Crime and Punishment in Early Republican China: Beijing's First Model Prison, 1912-1922

Abstract

Prisons today are often condemned as institutions of brutal deterrence, but they were viewed as products of benevolence and producers of goodness across the globe during most of the nineteenth and twentieth century. 1 A cathedral of modernity, the prison was embraced by local notables, county magistrates, government officials, legal experts, and political elites around the world from Paris to Rio de Janeiro and Auburn to Tokyo. Changing sensibilities towards pain, new representations of bodily integrity, humanitarian values heralded by Enlightenment thinkers, utilitarian ideas about punishment as a corrective measure, growing dissatisfaction with existing legal penalties, and revulsion at the conditions of existing jails combined towards the end of the eighteenth century in England and France to create a new conception of the prison as a total institution in which the wicked criminal could be reformed into a good citizen. While commitment to social improvement and faith in the malleable nature of humankind pervaded these early debates, the most important factor in the emergence of the prison was the political revolutions of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. During the French revolution, the fall of the Bastille symbolized the defeat of an entire ancient regime of punishment perceived to be cruel and arbitrary. A post-revolutionary mode of governance, in which legitimacy was vested in the nation rather than in a king, based its authority to punish on a code of law. Moreover, as the social hierarchies specific to traditional regimes were theoretically swept away by a new ideology of equality and fraternity, the state proclaimed a duty of care over its subjects: criminals should be punished in a humane way before being restituted to the social body. The idea of the reformative prison--producer of obedient citizens for a moral community based on the rule of law--paralleled the rise of [End Page 140] the modern state and the extension of political rights. Russia, for instance, opted for rehabilitation over corporal punishment during the era of Great Reforms, undertaking to redeem the nation's criminals in a new prison system, 2 while prison reform was embraced by the Meiji reformers in Japan after 1868. These global developments were dynamically interrelated: portraying their mission as a fight against "barbarism" and "inhumanity," prison reformers around the world operated within a comparative framework in which prison reform was seen as an indicator of a nation's "progress." The dungeon stood as an embarrassing reminder of backwardness, while the prison epitomized civilisation. Corporal punishment, arbitrary justice, and corrupt gaols were remnants of an old world, while reformed judicial systems, legal codes, and modern prisons were indicative of a new political order.