The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

The study of asylums and prisons in which society encloses its deviants, traditional preserve of sociologists and psychologists, has recently been encroached upon by philosophers and historians. O'Brien's work is a significant contribution to growing fund of historical literature on origins of penal institutions. Her extensive research is based on archival records of French prisons, statutes and published records, writings of both prisoners and reformers, and modern social theory. O'Brien examines three aspects of French prisons, first treating development of French penal institutions. Unlike most students of these institutions, she does not end her treatment of this subject with opening of first penitentiaries in I83os and I840s. Rather, she examines development of penal institutions from end of Old Regime until late nineteenth century. This chronological breadth permits her to trace evolution of other institutions of created concurrently, including agricultural labor camps, special institutions for women, transportation of criminals to Guiana and New Caledonia, and systems of surveillance and patronage which extended supervision of the dangerous class beyond prison walls. O'Brien also recognizes that much in Old Regime justice portended modern penology. The essence of new penitentiary system existed already in bagnes, or penal workhouses; brutal public executions so central to Foucault's work were a vanishing phenomenon before 1789.1 The second part of this work is an examination of nineteenthcentury prison organization and operation. The ideal of reformers was a prison system that would isolate inmates from society while immersing them in a rehabilitative regime of work, education, and discipline. But O'Brien determines that this promise of punishment remained unrealized. The administration of prison labor was turned over to private entrepreneurs who assigned work on basis of profit potential rather than for purposes of rehabilitation. Discipline was maintained by extracting fines from convicts' meager wages. O'Brien finds that provisions for convicts' education, also part of ideal rehabilitative program, were inadequate. There were few qualified prison teachers and elementary curriculum was supplemented with lessons on duty and self-restraint. The author states that most guards restricted their roles to controlling prisoners and, rather than serving as counselors that reformers had envisioned, involved their charges in corruption. Contrary to reformers' dream of reassimilating former prisoners into society, penal system's growing tentacles of discipline and control ultimately worked to exclude former criminals from society. Ex-