Additional Lecture 2 - Notes

SOCI254: Lecture 2 notes • No one single narrative, theoretical way of conceptualising the history of penalty Chronology of penal reform: • Throughout 18th c no segregation between men and women, both in same cells • No segregation of adults and children from the age of 7 with adults in prisons and dormitories • No classification of offenders, now we have catergory A,B,C of the level of prisons, locking up different types of offenders • Find yourself in an institution for didffernt levels of offences such as life prisoners and with those who commit the same kind of offence, from low level offenders to high level offenders. Not like that in the old days • Untried prisoners- those awaiting trial and sentence • Crued system that made no separation between sex, age, convection • As time progressed reformed tried to tackle those issues • Howard- longest penal reform establishment within the UK to this day • Made a series of prison inspections, consequence of this, followed a series of recommendations: prisons should prpvide, secure, sanitary and celluar facilities, toilets within cells, • Prisoners needed to be classified and catergories based on their offences, prisons not just a place for containment, also should have reform by introducing useful labour, ie jobs within the prison • Should be no sale of liquor or drugs etc • Highly influential with the peniterntiary Act in 1779: • Prisons should not just be signs for punishment but should also include rehabilitation • Prison should be a healthy space, not just sanitation, but also morally healthy place (health of prison would facilitate the rehabilitation of its prisoners) • Can see how histry can be read and understood as a progressive reform • 1823- prison not just in the gift of the goveneor, they had to compley with the developing national standards by inspections that took place, can see the modern system unfolding from here • Easy to mark history as a whole series of improvements that have been introduced • Arbitrary- based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system. • ID- implies that people like howard are responsible for reform and change, improvements, assumed that the driving force of reform of humanitariasm • Cesare Beccaria Wholesale condemnaition for the death penality, should be predictable and proportional • Jeremy Bentham- he argued that the purpose of prisons was to “grind Rogues honest”• Elizabeth Fry- formed in 1817- created the ladies society on female prisons, appauled by conditions for the state of prisons for women being held, even in low level prisons. • • • • • • Individuals like these above are herealded by historians as the driving forces behind reform. A given that they are motivation by humanitariasm, humanise the practices of punishment, penality and imprisonment Issues: many reforms are not fully implemented, dialluted in accordance to political interest, motivation and opposition Often produce unintended consequences, if prison is seen as a positive, we tend to use it more, becomes a counterproductive knowledge Expose prisoners to more intensive forms of survilelance, regulation and management Desire to reswcue indidivuals sits along side opposing logic that punishment and prisons should be unpleasant, hostile and not suitable environment Implementnation of reform are more complex than being suggested Critical revisonoism • Wherever we look, prisoners are drawen from the most disadvantaged areas • Prisons are one instrument of class oppression • Alternative of reform as humanistasm logic, too reductonist, fails to take account of other influencers Intergrated: • Appeals to the humantiarism idealist logic, Foucaut Expands the debate on reform Ever moving dynamic complex