ABSTRACT
Understanding crime and punishment provides us a key to understanding society: Criminology is successful not to the extent solving the state’s problems but to the extent that it becomes a vehicle for understanding society. In 2010, The Edinburgh Law Review published a review of Principles of European Prison Law and Policy, one of the key texts in European penology discussing the development and elaboration of a human rights approach to prisons within Europe. Like the human rights organizations that were at the centre of Stanley Cohen’s research, the CPT also aims at converting knowledge into acknowledgement. In Slavery and the Penal System, Thorsten Sellin pointed at another body of work that might be useful here: ‘To be punished means to be treated like a slave,’ so he cited Gustav Radbruch. Sellin elaborated Radbruch’s ideas on how public punishment stems from punishment in the domestic sphere, that is, from the right of a slave’s owner to punish his property.
