Imprisonment in the 1700s
temporary holding sells, crowed, unruly, unhygienic, were not the punishment more like holding cells before the punishment, Becceria wanted the punishment to be public
Transportation
banished to the colonies for breaking the social contract, if you don’t listen to the rules they don’t apply to you
Work houses and hard labour
to reform criminals, and the ‘idle poor’, broken the contract = hard labour, punishment have economic value (treadmill) in the enlightment period, horse of correction (people who can’t support themselves), emergence of mod prison
Emergence of modern prisons
Eastern state pantry, (silence and isolation)
‘Penitentiary’ as place for penitence and reform
John howard (to change the dark depressing nature of old prisons, prisons should be places of reform) and elizabeth fry (canadian non profit society to protect women, ie the need to separate women from men, female guards, prisons as places of reform)
Prison reformers argued that prisons should be based on:
Strict order and conformity
Rigid timetables
Silence and solitude to facilitate penitence and remorse
Penitentiary and “democracy”
- teaching people to listen to the social contract
-Prison reform combined enlightenment ideas about civilizing people and religious ideas about transforming the sinner - Reform the people who broke the social contract, benjamin rush said that prisons were a place to fix people to be able to conform to society and be civilized to be able to be good actor to society
Felony disenfranchisement (you lose the right to vote, when they are convicted of committing a serious crime)
residential schools
- late 18th century to late 19th century
- 1831 first res school opened
- 1835 Kingston pen was opened
- These two things are greatly related (stripping people of non desirable traits, and conforming people to social norms)
Prisons and deterrence
-Prisons designed to be imposing reminders to the rest of society of the punishment for crime
Prison architecture
- The ‘silent’ system (or the ‘Auburn’ system)= hard labor to reform people
- The ‘separate’ system (or the ‘Pennsylvania’ system)= isolation of the prisoners, to reflect on their acts, extreme isolation from all other prisoners
- A lot of symmetry to promote the development of reasons
Panopticon and Deterrence
- Jeremy Bentham
-Constant, anonymous surveillance from the central watchtower - Prisoners “seen without seeing”
- Feelings of being watched was supposed to promote self-regulation
-A tower in the middle with blinds so the guards would be able to see all the prisoners but the prisoners wouldn’t know if they were being watch
-The way jeremy bentham want the prison to be was never built however his ideas were used in many prisons, today
Panopticon
-Michel Foucault
- Discipline and Punish (1975)
- Panopticon “reverses the idea of the dungeon”
- Switch from “the many watching the few” (e.g. public executions) to “the few watching the many” (e.g. surveillance)
Prison as Imagined VS. Prisons in Practice
-Continued use of physical forms of punishment in prisons
-Solitary confinement critiqued as a form of torture
-Maintaining an orderly and silent system difficult/expensive
-Critiques that prisons ‘too easy’
-Prisons labor tied to economic motivations
-Expand prison practices
Over-representation in prisons
- Black men to white men in prisons
-Indigenous people represent 5% of the overall Canadian population but 32% of the imprisoned population
-Racial profiling and biases in the criminal justice process - Intergenerational legacies of policies that discriminate against people of color and indigenous peoples
- E.g. GI Bill and Residential schools
- Over policing of certain areas, racial profiling of pulling someone over, over charging people of color
- 1944 the GI bill to give a leg up to those returning from war, such as going to school, buying homes, getting a good job
- Almost all the black soldiers were left out of these benefits
eastern state pen
- opened 1829
- closed 1970
Positivist approach to crime and the classical School
-Humans as rational actors with free will
- Emphasis in the criminal act, regardless of the specifics of the individual
- Deductive reasoning (general theory then apply to certain circumstances - top down)
Positivist school
-Human behavior is determined by social, Psychological or biological factors
- Emphasis on the criminal and his/her individual particularities
- Inductive reasoning (scientific method, bottom up)
-Looking at the individual focused more on the criminal not so much as the crime itself like classical crime
Positivism and the scientific method
- Uses empirical observation and experimentation to find patterns that tell us something about the world
- Positivist criminologists wanted to use the scientific method to identify factors that determine human behavior
Crime statistics
-Emerged in early 1800s
- Andre-michel guerry & adolphe quetelet
- Focused on external, social factors that lead to crime
- Maps of france (ie like crime statistics)
- Correlation doesn’t equal causation
Charles Darwin
The origin of species (1859)
Natural selection and the survival of the fittest
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)
-The “italian school” of criminology
-Biological determinism
-The criminal man (1876)
-Tries to prove the idea of a born criminal
-Identifies physical and biological features that mark someone as criminal
-Criminals as “atavistic” - regressions in evolution
- Phrenology (the measuring of the skull)
Racism and sexism in the work of Lombroso and the Italian school
- Deeply flawed “scientific” methods were used to legitimize racist beliefs about “inferior” groups of people
- Lomroso argued that women were “biologically inferior” physically, intellectually, and morally
- Women who committed crime seen as doubly offensive and doubly “monstrous” than men who committed crime
- Those who were born with weird traits to prostitution
- Women who commit lack maternal instincts
Positivist approaches
-The circumstances that led to the crime
- Italian school people are born criminal
Contemporary responses to Lombroso’s work
- Resonated with racist beliefs and growing “us versus them” thinking of the mid-1800s
-Some academics at the time appreciated his ‘scientific’ approach
-But Lombroso’s work was critiqued and even rejected by many of his contemporaries
-This image that criminals were different than normal society
-French environmentalists were the ones who focused on the social aspect of crime
-Italian school was more internal aspect of crime
He would support incapaction
Incapacitating the “born criminal”
-Biological positivists believed that some people were born criminals and should be confined or even executed to protect the rest of society
- Indeterminate sentences
- Death penalty = eliminate someone who is inferior to society
- Believed that the process of natural selection could be ‘helped’
- Prison sentence was over when doctors said
