Book contents
- Global 1979
- The Global Middle East
- Global 1979
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Maps
- Orientations
- Part I Global Shadows
- Part II Militarized Cartographies
- Part III Hidden Genealogies
- Part IV Circulating Knowledge
- 9 The Criminal Is the Patient, the Prison Will Be the Cure:
- 10 The Cold War and Education in Science and Engineering in Iran, 1953–1979
- Part V Aspirational Universalisms
- Select Bibliography
- Index
9 - The Criminal Is the Patient, the Prison Will Be the Cure:
Building the Carceral Imagination in Pahlavi Iran
from Part IV - Circulating Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2021
- Global 1979
- The Global Middle East
- Global 1979
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Maps
- Orientations
- Part I Global Shadows
- Part II Militarized Cartographies
- Part III Hidden Genealogies
- Part IV Circulating Knowledge
- 9 The Criminal Is the Patient, the Prison Will Be the Cure:
- 10 The Cold War and Education in Science and Engineering in Iran, 1953–1979
- Part V Aspirational Universalisms
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the late 1920s, at the same time as the centralization of Iran’s legal system, the nascent Pahlavi state inaugurated a carceral system and imaginary in which modern prisons were promoted as necessary and progressive solutions to myriad social crises. In this era, Pahlavi statesmen and law enforcement officials attended conferences on policing and prisons in Europe, drawing architectures and techniques of punishment from those sources and working to dramatically expand Iran’s carceral system. This chapter examines state discourses on the prison in the aftermath of legal centralization and argues the mid-century Iranian government claimed its new-look prison system as a success story in its modernizing efforts. By vastly expanding Iran’s prison system and extolling the social virtues of its penal factories and literacy classes, the Pahlavi government marked the prison as a space of rehabilitation in which the bad criminal could be reformed into the good citizen, normalizing the incarceration of increasing numbers of Iranians in the process. This chapter also examines the establishment of the academic field of criminology in Iran, which emerged at the same time as these state-led reform efforts. Charting the rise of social scientific debates on crime and punishment, this chapter argues that this new academic discipline mapped onto the state’s modernizing sentiments regarding productivity, citizenship, rehabilitation, and modern progress.
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- Information
- Global 1979Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution, pp. 293 - 327Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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