Foucault's Carceral and Ignatieff's Pentonville—English prisons and the revisionist analysis of control and penality

Abstract

During the 1970s the work of Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff challenged the earlier somewhat optimistic general analysis of French and British penality during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their accounts constituted a major revision of this subject and in the early 1980s there was a counter revisionist critique of their work in which it was argued that Foucault and Ignatieff had made substantial errors of fact and judgement. During the mid 1980s the dispute between revisionists and counter revisionists was further informed by the work of David Garland and Radzinowicz and Hood in relation to British penality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this article the author considers these analyses specifically in relation to methods of reforming the attitude and conduct of prisoners and argues that revisionist and counter revisionist analyses both offer important insights into the actual historical development of the English prison system between 1775 and 1939.