ABSTRACT
In the pre-modern prisons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prisoner rights were not a consideration, but in the eighteenth century, and in the spirit of the Enlightenment, a process of reform began and the use of torture, the death penalty and corporal punishment was criticized. After 1945 an international human rights framework was gradually established and many of the principles and concrete rights underpinning today's human rights standards for prisons were agreed upon in the early aftermath of the war and with the unravelling of the Holocaust still fresh in mind. One can argue that the big philanthropic prison reformers of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century were some of the first to look empirically at the possible practical implications of Enlightenment philosophy in the context of prisons. In 1831, the famous, religious English prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry, for example, brought about changes in Danish prisons after reporting on conditions to the Danish royal family.
