2011/10/01 by Mary Gibson · 1 voice · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Criminology #History #Prison #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1086/ahr.116.4.1040
openalex publication_date 2011/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a wave of new studies has revitalized the field of prison history. Most notably, scholars of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have joined historians of the Western world in the debate over, to use Michel Foucault's phrase, “the birth of the prison.”1 The new prison histories of the non-Western world contest, or at least complicate, the original paradigm developed by Foucault and other historians of Europe and the United States in the 1970s in several fundamental ways. That paradigm dates the birth of the prison to the years between 1760 and 1840, when the rising middle class abolished public rituals of corporal punishment as incompatible with its new aspirations to build a modern liberal and industrial society. Focusing on Asia, Africa, and Latin America, recent research calls this framework into question by introducing the factors of colonialism, race, and the...