ABSTRACT
The aim of this article is to examine the ways in which Ottoman prison reform was implemented in Izmir in the late Ottoman Empire through discussion of punishment, urbanisation and imperial transformation (Adak 2015a; Adak 2015b). Izmir Prison represents not only the application of a new set of criminal codes and the centralisation attempts of the Ottoman government but also allows us to re-think the margins of the city, particularly the margins of governmentality. In terms of the politics of space, Izmir Prison shifted from being on the margins of the city in the late nineteenth century to the “marginal” spatiality within the new governmental and public space in the first decades of the twentieth century. How did the imperial governance affect prison administration in Izmir? What do local newspapers tell us about Izmir Prison? Do we see a shift of Smyrniots’ perceptions regarding Izmir Prison from Abdülhamid II’s era to the Second Constitution when the prison was more central to the city than before?
