State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment

Three books published during the seventies, by Michel Foucault, Michael Ignatieff, and David Rothman, greatly revised the history of the penitentiary. Contrary to the received wisdom which located the penitentiary's origin in the altruism of Quakers and other humanitarian reformers, and portrayed it as a humane advance from the squalid jails and workhouses, corporal and capital punishment, and transportation that preceded it, the revisionist accounts characterized the penitentiary, and other nineteenth-century "asylums" as weapons of class conflict or instruments of "social control." Social theories on a grand scale, such as Marxism or structural-functionalism, however, claim too much. The revisionist historiography of the prison followed these theories into three major misconceptions: that the state controls a monopoly over punitive regulation of behavior, that the state's moral authority and practical power are the major sources of social order, and that all social relations can be described in terms of power and subordination. The next generation of historical writing on crime and punishment must subject these distorting misconceptions to empirical examination.