essays in the mid-1990s signaled
the arrival of prison history as a recognized topic of importance and offered sum-
maries of the slow but steady accumulation of research over more than two decades.
Most publications of the 1980s and 1990s continued to cluster geographically in the
nations originally explored by Foucault, Rothman, and Ignatieff, although innovative
work began to appear on Latin America, Africa, and Asia.35 The first of the two
The Ancient and Medieval Worlds,” in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History
of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York, 1998), 3–43.
32 See Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early
Modern Europe (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991). His critique of Foucault has its roots in his earlier book
on the death penalty, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression, from a
Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, 1984).
33 Norbert Elias’s classic work, U¨ber den Prozess der Zivilisation, was originally published in German
in two volumes in 1939 but did not receive widespread recognition until 1969, when it was republished
in German and the first volume was translated into English as The Civilizing Process. Spierenburg has
compared the explanatory power of Foucault’s and Elias’s theories for criminal justice history in “Pun-
ishment, Power, and History: Foucault and Elias,” Social Science History 28, no. 4 (2004): 607–636.
34 For an overview of this research, see Pieter Spierenburg, “Violence and the Civilizing Process:
Does It Work?” Crime, Histoire & Socie´te´s 5, no. 2 (2001): 87–105.
35 For France, see Jacques G. Petit, ed., La prison, le bagne et l’histoire (Paris, 1984); Petit, Ces peines
obscures: La prison pe´nale en France (1780–1875) (Paris, 1990); and Robert Badinter, La prison re´pub-
licaine (1871–1914) (Paris, 1992). For the United States, see two studies of the revolutionary era that
in different ways challenge the revisionist paradigm: Adam J. Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons
and Punishment in Early America (New Haven, Conn., 1992); and Michael Meranze, Laboratories of
Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). The
system of convict labor in the South, closely related to the burgeoning field of African American history,
has also produced a number of studies (see fn. 64 below). For one of the few histories of the mid-
twentieth-century American prison, see Charles Bright, The Powers That Punish: Prison and Politics in
the Era of the “Big House,” 1920–1955 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996). Two overviews of American prison
1048 Mary Gibson
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
collections, Institutions of Confinement, edited by Norbert Finzsch and Robert Ju¨tte,
focused mainly on Germany and therefore added an important dimension to the
English-language literature on prison history in continental Europe.36 Containing an
equal number of essays on insane asylums and prisons, the volume implicitly ac-
cepted the revisionist equation of different institutions of confinement in their role
as disciplining institutions. The editors, however, follow Spierenburg’s lead in dating
the roots of these institutions to the sixteenth century, although they endorse no
particular philosophical approach. To Elias and Foucault, they add Gerhard Oest-
reich as a pertinent theorist, one who argued that the gradual growth of secular
“social discipline” in early modern Europe replaced the authority of the church and
culminated in the centralized and highly regulated absolutist states of the eighteenth
century.37 Social discipline thus offers an explanation for the growth of policing func-
tions in early modern cities (and subsequently in absolutist monarchies) and the
resulting need for institutions to confine those arrested for disrupting the social
order.
A second collection of essays, The Oxford History of the Prison, constituted a
landmark in that it validated the field of prison history and summarized much of the
existing literature at the time of its publication in 1995. Edited by Norval Morris and
David Rothman, this volume brought together many of the pioneers of research on
prisons—including O’Brien, Spierenburg, and Rothman himself—in a group of el-
egant and informative essays that provide a chronological overview of the field and
analysis of thematic issues such as juvenile delinquency and political prisoners. Shun-
ning theory for the most part, the collection was a bit old-fashioned in focusing
almost exclusively on the Anglo-American experience, with only one essay on mod-
ern continental Europe and none on non-Western areas. Perhaps as a concession to
history are provided by Larry E. Sullivan’s chronological study The Prison Reform Movement: Forlorn
Hope (Boston, 1990) and Mark Colvin’s more thematic treatment in Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and
Chain Gangs: Social Theory and the History of Punishment in Nineteenth-Century America (New York,
1997). For England, see Sea´n McConville, A History of English Administration (London, 1981); McCon-
ville, English Local Prisons, 1860–1900: Next Only to Death (London, 1995); Robin Evans, The Fabrication
of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge, 1982), for the influence of reforming ideas
on prison architecture; Philip Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography, 1830–1914 (Lon-
don, 1985), for the perspective of inmates; John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the
Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1987), for a correlation of the birth of the
novel with the birth of the prison; Joe Sim, Medical Power in Prisons: The Prison Medical Service in
England, 1774–1989 (Philadelphia, 1990), for analysis of one group of administrators; and Janet Semple,
Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford, 1993), for thelegislative defeat of
Bentham’s utopian vision. The mid-1990s also saw the publication of studies on prison reform in Hol-
land: Herman Franke, The Emancipation of Prisoners: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Dutch Prison
Experience (Edinburgh, 1995); in Italy: Susan B. Carrafiello, “The Tombs of the Living”: Prisons and Prison
Reform in Liberal Italy (New York, 1998); and in Russia: Bruce F. Adams, The Politics of Punishment:
Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 (DeKalb, Ill., 1996). Contributions to Latin American, African, and
Asian prison history will be discussed later in this article.
36 Norbert Finzsch and Robert Ju¨tte, eds., Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons
in Western Europe and North America, 1500–1950 (Cambridge, 1996). In one particularly interesting
essay, Martin Dinges explains why Foucault has received a generally negative reaction in Germany, so
different from the adulation of many French and American readers; Dinges, “Michel Foucault’s Impact
on the German Historiography of Criminal Justice, Social Discipline and Medicalization,” ibid., 155–
174.
37 Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koe-
nigsberger, trans. David McLintock (1982; repr., Cambridge, 2008; orig. German ed. Geist und Gestalt
des fru¨hmodernen Staates [Berlin, 1969]).
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Spierenburg, it included an essay by him on early modern Europe as well as a second
on ancient and medieval Europe by Edward M. Peters; yet the introductory essay
and many of the other contributions continued to point to the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries as a radical break and the era when prisons were born.38
The editors gave a nod to gender analysis by including a chapter on women’s prisons
written by Lucia Zedner, who in 1991 had published an exhaustive study of the pun-
ishment of female criminals in Victorian England.39 With that exception, however,
women’s experience remained marginal to the essays in The Oxford History of the
Prison, very few of which mentioned gender or included research by women’s his-
torians in their bibliographies.
The Oxford History of the Prison was more innovative in its inclusion of essays
detailing the history of prisons after the heroic era of their birth, which was char-
acterized by Enlightenment philosophy and liberal revolutions, and the subsequent
universal recognition, around 1850, of their failure. Several chapters are devoted to
a second wave of prison reform during the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, which was rooted in anxiety over high rates of recidivism but also entertained
hope that the new sciences of criminology, psychiatry, and sociology could provide
the solution.40 The most famous of the new academic specialists was the Italian psy-
chiatrist Cesare Lombroso, whose positivist theory distinguished “born criminals,”
or those biologically predisposed to crime, from “occasional criminals,” or those
corrupted by a bad environment.41 Although many participants in the new series of
International Prison Congresses, the first of which met in 1872 in London, rejected
Lombroso’s specific diagnosis of atavism as the cause of inborn deviancy, experts
across the Western world recommended the “individualization” of punishment. Ac-
cording to this medical model, the degree of punishment would be calibrated not to
the severity of the crime but to the dangerousness of the criminal, so that recidivists
would be locked up for long sentences, while less menacing lawbreakers would be
kept out of prison under new policies of suspended sentences, probation, and parole.
This new approach encouraged some nations to divert women and children, gen-
erally perceived as malleable, from traditional penitentiaries to reformatories or
asylums classified as medical or educational in nature.42 Attitudes hardened, how-
ever, toward convicts diagnosed as atavistic, degenerate, or morally insane, and they
were subjected—depending on the country—to capital punishment, imprisonment
for life, and/or sterilization in the name of “social defense.”
38 Pieter Spierenburg, “The Body and the State: Early Modern Europe,” in Morris and Rothman,
The Oxford History of the Prison, 44–70; Peters, “Prison before the Prison.”
39 Lucia Zedner, “Wayward Sisters: The Prison for Women,” in Morris and Rothman, The Oxford
History of the Prison, 295–324; Zedner,Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991).
40 Again, Rothman and O’Brien had long been pioneers in exploring the fate of the new reformative
penitentiaries after 1850. See David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Al-
ternatives in Progressive America (Boston, 1980); O’Brien, The Promise of Punishment. Other authors who
had also treated the period of the second wave of prison reform include Badinter and Wright for France;
Freedman, Rafter, and Sullivan for the United States; and Forsythe, Priestly, Sim, and Zedner for Brit-
ain.
41 For the influence of Lombroso on criminology and prison policy in the United States, see Nicole
Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Urbana, Ill., 1997).
42 For an overview of policies on juvenile delinquency in the United States, accompanied by an
excellent bibliography, see Steven Schlossman, “Delinquent Children: The Juvenile Reform School,” in
Morris and Rothman, The Oxford History of the Prison, 325–349.
1050 Mary Gibson
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
AMONG THE NEW WORKS IN GLOBAL PRISON HISTORY are five books that dramatically
expand our empirical knowledge about transformations in punishment outside the
geographical birthplace of the prison. While directly addressing debates about the
revisionist, and more particularly the Foucauldian, paradigm, they also introduce
entirely new perspectives that will require European and American historians to
rethink fundamental issues and to conduct future research within a much less pro-
vincial context. The books fall into three categories, in accordance with whether the
prison was introduced by a colonial government (Vietnam, Africa), by indigenous
rulers under imperialist pressure from Western powers (China, Japan), or by post-
colonial leaders (Peru).43
The first book to appear—and one considered pathbreaking by the subsequent
authors—was The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–
1940, by Peter Zinoman.44 Covering the mosaic of territories acquired by France
between 1862 and 1885 that would later become Vietnam (Cochin China, Annam,
and Tonkin), this work argues that the prison was a colonial imposition on Indo-
chinese society. Before the incursions of the French, punishment in precolonial Viet-
nam took the forms recommended by Confucian legal thought: flogging, indentured
servitude, exile, and death. Imprisonment was used only for individuals awaiting trial
or execution. In the face of fierce native resistance to military conquest, the French
colonizers initially built prisoner-of-war camps to subdue the population. Once the
French had consolidated their control, they constructed a network of prisons
throughout the territories, whose rules and regulations were drawn from the Eu-
ropean model of the reforming penitentiary.
Zinoman, however, focuses on practice rather than discourse and argues that the
rules imported from France bore no resemblance to the actual conditions in Indo-
chinese prisons. Rather than the rational and disciplined institutions of Europe an-
alyzed by Foucault, the colonial prison “recalled the brutality and squalor of the
eighteenth-century Bastille,” with its roots in the prisoner-of-war camp.45 As in the
early modern European prison, corruption and violence were endemic, labor was
43 Prison research on other regions of the world has produced mostly articles rather than books. ForIndia, see Anand A. Yang, “Disciplining ‘Natives’: Prison and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth-Century
India,” South Asia 10, no. 2 (1987): 29–45; Satadru Sen, “Rationing Sex: Female Convicts in the An-
damans,” South Asia 30, no. 1 (1999): 29–59; Sen, “The Female Jails of Colonial India,” Indian Economic
and Social History Review 39, no. 4 (2002): 417–438; Sen, “A Separate Punishment: Juvenile Offenders
in Colonial India,” Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 1 (2004): 81–104; Clare Anderson, “The Politics of
Convict Space: Indian Penal Settlements and the Andaman Islands,” in Carol Strange and Alison Bash-
ford, eds., Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion (New York, 2003), 40–55; and three essays in
Diko¨tter and Brown, Cultures of Confinement : David Arnold, “India: The Contested Prison,” 147–184;
Clare Anderson, “Sepoys, Servants and Settlers: Convict Transportation in the Indian Ocean, 1787–
1945,” 185–220; and Ian Brown, “South East Asia: Reform and the Colonial Prison,” 221–268. For the
Middle East, see Anthony Gorman, “Regulation, Reform and Resistance in the Middle Eastern Prison,”
ibid., 95–146; and Ervand Abrahamiam, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern
Iran (Berkeley, Calif., 1999). For sub-Saharan Africa, in addition to the essays in Bernault, see David
Williams, “The Role of Prisons in Tanzania: An Historical Perspective,” Crime and Social Justice, no.
13 (Summer 1980): 27–37; Linda Chisholm, “The Pedagogy of Porter: The Origins of the Reformatory
in the Cape Colony, 1882–1910,” Journal of African History 27, no. 3 (1986): 481–495; and Rudolph
Peters, “Controlled Suffering: Mortality and Living Conditions in 19th-Century Egyptian Prisons,” In-
ternational Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 3 (2004): 387–407.
44 Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley,
Calif., 2001).
45 Ibid., 7.
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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
backbreaking and often dangerous, and inmates lacked decent food, sanitation, and
medical care. Citing prominent criminologists such as Alexandre Lacassagne, co-
lonial administrators held “yellow” criminality to be fundamentally different from
criminality in Europe, and its perpetrators to be morally irredeemable. Thus Viet-
namese inmates were kept separate from Europeans, who enjoyed individual cells
and better treatment.
That violence rather than reform characterized colonial Vietnamese prisons re-
sulted also from their political nature. As heirs of the prisoner-of-war camps, they
held inmates considered not just, in Zinoman’s words, “antisocial” but also “anti-
state” by their French captors.46 Ultimately this racist and politicized approach on
the part of the French colonial administration backfired, because the appalling con-
ditions encouraged inmates to organize, to resist, and in some cases to riot. Fur-
thermore, the circulation of prisoners among different institutions, for reasons of
work or punishment, began to create a sense of national community among indi-
viduals from different regions and classes. This incipient nationalism created fertile
ground for Communist Party members, who, liable to arrest in large numbers, began
in the 1930s to recruit new members and hold classes in prisons. Noting the large
body of prison memoirs and poetry from the colonial era by individuals later hailed
as national heroes, Zinoman argues that French prisons must be recognized as an
important incubator of the communist revolution.
A second work that treats colonial prisons, A History of Prison and Confinement
in Africa, is a collection of essays edited by Florence Bernault, who also provides an
excellent introductory chapter.47 Before the European incursions into sub-Saharan
Africa, imprisonment was as unlikely to be used as a form of punishment there as
in precolonial Vietnam. Instead, African societies tended either to settle minor dis-
putes through mediation and reparation or to punish more serious crimes by exile,
execution, or sale into slavery. The chronology of the birth of the prison in Africa,
however, is more complicated than that in Vietnam. First, European penetration
took place in several stages, each of which introduced a characteristic type of en-
closure: dungeons in forts on the coast built by traders beginning in the sixteenth
century; depots to hold captured Africans during the slave trade; and military jails
to hold prisoners of war after the 1880s as the imperialist powers moved inland.
Precedents therefore existed for the “modern” penitentiaries erected by colonial
rulers beginning in the 1910s. Bernault and several other authors in this collection
enrich the debate over the birth of the prison by widening the lens of the discussion
to include all forms of confinement. From this broader perspective, some African
societies did indeed use enclosure before the arrival of the Europeans, either to hold
suspects or confine political opponents (as in early modern Europe) or to isolate
individuals during initiations or for other ritual purposes. Thus Africans brought
various associations to their experience of modern imprisonment, including terri-
fying memories of the slave trade and associations between ritual enclosure and
contact with the spirit world.
The institutionalization and massive expansion of imprisonment did not occur
until after 1910, but it quickly became an important tool of domination by the French,
46 Ibid., 32.
47 Florence Bernault, ed., A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003).
1052 Mary Gibson
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
British, Portuguese, and Belgian colonial administrations. Unlike European prisons,
which rested in principle on social consensus and promised to reform the delinquent
citizen, African prisons sought to reinforce white authority through “political des-
potism.” Chaotic and filthy, they made no effort to individualize punishment, be-
cause Africans were held to be “an undifferentiated mass” who preferred to live in
large, crowded cells. Colonial prisons also resembled premodern European prisons
in the frequent use of violence, so that incarceration constituted not a replacement
for but an addition to corporal punishment. In an innovative essay on female inmates
in Senegal, Dior Konate´ argues that women suffered the worst conditions in colonial
prisons, where they were rarely provided with separate cells. Left to sleep in the
kitchen or on the porch, women prisoners were subjected to sexual harassment and
violence from both male guards and male prisoners.48
African prisons also differed from the European model in their requirement of
hard labor and their concern with earning profits. Rather than a tool to discipline
and rehabilitate the individual as in Europe, penal labor constituted an integral part
of colonial economies, where inmates worked at minimal expense for white colonists
in both the public and private sectors. Labor circulated between “free” society, which
required Africans to perform forced labor, and prisons, which sent those arrested
for violating forced labor service to work for private employers. The use of prisons
to discipline the workforce formed part of the larger strategy of European imperialist
rulers to impose new notions of space on subject populations. The redefinition of
punishment as confinement in a specific architectural space complemented other
policies—such as pass laws and the drawing of new borders—meant to disrupt the
traditional migratory fluidity of precolonial African societies.
Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China, by Frank Diko¨tter, also rep-
resents the prison as an importation from Europe, but in markedly different cir-
cumstances.49 Because Confucianism dominated late imperial Chinese culture and
legal principles, traditional punishments before the turnof the twentieth century
resembled those in precolonial Vietnam: fines, beatings, penal servitude, exile, and
death. Again, jails were used only to house defendants being held for trial or con-
victed criminals who were awaiting execution or were being sent into penal servitude
or exile. While China was never directly colonized, it was subjected to diplomatic
pressure from Europe and the United States to reform its legal system, and spe-
cifically to abolish corporal punishment. This pressure took the form of a series of
nineteenth-century treaties guaranteeing “extraterritoriality,” the right of citizens of
Western nations to be judged and sentenced in their own courts rather than be sub-
jected to Chinese criminal law. After China’s humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese
War of 1894–1895 and the resulting nationalist fervor, the emperors of the late Qing
dynasty began to call for an end to extraterritoriality, a campaign continued by the
republican regime that took power in 1911. Because Western powers claimed that
extraterritoriality was a necessary protection for their citizens against the supposed
irrationality and brutality of the Chinese legal process, nationalist reformers called
for the replacement of corporal punishment with prisons on the European model.
That the great era of Chinese prison-building began during the reforming years
48 Ibid., 16, 20; Dior Konate´, “Ultimate Exclusion: Imprisoned Women in Senegal,” ibid., 155–164.
49 Frank Diko¨tter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China (New York, 2002).
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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
of the late Qing and accelerated with the republican revolution accords with Diko¨t-
ter’s thesis that the birth of the prison correlates with the introduction of popular
sovereignty and individual rights, whether in France in 1789 or in China in the early
twentieth century. By 1918, China boasted thirty-nine “model” prisons, with the Bei-
jing No. 1 Prison being “the model of all models.”50 Although Diko¨tter concedes that
everyday life in local jails and even model prisons never embodied the utopian
dreams of reformers, he nevertheless emphasizes the real commitment of state ad-
ministrators to establish efficient and humane institutions that would symbolize Chi-
na’s progress toward modernity. China eliminated almost all corporal punishment
in prisons before many European nations and resisted calls by some Western powers
to reinstate it after subsequent episodes of social disorder. In 1934, having adopted
standards set by the League of Nations for the treatment of prisoners, the Chinese
prison system was more progressive and humane than those of Germany, Italy, and
the Soviet Union in the same decade.
For Diko¨tter, the popularity and acceptance of the theory of reformative im-
prisonment can be explained not simply by foreign pressure or superficial emulation
but mainly by its compatibility with a much older Chinese belief in the power of
education. Adopted as one of a constellation of institutions meant “to promote cor-
rect behavior” through moral training, emulation, and discipline, the prison was not
blindly copied by Chinese officials but was redeployed to inculcate respect for tra-
ditional social norms in prisoners.51 This reconfiguration of the prison to local con-
ditions did not prevent Chinese reformers and officials from participating in the
International Penitentiary Congresses or from adapting Western criminological
ideas, including the positivism of Lombroso. But they turned the racism of European
criminology to their own uses by elevating “yellows” to the level of “whites” as rivals
for control of supposedly inferior darker races. The republican system of model
prisons remained intact after the Guomindang took power in 1927, but it was weak-
ened by World War II and finally destroyed by the civil war during the late 1940s.
The succeeding Chinese Communist Party continued to use imprisonment, but in the
form of forced labor camps, employing torture for mostly political ends.
Daniel Botsman’s book Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan has
many parallels with Diko¨tter’s, because it also addresses a nation that escaped direct
colonization but not imperialistic pressure fromWestern powers.52 Botsman devotes
a significant part of his analysis to the period before the establishment of modern
prisons, which occurred after the arrival of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853
and the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Especially violent punishments, such as quar-
tering, impaling, and boiling alive, had already disappeared under earlier Tokugawa
rule. But various forms of aggravated execution remained, including a form of cru-
cifixion known as “stringing up,” as well as pillorying, flogging, and tattooing (to mark
an individual as a criminal). As in early modern Europe, the most horrifying pun-
ishments were applied publicly, albeit rarely, to impress the populace with the power
of the ruling shoguns; frequent pardons were also granted to display the shoguns’
capacity for benevolence. Sensitive to space as a dimension of punishment, Botsman
50 Ibid., 69.
51 Ibid., 14.
52 Daniel V. Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, N.J., 2005).
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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
characterizes early-nineteenth-century Edo (now Tokyo) as “a city covered with pe-
nal signs,” with its jailhouse in the poor section of town, frequent parades of criminals
on horseback to the execution grounds, and the subsequent display of severed
heads.53
The exact dating of the birth of the prison is controversial in Japanese histori-
ography, because several institutions of confinement existed before the Meiji period.
The Kodemacho Jailhouse in Tokyo was established as early as the 1610s, but like
many European jails, it mostly held suspects before sentencing, or less often housed
convicted women as an alternative to flogging. In 1790, the Stockade for Laborers
was built on the island of Ishikawajima to put vagrants and petty thieves to work and
as a supplement to corporal punishment. In contrast to many historians, who point
to the Stockade of the Tokugawa period as an embryonic modern prison, Botsman
characterizes it as simply an addition to—rather than a replacement for—older pun-
ishments, because it pursued the identical aim of upholding the traditional hierar-
chical and paternalistic social order dominated by the warrior class. Only after the
Western powers, through treaties guaranteeing them extraterritoriality, pressured
Meiji administrators to reform legal institutions did incarceration begin to replace
corporal punishment, although these same administrators quickly came to see mod-
ern prisons as a prestigious symbol of nation-building. The first modern penitentiary
was opened at Kajibashi (Tokyo) in 1874, and the 1881 prison on the island of Hok-
kaido (now Ezo) set the pattern for most Meiji institutions in using inmates to col-
onize underpopulated areas by building roads, dredging rivers, and mining coal and
sulfur.
Botsman emphasizes the influence both of Western models on Japan and, in turn,
of Japanese reformers on other Asian countries considered backward and barbaric
in their legal practices. Interaction with the West included study trips abroad by
experts such as Ohara Shigechika, who laid out a blueprint for the Kajibashi prison
based on Bentham’s panopticon; participation in the International Penitentiary Con-
gresses, beginning with that held in Stockholm in 1878; and the recruitment in 1889
of a German consultant, Kurt von Seebach, to advise the government and train
prison administrators. Japanese scholars, in turn, began to consider themselves “the
‘real’ experts on the East,” with “their own forms of Orientalist knowledge” to spread
to their neighbors.54 Ogawa Shigejiro, an expert on Europeanpenology, served as
an official adviser to the Qing dynasty in developing blueprints for model prisons like
those described by Diko¨tter. Once the Japanese themselves became an imperial
power, they set out—as had Europeans in their own colonies—to introduce modern
prisons in Taiwan to discipline inhabitants they perceived as wild and uncultured.
In The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850–1935,
Carlos Aguirre builds on the collective efforts of Latin American historians since the
1990s to develop a historiography of crime and punishment that would be compa-
rable to that for Europe and the United States.55 Aguirre has been a central figure
in this initiative, serving as co-editor of two collections of essays that include pio-
53 Ibid., 28.
54 Ibid., 221.
55 Carlos Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850–1935 (Dur-
ham, N.C., 2005).
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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
neering studies of prisons in several Latin American nations.56 In Lima, as in most
of Latin America, the birth of the prison occurred after independence, though in a
nation that was shaped by the legacy of colonialism, most notably racism among the
white population against indigenous Indians and former black slaves. Thus the Lima
penitentiary, opened in 1862 and modeled on the American prison in Auburn, New
York (which had been visited by a Peruvian emissary), could never live up to its
principles of discipline and reform. Instead, prison administrators ran their insti-
tution with “a combination of brutality and indifference” reflecting the “exclusion-
ary” nature of the modern Peruvian state, which denied full citizenship to Indians
and blacks.57
Conditions in the new penitentiary—popularly called el pano´ptico—were better,
however, than those in the old Ca´rcel de Guadalupe and the penal colony on the
island of El Fronto´n, where the majority of prisoners were held. To his credit,
Aguirre compares the three institutions throughout the book to emphasize the
patchwork of heterogeneous penal institutions that typified most nineteenth-century
countries, including many in Europe. Despite its numerous shortcomings, the new
penitentiary was the first modern building in Lima and a symbol of progress for the
ruling classes. By the 1890s, Peruvian criminologists were importing and debating
European positivist theories, including that of the born criminal. Aguirre offers a
fascinating analysis of how local circumstances shaped the reception of Lombroso’s
biological determinism, seemingly so fitting to a society permeated by rigid racial
hierarchies. With a population that was majority non-white, however, Peru could not
hope to aspire to build a modern, liberal nation if Indian and black inferiority was
held to be an eternal biological condition. Consequently, most criminologists de-
veloped sociological and cultural explanations for crime and professed faith in the
reforming capacity of the Lima penitentiary despite its failure to put disciplinary
principles into practice.
The prison was ruled not by discipline but by what Aguirre labels a “customary
order” that was tacitly negotiated between the inmates and the guards—and some-
times even administrators—at the institution. Both prisoners and guards violated the
rules for their own purposes, in the case of the former to make life more tolerable
and in the case of the latter for economic gain. Prisoners paid bribes for alcohol and
coca, for sexual services, and even for pardon or release. Administrators were often
complicit in these transactions in hopes of appeasing inmates and preventing violent
disorders such as escapes and revolts. Hierarchy pervaded the inmate community,
an “ultra-masculine world” characterized by the practice of tattooing, the use of
criminal jargon, homosexual behavior, and a cult of violence.58 Thus the customary
order tended to benefit older and more experienced inmates or those with a rep-
utation for aggression (whether white or black) over those who were young, weak,
or indigenous. By the 1920s and 1930s, prisoners began to protest their conditions
in letters to prison authorities and even to newspapers, appropriating language from
56 See Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America:
Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940 (Austin, Tex., 1996); and Ricardo
D. Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law
and Society since Colonial Times (Durham, N.C., 2001).
57 Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds, 1.
58 Ibid., 165.
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both prison reformers and the growing number of political prisoners in their midst.
But these denunciations did little to guarantee respect for prisoners’ rights in a so-
ciety that continued to be marked by extreme social and racial stratification.
THESE INNOVATIVE STUDIES INVITE US to rethink and re-theorize four issues of central
importance for globalizing prison history. The first is the question of periodization,
because non-Western societies did not experience the “birth of the prison” until
almost one hundred years after its creation in Europe and the United States. Our
five authors date the first modern penitentiaries in their nations of study to 1862
(Peru), 1874 (Japan), the late nineteenth century (Vietnam), and the early twentieth
century (China and Africa), thus shifting the focus from the European Enlighten-
ment to the age of European imperialism. This time lag is not surprising, in that the
prison was an export of the late-nineteenth-century colonial project, albeit reinter-
preted by local rulers to serve their interests. The new studies thus direct our at-
tention away from debates about the birth of the prison as an institution to the birth
of imprisonment as the dominant form of worldwide punishment. When did incar-
ceration become the global response to crime? At what date did the majority of the
world’s population begin to face imprisonment rather than traditional penal sanc-
tions? To answer this question, the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is re-
placing the classical period of the revisionist paradigm, a century earlier, as the more
important focus of current historical research.
While prisons were exported as part of the civilizing mission of the imperialist
powers, they were flexible enough to serve the strategies of very different political
regimes. In some cases, similar political climates encouraged the abolition of cor-
poral punishment in favor of incarceration during both the “classic” age of the birth
of the prison in Europe and the United States (1760–1840) and the age of global-
ization (1880–1940). For China, Japan, and Peru, nations that were independent,
prisons became an architectural symbol of modernity and a sign of advancing civ-
ilization. In all three cases, the building of penitentiaries formed part of a larger wave
of liberal reform, whether the government was a republic (China after the Qing and
Peru) or a monarchy (Japan). Crucially linked to the overhaul of the justice system
as part of state-building, the new penitentiaries in theory introduced a democracy
of punishment for all citizens. The case was quite different in the colonial societies
of Vietnam and Africa, where the Enlightenment values of liberalism, equality, and
humanity in punishment were almost entirely absent. While colonial administrators
themselves came from nations professing these ideals and defended the imposition
of widespread imprisonment on native subjects as part of the civilizing mission, they
never intended to build autonomous states or to confer citizenship on their subjects.
The colonial enterprise was surely one of discipline and not reform.
The practice of prisonreform, the second issue that must now be reconsidered
in a global perspective, diverged markedly between the independent and colonial
societies discussed in the five books. This is not to say that any of the authors believe
that practices inside prisons lived up to the legal principles that supposedly guar-
anteed a disciplined but humane environment providing moral regeneration, edu-
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cation, and vocational training to all prisoners. Nor did prison administrators fully
implement the Western model of “individualization,” the separation of various cat-
egories of prisoners (men and women, adults and children, suspects and convicts, the
healthy and the sick/insane) in different cells with appropriate daily regimes. Yet
China and Japan seriously sought to replace corporal punishment with reforming
penitentiaries, which became a source of national pride. Peru also enacted liberal
prison legislation modeled on the European ideal, but it was rarely enforced because
it cut against the grain of a fundamentally hierarchical and exclusionary social struc-
ture. In contrast, little pretense of reform characterized the functioning of colonial
penitentiaries in Vietnam and Africa, where disorder, corruption, and communal
cells were the order of the day.
The centrality of forced labor also distinguished many non-Western prisons,
whether or not they were under colonial domination. Of course, work was central
to the original vision of early European and American prison reformers, but as much,
if not more, for its promise to inculcate inmates with bourgeois habits of diligence,
regularity, and sobriety as for the purpose of profit.59 In fact, prisons built on the
Philadelphia model could never promise large revenues, because only artisanal types
of work could be pursued in individual cells. Even penitentiaries with common work-
shops failed to bring in much profit, partly because of the opposition of free workers
in Europe and the United States to unfair competition from much lower-paid in-
mates. In contrast, China and even more so Japan employed their prisoners to open
up underpopulated areas for colonization by reclaiming agricultural wastelands,
building infrastructure, and mining raw materials. According to Bernault, economic
motives were central to the prison project in many African colonies, where “prisoners
provided a docile, cheap, and constantly available labor force for underpaid tasks”
for private entrepreneurs and plantation owners as well as for the colonial admin-
istration.60 Such hard and often deadly work had almost disappeared in Europe with
the closing in the nineteenth century of the continental bagnes that had replaced the
galleys a century earlier.61
The new research on non-Western prisons has also emphasized a third issue,
prison subculture, which has largely been ignored in the traditional paradigm. The
exception was O’Brien’s extensive analysis of the world of French prisoners, which
is cited frequently in recent studies as a model for attempting to reconstruct daily
59 The treadwheel, introduced into English prisons by the Prison Act of 1865, was an extreme example
of “hard labor” that produced nothing of economic value. See Sea´n McConville, “The Victorian Prison:
England, 1865–1965,” in Morris and Rothman, The Oxford History of the Prison, 131–133. A recent work
that contests this consensus and argues that labor was indeed central to the Western—in this case Amer-
ican—prison project is Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the
Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (New York, 2008).
60 Bernault, A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, 22.
61 The exception was those European felons transported to Australia, French Guiana/Caledonia, or
other European penal colonies, where they were treated almost as colonial subjects. On transportation,
see Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge, 1988); Joy
Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cam-
bridge, 1997); Alice Bullard, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific,
1790–1900 (Stanford, Calif., 2000); Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in
French Guiana (Berkeley, Calif., 2000); Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-Century Trans-
portation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Basingstoke, 2004); and Stephen A. Toth, Beyond
Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854–1952 (Lincoln, Neb., 2006).
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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011
life within prisons.62 But for the most part, historians of early penitentiaries in Eu-
rope and the United States, while admitting that prisoners frequently lacked ade-
quate food, clean cells, and good medical care, have focused nevertheless on the
discourse of statesmen, reformers, and administrators in a quest to understand why
the prison came to be seen as the answer to a host of perceived social issues. While
not rejecting the “cultural turn,” and especially the multiple ways in which colonial
officials or non-Western rulers appropriated foreign penological theories and re-
invented them for their own purposes, scholars are also returning to an interest in
social history, or “history from below.”63 They attempt to reconstruct the interaction
between prisoners and their guards, which took the form of both collaboration and
violent conflict. Guards, who came primarily from the same impoverished class as
most prisoners and were usually just as poorly educated, endured harsh working
conditions characterized by low pay, danger from prisoner violence, and humiliating
submission to middle-class administrators. In Vietnam, penal colonies on the bor-
ders were staffed by members of non-Vietnamese minority groups, which only in-
creased tensions between guards and inmates. Yet, as Aguirre shows in great detail
for Peru, collusion frequently developed between the two groups, allowing a sub-
culture of illegal transactions, homosexuality, and self-organization within the in-
mate community. Thus inmates were not entirely passive recipients of discipline,
although their agency was severely circumscribed by prison walls and militarized
guards.
In their quest to reconstruct the experience of imprisonment, the authors of these
five new books have actively sought out new sources rarely used in previous studies.
Letters of grievance, sometimes by groups of prisoners, were permitted in some
nations and offer insight into both the conditions of everyday life and also, by their
tone, the degree of militancy among inmates. In China, for example, Diko¨tter found
that prisoners frequently requested better food, health care, and education but rarely
complained about violent treatment by guards. Thus he cautiously concludes that
Chinese authorities took seriously the European principle of eliminating corporal
punishment. Written complaints seem not to have been tolerated in colonial Viet-
nam, so that prisoners frequently resorted to revolt to air their opposition to the
prison regime. With the rise of the anticolonial and communist movements of the
1920s and 1930s, the number of political prisoners grew throughout Asia, Africa, and
Latin America. Often middle-class and literate, these radical inmates used letters
and petitions to ensure that their grievances were heard outside prison walls. Op-
position and colonial newspapers publicized the repressive and inhumane conditions
of local prisons, sometimes championing political prisoners as martyred heroes. Fi-
nally, many political opponents wrote memoirs after their release, which, while cast
in politically prescribed molds, nevertheless offer valuable glimpses into the lives of
those incarcerated for not only political but also