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Reflections on Penal Servitude
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Extract
During the next few days, you will be examining various kinds of correctional treatment, among them imprisonment as punishment. Its character and effectiveness will be analyzed and its features scrutinized and evaluated. In that connection, your attention will naturally be focused on the contemporary scene and your interest centered in those methods of institutional treatment, which appear to hold the greatest promise of sucess. Therefore, the primitive elements remaining in many of our prison systems may not receive much attention, although their removal is necessary if we are to achieve a system of institutional treatment worthy of our highest aspirations. I have chosen to deal in this address with the most important of these primitive elements. It has been strangely neglected by historians of punitive imprisonment, because it was for a long time considered to be alien to imprisonment until it was gradually incorporated in that penalty, remaining to this very day a dominant feature in some prison systems.
Information
- Type
- II. — General Conferences Conférences Générales
- Information
- International Annals of Criminology , Volume 8 , Issue 2: Le Traitement des Delinquants , 1969 , pp. 221 - 231
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1969 International Society for Criminology
Footnotes
(1)
The address is an enlarged and revised version of a paper on « Penal Servitude: Origin and Survival » read before the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, April 22, 1965.
References
(2) Dom Mabillon (Jean), «Réflexions sur les prisons des ordres religieux». Œuvres posthumes, t. II (Paris, 1764), p. 321-335. The English translation of these « reflexions » is found on p. 583-592 of Thorsten Sellin's article, « Dom Mabillon (Jean) — a prison reformer of the 17th century. » Jour. of Criminal Law and Criminology, 17: 581-602, 1927.
(3) Bar (Carl Ludwig) (von), A History of Continental Criminal Law (LVI, 561 p., Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1916); p. 36.
(4) Masson (P.), «Les galères de France, 1481-1681.» Ann, de la Fac. de lett. d'Aix, 20: 7-479, 1937; p. 81.
(5) Ibid., p. 82.
(6) Kennan (George), Siberia and the Exile System (2 V., New York: The Century Co., 1891); vol. I., chap. v.
(7) The Huguenot Galley Slave. Being the autobiography of a French Huguenot condemned to the galleys for the sake of his religion. Translated from the French of Jean Marteilhe (XV, 214 p., New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1867).
(8) Howard (John), An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe… (VIII, 259 p., Warrington, 1789); p. 67.
(9) D'Haussonville (vicomte), Les établissements pénitentiaires en France et aux colonies (638 p., Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1876); p. 526.
(10) Schmidt (Eberhard), Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrecht-spflege (436 p., Göttingen: Dandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1947); p. 162.
(11) Bar (von), op. cit., p. 253.
(12) Barnes (Harry Elmer), A History of the Penal, Reformatory and Correctional Institutions of the State of New Jersey (654 p., Trenton: MacCrellish and Quigley Co., 1918); p. 62.
(13) Lewis (W. David), From Newgate to Dannemora. The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796-1848 (X, 311 p., Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press).
(14) Ibid., p. 155, 156.
(15) Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the American Prison Association…, 1919 (New York, n.d.); p: 125-126.
(16) Rankin (Robert S.), The Government and Administration of North Carolina (XIV, 429 p., New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1956); p. 175-179.
(17) Steiner (Jesse F.) and Brown (Roy M.), The North Carolina Chain Gang. A Study of County Convict Road Work (194 p., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927).
(18) MacCormick (Austin H), Report of a Study of the Louisiana State Penitentiary…, July 1964 (New York: Osborne Association, September 1964, mimeo).
(19) No better single source for the role which political economy plays in the development of systems of punishment can be found than Rusche (Georg) and Kirchheimer's (Otto), Punishment and Social Structure (XIV, 268 p., New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).