ABSTRACT
Prison studies is one of the few criminology subdisciplines (for want of a better word) that recognizes the importance of historical analysis for an informed understanding of the issues and dilemmas facing prisoners, prison staff, reform groups and penal policy-makers today. All too often in other areas of criminology, the past seems a foreign country, but there are relatively few academic texts on imprisonment that do not at least give a nod to how the history of prisons and punishment continues to shape contemporary practices. This recognition of the importance of the past may be, in part, due to the dominance of Foucault, whose influence on criminology is immeasurable and whose thesis on the birth of the prison remains a touchstone in sociologically informed studies of confinement and control. Keith Soothill (Chapter 2) acknowledges this debt, noting that Foucault is the foremost writer among the prison ‘revisionists’ who challenged the notion that prisons represent progress, replacing the barbaric punishments of torture and execution with humane and regulated institutions. Arguing that imprisonment is intrinsically concerned with power relations, economic motives, the interests of the governing class, and the operation of state power to regulate and control society, a Foucauldian approach to history implies that imprisonment has no moral justification and that – to quote another of the contributors to this part of the Handbook – ‘a prison is a prison is a prison’ (King, Chapter 5). Soothill argues that, while the experience of being imprisoned has similar resonances whatever the era, we should not neglect the importance of the political, economic, social and cultural contexts that prevail at any given time. He organizes his chapter around ‘milestones’ in prison history and examines the effects of what was going on outside prison walls to the environment that was shaped within them at each of these key moments. The chapter spans three centuries, taking in the end of transportation, the influence of the great prison reformers and philanthropists throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bentham’s (1791) blueprint for a panoptic penitentiary that proved so influential in the work of later scholars (such as Foucault and Ignatieff), the establishment in 1901 of a separate juvenile
justice system for young offenders, the introduction of ‘open prisons’ in the 1930s and the commissioning of the Mountbatten Report following a series of high-profile escapes from prisons in the 1960s. Soothill also discusses the various legislation that has been passed over the last 300 years that has both informed and reflected public and political unease about the state of prisons and the role of confinement.
