Socio (Nov 2020)
Contre une vision diffusionniste de la « naissance de la prison »
Abstract
During the “long” 19th century, the prison became the dominant institution of punishment on a worldwide scale. Focussing on the first half of this period, the article demonstrates that concepts of diffusion, which continue to provide the central model of representation of this process, are inadequate to organize narratives about the global developments of modern prison regimes. These transformations, since the late 18th century referred to as “prison reform”, took place in a polycentric and continuous way. They were not sequentially interrelated in a successive expansion from one world region to another – from « the West » to « the rest » –, but evolved in a way for which the article proposes the analytical concept of a global frame of reference.
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