Book contents
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION
- PART ONE HOSPITALS AND ASYLUMS
- PART TWO PRISONS
- 9 Michel Foucault's Impact on the German Historiography of Criminal Justice, Social Discipline, and Medicalization
- 10 The History of Ideas and Its Significance for the Prison System
- 11 The Prerogatives of Confinement in Germany, 1933-1945
- 12 “Comparing Apples and Oranges?” The History of Early Prisons in Germany and the United States, 1800-1860
- 13 Reformers United: The American and the German Juvenile Court, 1882-1923
- 14 The Medicalization of Criminal Law Reform in Imperial Germany
- 15 Prison Reform in France and Other European Countries in the Nineteenth Century
- 16 Surveillance and Redemption: The Casa di Correzione of San Michele a Ripa in Rome
- 17 “Policing the Bachelor Subculture”: The Demographics of Summary Misdemeanants, Allegheny County Jail, 1892-1923
- 18 Beyond Confinement?: Notes on the History and Possible Future of Solitary Confinement in Germany
- Index
18 - Beyond Confinement?: Notes on the History and Possible Future of Solitary Confinement in Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION
- PART ONE HOSPITALS AND ASYLUMS
- PART TWO PRISONS
- 9 Michel Foucault's Impact on the German Historiography of Criminal Justice, Social Discipline, and Medicalization
- 10 The History of Ideas and Its Significance for the Prison System
- 11 The Prerogatives of Confinement in Germany, 1933-1945
- 12 “Comparing Apples and Oranges?” The History of Early Prisons in Germany and the United States, 1800-1860
- 13 Reformers United: The American and the German Juvenile Court, 1882-1923
- 14 The Medicalization of Criminal Law Reform in Imperial Germany
- 15 Prison Reform in France and Other European Countries in the Nineteenth Century
- 16 Surveillance and Redemption: The Casa di Correzione of San Michele a Ripa in Rome
- 17 “Policing the Bachelor Subculture”: The Demographics of Summary Misdemeanants, Allegheny County Jail, 1892-1923
- 18 Beyond Confinement?: Notes on the History and Possible Future of Solitary Confinement in Germany
- Index
Summary
This chapter aims to develop a periodization of the history of solitary confinement in Germany (with emphasis on Prussia) and hazards a look into the future of this particular institution as well as that of confinement in prisons in general.
INTRODUCTION
There have always been swifter, cheaper, and much more impressive punishments than those that imply some kind of confinement. Over most periods of history and in most corners of the world imprisonment was therefore not regarded as a logical answer to crime. But confinement also contains or at least promises some advantages over other sanctions. It provides, for instance, not only a temporary “incapacitation” of the offender, but is also often considered conducive to his “moral reform.” Moreover, it allows a fine differentiation of degrees of punishment (by years, months, weeks, and even days of imprisonment) as well as a reversibility of the sanction, which is lacking in all sanctions that imply physical elimination or mutilation. After monasteries and medieval cities had become aware of these advantages, it took until the “Great Transformation,” approximately 1760-1840, before imprisonment was finally being recognized as a suitable response to criminal offenses. From the onset, though, confinement had been organized in either of two forms, the more usual one being collective, and the extraordinary one individual. Collective confinement separated the individual from the outside world, but it did not erect barriers between detainees, thereby allowing the formation of an intramural “society of captives.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Institutions of ConfinementHospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500–1950, pp. 349 - 362Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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