ABSTRACT
The question of how well past societies treated those whom they deemed dangerous or unfit has become a legitimate historical one only since the emergence of social history in the last 25 years. The histories of persons considered deviant-including those convicted of crimes, the insane, the poor, orphans, and wayward children-have been the subject of interest since revisionist historians began discarding the older Whig interpretations of institutions and professions designed to confine, control, or educate potentially troublesome groups. The previous Whig, or “progressive,” view, that the dominant medical, philanthropic, and legal institutions were guided by benevolent reform impulses, was almost wholly discarded for the view that the rise of public and private institutions to confine deviant and oppressed populations was the result of prevailing cultural attitudes of aversion and fear. Some of these historians further argued that a pragmatic need to control persons who were seen as interfering with the rational and orderly workings of economic and political systems was the basis for their confinement in institutional settings. Efforts to reform the insane, the poor, and the prisoners, along with efforts to educate the children of immigrant families, were viewed as tantamount to efforts to control them by these revisionist historians. The term “social control” implies a stern, if not malevolent, attitude toward persons considered dangerous or unfit by society, the belief in the reality of this punitive attitude has informed the histories associated with the social control hypothesis.
