The journal review. Prison has become the dominant mode of punishment almost everywhere in the world. In France, the workforce has tripled in sixty years, and this punitive inflation is also observed elsewhere. ” How to explain this worldwide success? “, ask the historians Natalia Muchnik and Falk Bretschneider, who coordinate this dossier of the journal Socio devoted to prisons.
We learn that it is not easy to precisely date the origins of the prison. Criminal history has long been dominated by Eurocentrism. ” Research has long regarded the prison as it is known as a Western invention, the first traces of which would have appeared in the Enlightenment and which would later have spread, by a gigantic diffusion movement, colonial in nature or not. across the globe “, they write.
“Viewing prison as a Western invention is becoming more and more problematic”, write historians Natalia Muchnik and Falk Bretschneider
Certainly, the emergence of confinement was contemporaneous with colonization. But ” seeing prison as a western invention is becoming increasingly problematic “. A New History of Prison seeks the origins of modern prison practices earlier in history, in medieval times, and even further afield.
Non-European roots
More ” if the chronological enlargement of the history of the prison seems today acquired, the authors still write, this is not the case with its geographical counterpart “. The researchers are also interested in the non-European roots of the deprivation of liberty, “ by studying the role of confinement in the penal or military practices of pre-colonial societies ”. This issue therefore attempts to present recent work in this field of research.
Can we write a comprehensive history of prison? What do recent studies tell us? What knowledge can researchers rely on today, which Michel Foucault did not have? What fields remain to be cleared? Two historians, Xavier Rousseau and Marie Houllemare, provide a fascinating overview of the historiography of prisons.
Costly, ineffective, unequal, violent, they nevertheless continue to exist. The response to the violation of laws, recalls the sociologist and anthropologist Didier Fassin, “ has long been in the form of repairs ”. Could humanity do without prisons? The abolitionist movement is gaining strength, especially in the United States.
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