Classic text revisited: Slavery and the Penal System

Abstract

In Slavery and the Penal System Thorsten Sellin set out to prove Gustav Radbruch's 1938 thesis that the modern ‘criminal law bears the traits of its origin in slave punishments’ (cited at p. viii). Within a relatively short book Sellin charts the history of state punishment from Ancient Greece to mid-twentieth century America, a review that manages to take in the penal systems of the Roman Empire and the European Middle Ages, as well as the development of Galley Slavery, Houses of Correction, the Bagnes, penal colonies in Siberia and Australia, and the US convict lease system. It is a massively ambitious work highlighting continuities in punishment from antiquity to modernity that show how key characteristics of penal systems have remained unchanged from their origins in slave punishments.