2 - Four Centuries of Prison History

Summary

As I write this chapter in my Amsterdam home, I imagine a group of magistrates only ten minutes' walking distance from here but exactly four hundred years ago debating a project for a new punitive institution. The physician Sebastiaan Egberts, who has just been elected schepen (judge in the town court), comments on a report by Jan Laurensz Spiegel, one of the initiators, who died in 1590. A year before his death the town council agreed to build a house where malefactors could be kept and chastised. Dr. Sebastiaan, as most people call him, is a practical man. He realizes that the institution should be safe and secure because the thieves who will be incarcerated in it are likely to seize every opportunity to escape. His practicality, however, is not owing to indifference. Strict surveillance and forced labor, Dr. Sebastiaan argues, ought to improve the inmates' character, so that they won't go stealing again after their release. If they do, they finally will be executed, but it is better to have good citizens than dozens of corpses hanging from the gallows. It takes a few more years to complete the project; the house, called tuchthuis, opens its doors in 1596. Because of the work done there, the “rasphouse” becomes its popular name.

It is not for idiosyncratic reasons that I cite this example, nor even because I want to focus on national history. The historical significance of the Amsterdam project transcends the boundaries of the Netherlands. Similar punitive institutions had been established in England in the second half of the sixteenth century and in several Continental countries in the first quarter of the seventeenth. Because their regime centered on forced labor, I call them “prison-workhouses.” It is fair to say that, from a European perspective, imprisonment began around 1600. With the year 2000 approaching, it means that we now have four hundred years of prison history behind us. This chapter contains a tentative assessment of what these four centuries mean for historical and sociological theorizing. I will contrast my own views, based on the work of Norbert Elias, with those of Michel Foucault and others. First, one more example from the early years.