ABSTRACT
From the early nineteenth century, moral conceptions about the rehabilitation of criminals have, to a greater or lesser extent, influenced the treatment of offenders and prisoners. Many of the tools developed in that regard have gone hand in hand with the general scientific optimism and the art of social engineering that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment. As imprisonment gradually replaced the public physical punishment practised between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, attempts to rehabilitate criminals increasingly became linked to the prison as an institution—especially after the 1820s–30s, when the modern penitentiary system began to develop. This contribution will broadly describe how the philosophy of rehabilitation developed from a religious understanding of conversion in solitude and then influenced prison practice from the 1830s until today. It will be argued that crime has often been socially constructed as deviant behaviour characterised by individual immoral thought-processes—i.e. abnormal “criminal” thinking. Through the creation of such constructions, crime has become both a moral and a modern concept through which various groups of people have been separated and marginalised over time from the rest of society. The analysis will focus on the ideology of the modern penitentiary in the middle of the nineteenth century and will rest on an empirical case study of Danish prison reforms based on extensive and very well kept archives from the Danish central administration and Vridsløselille Penitentiary. It will be described how the new ideology of rehabilitation located the cause of criminality in the individual offender’s allegedly inappropriate way of thinking and his or her lack of social skills, and prescribed what has been termed a “religious technology of the self” as the solution. Furthermore, this chapter will briefly show how important remnants of this ideology can be found in the cognitive treatment programmes that became popular in prisons from the 1990s onwards. Finally, this raises a number of questions as to whether—for almost 200 years—we have been caught in a narrow definition of crime and rehabilitation that relies on a peculiar fusion of modernity and morality.
