Penal History Research Articles

The offender between penal policies and local practices: A history of individualised punishment

Like many other jurisdictions, the Danish criminal justice system has used pre-sentence reports for almost a century to be able to impose individualised sanctions. During this period, suspended sentences and a range of alternative sanctions have been developed, and the number of pre-sentence reports issued has increased dramatically accordingly. These changes are often explained in terms of shifting ideologies about the relation between crime, person and society during the 20th century. However, this article argues that the larger, paradigmatic changes within penal decision-making may be articulated quite differently in everyday institutional practices. Both current and former perceptions of ‘the criminal’ thus appear as hybrid forms in judges’, probation officers’ and other professionals’ contemporary practices feeding into sentencing. The penal history of pre-sentence reports as phenomenon thus enables us to raise awareness about contemporary, heterogeneous and anachronistic constructions of the defendant that influence their punishment.

“It Has Made Me Think”: Engaging the Public with the History of Health in the Modern Irish Prison

Since the establishment of the modern prison system in the early nineteenth century, prisons and prisoners have been construed as sites of moral, social, and biological contagion. Historic and contemporary studies show that most prisoners experience severe health inequalities, higher rates of addiction and mental health issues, and lower life expectancy than the rest of the population. They also come from deprived social strata. Yet, these aspects of Irish penal history have been largely neglected in academia and popular histories. Our article discusses two public history projects—an art installation, The Trial, and a museum exhibition, Living Inside—that engaged different publics with the long history of health and welfare in Irish prisons. Developed by the research team on the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award “Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000,” based at University College Dublin, the projects adopted different methodologies to engage their audiences and explore the experience and management of health and welfare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish prisons. We further examine the different methodological approaches of each project, their varied aims and audiences, and the impacts reported by audiences and participants. The article also considers some of the challenges of doing this kind of public history, both in terms of working with marginalized communities and presenting research about difficult subjects to various audiences.

Reframing “the most holy spot in Ireland”: an analysis of the narratives from and around Kilmainham Gaol

Prisons play a prominent role in Irish imagination and collective memory, because their wings and cells bore witness to many turning points in the country’s recent history. Kilmainham Gaol, often called ‘the Bastille of Ireland’, is no exception: from 1796 to its closure in 1924, it held the leaders of nineteenth-century agrarian and nationalist revolts as well as the Easter Rising rebels in 1916. Given the Gaol’s importance in nationalist history, it has been argued that a specific narrative came to be constructed around it by its restorers: one aimed at elevating the Gaol to a symbol of the separatist struggle, and which deliberately downplayed the fact that the prison had been a place of detention also for non-political prisoners and the opponents of the Free State. Scholars contend that this narrative long dominated over stories of ordinary penal history, and, only recently, brief mentions of ‘ordinary’ prisoners and the Civil War have entered the dominant narrative. My article questions these assumptions and is divided into two parts to outline such ‘reframing’ of Kilmainham Gaol: first, drawing on archival documents, I discuss the intention of the authorities to redesign Ireland’s past as a monolithic history of struggle against the enemies of the nation in their narrative of the Gaol, and I argue for the need to consider their reasons to do so; second, I resort to Witcomb’s methodological approach to highlight how today’s curators respond to the representational challenges posed by the Gaol and aim at incorporating into the narrative of the site the dissonant voices of those who had been previously neglected.

Places of Justice? Representations of Law in Canadian Court Museums

AbstractThere is little scholarship on museums and heritage sites that memorialize courts, judges, and law. Engaging with literatures on penal history and law and culture, we explore representations of law and power in court museums across Canada. Based on observations and interviews, we examine the meanings of the artifacts curated at court museum sites. In a post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission context, where heritage sites have been called upon to account for the atrocities experienced by Indigenous peoples in colonial institutions, we show how court museums in Canada continue to be curated in ways that naturalize the Canadian state and law, deny colonialism, and reproduce myths regarding the Canadian penal system. In our discussion, we reflect on the implications of our findings for literatures on representations of penality and law. We contend penal history museums must learn from critical, decolonizing trends in museological studies.

Healthcare in a pure gatekeeping system: utilization of primary, mental and emergency care in the prison population over time

BackgroundThis study investigates the prisoner and prison-level factors associated with healthcare utilization (HCU) and the dynamic effects of previous HCU and health events. We analyze administrative data collected on annual adult prisoner-stay HCU (n = 10,136) including physical and mental chronic disease diagnoses, acute health events, penal circumstances and prison-level factors between 2013 and 2017 in 4 prisons of Canton of Vaud, Switzerland. Utilization of four types of health services: primary, nursing, mental and emergency care; are assessed using multivariate and multi-level negative binomial regressions with fixed/random effects and dynamic models conditional on prior HCU and lagged health events.ResultsIn a prison setting with health screening on detention, removal of financial barriers to care and a nurse-led gatekeeping system, we find that health status, socio-demographic characteristics, penal history, and the prison environment are associated with HCU overtime. After controlling for chronic and past acute illnesses, female prisoners have higher HCU, younger adults more emergencies, and prisoners from Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Americas lower HCU. New prisoners, pretrial detainees or repeat offenders utilize more all types of care. Overcrowding increases primary care but reduces utilization of mental and emergency services. Higher expenditure on medical staff resources is associated with more primary care visits and less emergency visits. The dynamics of HCU across types of care shows persistence over time related to emergency use, previous somatic acute illnesses, and acting out events. There is also evidence of substitution between psychiatric and primary care.ConclusionsThe prison healthcare system provides an opportunity to diagnose and treat unmet health needs for a marginalized population. Access to psychiatric and chronic disease management during incarceration and prevention of emergency or acute events can reduce future demand for care. Prioritization of high-risk patients and continuity of care inside and outside of prisons may reduce public health pressures in the criminal system. The prison environment and prisoners’ penal circumstances impacts healthcare utilization, suggesting better coordination between the criminal justice and prison health systems is required.

Slavery, economics, race and convict leasing: A general and materialist history of punishment and prisons in Florida, 1840-1923

ABSTRACT This paper employs archival data and historical analysis to trace Florida’s penal history, and to connect that history to the economic and social context of the time. Section I reviews the history of Florida’s penal system, and the use of convict labor and avoidance of imprisonment from 1840 to 1923. Section II examines theoretical assumptions that guide the analysis of Florida’s prison history undertaken in Section III. Drawing upon the insights of Rusche and Kirchheimer, Section III examines Florida’s penal history in relation to economic and social trends and issues. Of particular importance to the discussion are concepts such as race, class, and marginalization.

Historicizing Extramural Convict Labour: Trajectories and Transitions in Early Modern Europe

AbstractNew global histories of punishment are steadily decentring the history of punishment and convict labour, challenging traditional conceptions of a linear path towards a single penal modernity and the penitentiary as the telos of its history. Through an exploration of three strands of extramural convict labour emerging in Copenhagen (1558), Ulm (1561), and Almadén (1566), this interpretative essay argues that this challenge can be furthered by taking a view of Europe's own penal history from which the focus is less on origins and more on how the landscape of punishment evolved through a continuous and largely contingent process of assemblage. In this process, a few key elements – labour, displacement, pain, and confinement – were combined and mixed to different effects in specific contexts. Along with that approach comes the need to historicize the process by relating it to other practices of labour coercion, both within the penal field and outside it.

Interrogating the Penal Pendulum: An Introduction to the Review Symposium on Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice

This Essay introduces a Review Symposium for Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps’s Breaking the Pendulum, a book that challenges the centrality of the pendulum metaphor that scholars, journalists, and politicians have used to describe significant shifts in the overall orientation of punishment nationwide. Drawing on recent research, Goodman, Page, and Phelps lay out the case for abandoning this metaphor as well as its associated theory of penal change, offering in its place an “agonistic perspective.” Using this agonistic perspective as well as research on the topic, I suggest some reasons why the pendulum metaphor may still be a fruitful site of interrogation. Specifically, I argue that, while recognizing the caveats illustrated by Goodman, Page, and Phelps, we should take seriously the pendular pattern of US penal history told at the national level and we should not dismiss the mechanical causes of penal change in our efforts to populate theories and accounts of penal change with individual and group actors.

Penal (Ant)Agonism

In Breaking the Pendulum, Goodman, Page, and Phelps (2017) advance an “agonistic” perspective that contends struggle drives penal change, and that it does so through perpetual conflict. Yet studying only manifest struggles, when an actor made their resistance to a penal status quo known, presents thorny problems in conceptualizing conflict. One such problem is that conflict among agonists advocating competing penal policies presupposes consensus between those who threaten penal order’s basic conditions. Understanding penal agonism’s corollary, penal antagonism, offers a more complete starting point from which to theorize penal history and penality.

“Moral Rubbish in Close Proximity”: Penal Colonization and Strategies of Distance in Australia and New Caledonia, c.1853–1897

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to thebagnein New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

Australia: Shadow and Cultural Complex in the Antipodes

ABSTRACT“Australia: Shadow and Cultural Complex in the Antipodes” examines Australia’s penal colony history in which eighteenth-century convicts and settlers survived the trauma of migration and imprisonment by stoic repression. As such, a society developed that fears the unconscious and its shadow content, thus preventing the individuation process from being part of the cultural norm. These qualities—of repression and stoicism—are now respected cultural traits and evidence of an authentic Australian identity. The metaphysical culture of the Aboriginal has been disrespected by the dominant non-indigenous population. The psychic split between the two cultures mirrors the psychospiritual split within the individuals of the non-indigenous culture, in which self-awareness, self-reflection, and exploration of the unconscious are seen as weakness, or defects of character. Healing the split in the culture between the indigenous and non-indigenous peoples would require answers: education in the alchemical and genetic natures of both cultures and awareness of the history of human migration out of Africa. The DNA of the Cosmic Serpent supplies a psychic foundation to the education of the non-indigenous and indigenous peoples. This is vital to understanding that both cultures were nurtured by and sprang from a common taproot, the alchemical rhizome.

“…they didn't just do it because it was a job”: Representing wardens in Canadian penal history museums

Wardens figure centrally as part of the plot in popular culture representations of prisons such as in films (e.g. The Shawshank Redemption) and television (e.g. Wentworth). Yet little is known about how wardens are depicted in another form of criminal justice popular culture: the penal history museum. This paper examines representations of wardens observed as part of a study of 45 punishment memorialization sites across Canada. We analyze the symbolism used in these penal history museums, as well as the framing used to curate warden-related objects. Our analysis reveals that positive representations of prison wardens depict them as family-oriented, benevolent men of a strong character, who embody and command respect for authority. We found fewer representations that were critical of warden's work. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our findings for literature on cultural depictions of penality and justice.

Life in a Forgotten Scottish Gulag: Punishment and Social Regulation in HM Peterhead Convict Prison

AbstractThis paper contributes to filling a lacuna in our knowledge of penal history in Scotland by examining the voices of convicts through records of prisoners experiencing Penal Servitude during the period 1897–1942. The sources utilized are the archived files of thirty‐two male convict prisoners in Scotland's Convict Prison at Peterhead. These files give insights about life in this remote prison as conveyed through records of punishment, prisoners' requests, and prisoners' letters. Prison Rules about convict correspondence highlight penal letters as a distinctive genre of communication: political and personal boundaries were enforced on all exchanges. The convict prison, like nineteenth‐century British labour colonies, imposed workhouse conditions at the extreme; it was a place of exclusion, dominated by religious and social sentiment and suppositions about criminal psychology and containment. The extent of the curtailment of convicts' liberty and the aim of re‐socialization is refracted in penal practices fostering convict dependency. The ethos of Scotland's convict colony was immersed in military traditions of training, subservience to authority and generalized gloom.

Prisons, Proportionality and Recent Penal History

A leading aim of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 was to install the principle of proportionality as the primary rationale for sentencing and to bring about a reduction in the use of imprisonment. In the decade that followed the prison population in England and Wales rose steeply. This article examines the reasons for the rising use of prison, in order to assess whether proportionality (or ‘just deserts’) was tried and failed. It argues that in practice the proportionality principle was overwhelmed by other influences, and that deterrence and incapacitation were the main drivers of the increasing use of imprisonment. The article goes on to argue that proportionality theories have within them the resources to produce penal moderation, notably the ‘drowning out’ argument, the human rights argument, and decrementalism. The article concludes by rejecting the claim that proportionality theories are likely in practice to result in escalating punishment.

Captive and Captor Representations at Canadian Penal History Museums

This article examines representations of prisoners and prison staff from 45 penal tourism sites across Canada. Drawing from literature on representations of criminal justice, we demonstrate that the objects, signs, and symbolism in these heritage sites are curated in ways that can create separation between penal spectators and prisoners. Positive representations of prison staff stand in contrast to depictions of prisoners who are often demonized in museum displays through emphasis placed on narratives, relics, and images of danger and violence. Arguing that these depictions generate conditions for the support and justification of punitive practices including incarceration, we conclude by reflecting on what our findings add to social science literature on representations of captives and captors.

Reconsidering the boundaries of the shadow carceral state: An analysis of the symbiosis between punishment and its memorialization

Beckett and Murakawa conceptualize the ‘shadow carceral state’ as institutions deriving their authority from administrative and civil law that dole out punishment in conjunction with the penal state. This concept enriches criminological inquiry by expanding the boundaries of what punishment work entails. Left unexplored are the contributions of memory institutions such as penitentiary, prison and jail museums intersecting with the penal state that bolster the latter’s power to deprive liberty and inflict pain. Based on an analysis of three Canadian penal history museums, we illustrate how Correctional Service Canada mobilizes federal prison labour and other involuntary prisoner contributions, as well as agency staffing and resources to naturalize punishment. After examining this symbiosis between punishment and its memorialization, we argue for a conception of the shadow carceral state that includes cultural entities and processes which reproduce state control as a dominant way of responding to criminalized conflicts and harms.

Crime and Regret

Recent developments in neuroscience and social science are illuminating the critical importance of regret in human choices, including criminal decision making. After differentiating regret from related emotions (e.g., disappointment, sadness, shame), I argue that regret can prompt desistance from crime and that regret avoidance is a powerful mechanism of conformity. I then turn to American and European penal history to demonstrate that the invention of the prison was premised on the notion that solitary confinement could inculcate regret in prisoners and thereby change them profoundly. The place of regret in both historical and emerging thinking about human choice underscores its importance for understanding the connections between emotions and criminality.

Incoded counter-conduct: What the incarcerated can teach us about resisting mass surveillance

This paper reviews penal history in order to consider forms of resistance to mass surveillance. Because experiences of surveillance are endemic to incarcerated life, identifying tactics of protest among these populations provides valuable insights for potential forms of counter-conduct in other circumstances of ubiquitous monitoring. We introduce the term incodification as a means of describing conditions of continuous surveillance ingrained into infrastructures of everyday life, even as these conditions give rise to tactics of resistance. We focus on three forms of protest: hunger strikes, alternate communication networks and viral dance videos, drawing on Foucault’s theory of askesis in order to develop our understanding of incodification. Our objective in introducing this term, and with our analysis as a whole, is to provoke and promote theoretical and activist projects that both address and subvert infrastructures of incodification.

Postcolonial penality: Liberty and repression in the shadow of independence, India c. 1947.

This article reports primary archival data on the colonial penal history of British India and its reconfiguration into the postcolonial Indian state. It introduces criminologists to frameworks through which postcolonial scholars have sought to make sense of the continuities and discontinuities of rule across the colonial/postcolonial divide. The article examines the postcolonial life of one example of colonial penal power, known as the criminal tribes policy, under which more than three million Indian subjects of British rule were restricted in their movements, subject to a host of administrative rules and sometimes severe punishments, sequestered in settlements and limited in access to legal redress. It illustrates how at the birth of the postcolonial Indian state, encompassing visions of a liberal, unfettered and free life guaranteed in a new Constitution and charter of Fundamental Rights, freedom for some was to prove as elusive as citizens as it had been as subjects.

Tour Guide Styles and Penal History Museums in Canada

Although the existing penal tourism literature examines displays at penal heritage sites, little research has explored the work of tour guides within them. Drawing from interviews and observations, this article assesses the styles of tour guides working at penal history museums in Canada. We situate carceral guides' styles along a continuum encompassing those who claim to convey historical facts as well as ones who explicitly engage in staging and performance, which are primarily responsive to penal tourists' expectations for fun and entertainment. In the discussion and conclusion, we address the practical implications of this assessment of guide styles. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.