"Woman manacled before giving birth" and "Battery hen cells
being built for women" are only two of the various horror
stories about everyday life in British prisons which have
recently hit the headlines. Hardly a week seems to go by
without new revelations about dire conditions in prisons both
here and across the Atlantic. But such concern about the
problems of life behind bars generally has little real impact
on sentencing policy. On the contrary, both Britain and the US
have experienced a considerable growth in the prison and jail
population since the mid-1970s. In the US in early 1992, 455
people were imprisoned per 100,000 of population. Prisons are
so accepted today as a fundamental part of criminal justice,
that for most people it must be inconceivable how society
could ever do without them.
Yet, as is pointed out in the rich and compelling "Oxford
History of the Prison", co-edited by Norval Morris and David
J. Rothman, the prison emerged barely 200 years ago as the
major way of dealing with offenders. The 13 contributors trace
the history of punishment and incarceration from ancient times
to the present, setting the extraordinary transformation of
the ideology and practice of imprisonment into the larger
context of social and political change. The book is divided
into two parts, the first one offering a straightforward
historical narrative, focusing primarily on the prison system
of the US and Britain since the 1780s. The chapters of the
second part consider in more detail a number of themes, such
as local justice, the juvenile reform school and the history
of the literature of confinement. What unites most of the
essays is the attempt to address the question of how the
prison system could have gained such credibility, since the
system itself is so strange that in David J. Rothman's words
it "can still prompt an inmate to want to meet the man who
dreamed it all up, convinced that he must have been born on
Mars" (p.128).
In fact, the prison is very much a product of this world
and was already known in ancient and medieval times. Yet, in
the middle ages the prison population was still largely
confined to those awaiting trial or the implementation of
their sentence, and to debtors. Other forms of punishment were
much more popular, as Pieter Spierenburg points out in his
excellent chapter on early modern Europe. Contemporary
attitudes were most clearly embodied, according to
Spierenburg, in execution on the scaffold, and other forms of
corporal punishment such as mutilation, whipping and branding.
These and other non-physical public punishments, including
symbolic acts of shaming and dishonouring, had a highly
ritualistic and theatrical character, partly aimed at the
deterrence from crime of the assembled public.
However, the nature of the penal system of Europe had
changed greatly by the mid-18th century, with various forms of
incarceration gradually replacing the "theatre of horror".
From Spierenburg's account there emerge two distinct
developments which help explain this shift. Firstly,
imprisonment with forced labour and other forms of penal
servitude (such as the galleys) grew increasingly popular from
the early-16th century onwards, as attitudes towards idleness
and poverty changed. The poor were
increasingly expected to work, and houses of correction
emerged all over northern Europe to ensure that they would do
so. Secondly, attitudes to the body of the offender and to
public punishment altered, with the judicial elites being more
and more reluctant to hand out death sentences or penalties
involving mutilation. These factors combined to make
imprisonment a well-established element of criminal justice by
the end of the early modern period.
But imprisonment was not yet totally dominant as a form of
punishment. For example, transportation was still very popular
in England, both in the 18th century to the America, and in
the following century to Australia. Furthermore, prisons were
not yet what we refer to under that name today. As Randall
McGowen points out in his account of the English prison, "the
contrast between a prison in 1780 and one in 1865 could
scarcely have been greater" (p. 79). In the 18th century, the
debtors and
remand prisoners in the local jails often mingled together
with petty offenders who were sent to the workhouse. In the
prisons there was little sign of authority, it was noisy and
smelly, and some prisoners were gambling while others were
drinking beer sold by the jailors. The inmates were also
relatively free to mingle with friends and family. All this
was to change at the end of the eighteenth century.
In a period which saw the temporary end to transportation
and an apparent increase of crime after the American
Revolution, the discussion about confinement was renewed. A
prison reform movement emerged in England, commonly associated
with John Howard and his 1777 book "The State of the Prison in
England and Wales". Religiously inspired, the reformers
attacked the contemporary disorder in the prison and aimed at
methods which would reform the prisoner. Yet, despite the
continuation of the debate about the state of prisons in the
early 19th century, prisons in England in the 1820s generally
still operated on the basis of informality. It was the
influence of penal experiments in America that led to the most
sustained effort in England to reconstruct the prison in the
following decades.
As David J. Rothman argues in his chapter on the US prison
system, the 1820s and 30s in the States were characterised by
widespread fears about the supposed disintegration of society
and the family. It was in this context that reformers
discovered the prison as a place to teach order and discipline
to the offenders, who were perceived as a fundamental threat
to the stability of society. The basic idea was to hold
prisoners in solitude in order to shield them from the
supposed contaminating influence of other convicts. Being left
in completely silence with only the company of one's
conscience and the Bible was to bring about the spiritual
renewal of the offender. Also, a strict diet of work and
military discipline would help to turn them into law-abiding
citizens. Prison building flourished until the 1840s, aimed at
transforming the prison from a physically and morally filthy
place of confinement into a clean and rationally functioning
reform-machine. The optimistic belief in the new prison based
on uniformity and impersonality was widespread. One prison
chaplain
insisted: "'Could we all be put on prison fare, for the space
of two or three generations, the world would ultimately be the
better for it'" (p. 118).
The interesting theoretical issue concerning the emergence
of the prison is how the authors interpret the development
away from the brutal sanctions against the body to
imprisonment. It was long maintained in the literature on
punishment that this shift ought to be seen as a logical step
in the ever-continuing progress of humanity. This consensus
was attacked most forcefully by Michel Foucault in his 1975
"Discipline and Punish", where he described the prison as part
of a larger attempt by bourgeois society to discipline and
dominate, and to punish the slightest deviation from what it
prescribed as normative behaviour. Foucault's ideas crop up a
number of times in one way or another in the "Oxford History
of the Prison", as do the theories of other writers on the
history of punishment like Norbert Elias, Georg Rusche and
Otto
Kirchheimer. As the book is directed at readers without any
prior in-depth knowledge of the subject, it is regrettable
that the editors did not chose to include a chapter on the
different methodological approaches to punishment.
The general thrust of the articles in the "Oxford History
of the Prison" is to describe the emergence of the prison
neither as a glorious humanitarian effort, nor as a
totalitarian project aimed at social or class control. Rather,
they point to the contradiction between what the reformers
intended and the cruel system of isolation and de-
personalisation which was ultimately created. So had the life
of inmates improved by the 19th century? No clear answer
emerges. To be sure, prisons were cleaner places, and the
cruel spectacle of public corporal punishments had largely
ended. But while in earlier times only a fraction of offenders
had been ritually punished, now an ever increasing number were
sent to prison, for longer stretches of time. However, as
Lucia Zedner points out in her insightful chapter on women and
the prison, the 19th century reform movement was definitely
welcomed by the small number of female prisoners. Women were
finally separated from male prisoners, which put an end to
their constant exploitation. For example, the governors of the
London Bridewell had in previous centuries run their prison as
a lucrative brothel, forcing female inmates into providing
sexual services - an "unorthodox form of prison employment"
(p. 329).
The following chapters also show that while simplistic
doctrines about the development of punishment may offer easy
explanations, they often have little historical validity. For
once, it is a fallacy to assume that "punishment of the body"
was more or less overnight replaced by "punishment of the
soul". Corporal punishments continued as a disciplinary
measure inside the prison walls well into the 20th century.
The last whipping in Delaware's prisons took place in 1954,
and in England flogging as punishment was abolished as late as
1967. Furthermore, as emerges from Sean McConville's account
of the English prison system from the mid-19th to the mid-20th
century, hard labour in Victorian prisons was very much
directed at the body.
Administrators believed that the mere denial of freedom was
not punishment enough and thought up various ways of
intensifying the pains of imprisonment. Their industriousness
made the hand crank and the treadwheel common features in
prisons of the second half of the 19th century. The latter was
an especially cruel device, constructed of a series of steps
on a huge wheel which was to be turned around by the
prisoner's climbing motion. Not only was the work physically
exhausting, but it was also mentally gruelling for the
prisoners as it produced absolutely nothing. The only
justification of this, in McConville's words "scarcely veiled
torture" (p.147), was to punish the prisoners. A medical and
scientific committee was set up in the 1860s to determine the
amount of labour that could be expected from the prisoners,
and after rational deliberation the experts concluded that
prisoners sentenced to hard labour were to ascend 8,640 feet
per day.
The impact of the medical profession on the prison, the
medicalisation of crime and punishment, gathered increasing
momentum in the following decades, and in the 20th century
eugenic justifications were invoked to incarcerate those who
were supposed to present a risk to the future health of the
nation. On the whole, this aspect is slightly neglected in
Morris and Rothman's volume. The belief that the supposedly
objective methods of criminal-biology or psychiatry were the
key to solving all problems associated with criminality was
widespread. These disciplines seemed to provide a way of
scientifically determining who was destined to offend again,
and thus to be locked away for ever.
Psychiatry and psychology also had an impact on life in
American prisons, as Edgardo Rotman shows in his chapter on
the US penal system in the 19th and 20th century. However,
attempts to fully implement the therapeutic model of the
prison failed time and again because of over-crowding and
under-funding. A prison report of 1965 concluded that "life in
many institutions is at best barren and futile, at worst
unspeakably brutal and degrading" (p. 193).
Compared to the worst excesses of the 19th century, life
inside has today improved in some ways. Ventilation and
sanitation have changed the prison infrastructure,
recreational options like sports, libraries and TV's have
grown and prisoners have at last acquired some legal status.
Yet, order and discipline is still prioritised over individual
treatment. Riots, gangs and HIV are pressing problems, and so
is
over-crowding in institutions often purpose-built to suit the
ideals of 19th century punishment: less than one quarter of
English prisons in use in the late 1970s were built in the
20th century. As emerges from an account of a prisoner of his
experience in an US institution in the 1990s (cited in Norval
Morris chapter on the contemporary prison), arguably the worst
problem of life behind bars today is its purposelessness - its
dullness, monotony and utter boredom.
The contradictory history of the prison, torn between its
over-optimistic rhetoric and often grim reality is set out
with great skill by the various authors of the present volume.
Its readability is enhanced not only by the high standard of
writing, but also by many illustrations - photos, drawings,
paintings - which offer a more graphic insight into life in
prison. While most chapters include endnotes for suggested
further reading, it would have been useful especially for
academic readers had the authors also included footnotes.
The major problem with the "Oxford History of the Prison"
is its all too narrow geographic conception. While the
subtitle of the book promises an exploration of "the practice
of punishment in Western society", this is all too often
equated simply with "the practice of punishment in Anglo-
American society". This reduction leaves many interesting
areas of the modern penal system either unexplored or dealt
with only
superficially. For example, Patricia O'Brien has less than 30
pages (of more than 450) to deal with the European prison
system in the 19th and 20th century. She devotes only 10 lines
to the experience of imprisonment in Nazi Germany - even
though she states herself that the concentration camps
represent the most extreme use among all European nations of
the deprivation of liberty as a form of punishment. The
editor's explanation of this omission is not persuasive.
Morris and Rothman argue that "the genocidal practices that
went on within the camps did not take their inspiration from
the conduct of criminal punishment" (Introduction, p. xiv).
However, concentration camps were clearly influenced by
experiences drawn from criminal punishment. Also, by the time
the genocide began in the death camps of Eastern Europe,
gigantic prison and labour camps within Germany had already
been in operation for a full 8 years. But even if one chooses
to neglect the camps, how did the prisons proper in fascist
Italy and Germany compare with their counterparts in
democratic societies, and what does this tell us about the
nature of the prison?
The half-hearted description of modern European punishment
is also evident in O'Brien's treatment of imprisonment in the
Weimar Republic. Relying on only one outdated source, she
describes this period as a mere preface to the Third Reich:
Weimar, she argues, relied on the increasing use of the death
penalty and the increased severity of punishment. In fact, the
Weimar period saw the first sustained effort at a reform of
the prison system in Germany, with the introduction of
independent supervisory bodies, holidays from prison and
experiments with limited forms of prisoner self-rule. One
leading reformer, Max Grnhut, declared in 1931: "Until
recently, the educational premise was the hazardous enterprise
of a few theoreticians. Today, it seems to be universally
accepted, and the judicial administrations are obviously
competing with one another to modernise the prison service".
Similarly, the numbers of executions in Prussia dropped from
172 between 1900-1910, to only 47 executions between 1920 and
1930. As the late German historian Detlev Peukert has pointed
out, Weimar has its own complex history and should be judged
on its own terms, not merely as a prologue to the Third Reich.
The focus on the English speaking world is all the more
regrettable, as in most European countries the importance of
the prison declined after the Second World War, in marked
contrast to the US and Britain. Questions about what one might
learn from this experience remain unanswered. Overall, the
structure of the book would have been more convincing had the
editors consistently stuck either to a wider western
perspectivethroughout the book, or to the Anglo-American
experience only. The inconsistency of their application of the
term 'western society' is apparent once more in Aryeh Neier's
chapter on the history of the political prison. After being
offered little or no information in the entire book on
imprisonment in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union, the
reader is confronted here with accounts of the prison system
in China, El Salvador and Indonesia.
Surveying the last 200 years of the history of the prison,
one might well ask why the constant failure of the prison to
live up to its claims has had no impact on its continuing
longevity. The history of the prison emerges as a succession
of phases of over-exaggerated optimism in the power of the
prison to change human behaviour, swiftly followed by failure
in the realm of reality. One explanation for the survival of
the prison might be that it has been successfully presented as
the embodiment of a variety of contradictory justifications
for punishment: it can been seen as incapacitating,
retributive and as educative; either as harshpunishment or as
benevolent reform, whichever suits the public mood best.
No research has been able to demonstrate a positive link
between a higher rate of imprisonment and a reduction of the
crime rate. In fact, as Norval Morris points, "the less
effective the prisons are in reducing crime, the higher the
demand for more imprisonment" (p. 257). The view persists that
increased severity of punishment will lead to less crime. In
this context, the prison has also become a weapon in politics.
As Morris observes, being "tough on crime" today is a
precondition for election to public office, and imprisonment
remains the preferred way of demonstrating this resolve in the
never ending but constantly proclaimed "war on crime". It
emerges from this book that as long as this naive belief in
the powers of the prison is not put into perspective by its
history of failed promises, the rallying cry of politicians in
Britain and the US will continue to be "prison works" -
irrespective of which party they belong to.
November 1996
Author's Response
