NCJ Number
80594
Date Published
1981
Length
39 pages
Annotation
This article presents a description and critique of recent social histories of punishment and suggests areas of study for future historical writing.
Abstract
Three books published in the 1970's -- by Michel Foucault, Michael Ignatieff, and David Rothman -- greatly revised the history of the penitentiary. Contrary to the received wisdom which located the penitentiary's origin in the altruism of Quakers and other humanitarian reformers and portrayed it as a humane advance from squalid jails and workhouses, the revisonist accounts characterize the penitentiary and other 19th century 'asylums' as weapons of class conflict or instruments of 'social control.' Underlying revisionist social theories, such as Marxism or structural-functionalism, however, claim too much. The revisionist historiography of the prison followed these theories into three major misconceptions: that the state controls a monopoly over punitive regulation of behavior, that the state's moral authority and practical power are the major sources of social order, and that all social relations can be described in terms of power and subordination. These misconceptions can no longer be uncritically accepted, since there are indications that powers of moral and punitive enforcement are distributed throughout civil society and that the function of prison can only be understood once its position within a complex framework of sanctioning and dispute regulation procedure in civil society has been determined. The next generation of historical writing on crime and punishment must subject distorting misconceptions to empirical examination. About 100 references are listed. (Author abstract modified)