There has recently been a renewed interest in the history of prisons and, more broadly, places and facilities designed to isolate criminals, “deviants” and misfits, the sick, the “insane” from society. New paradigms and prisms have emerged through which to understand the very concept of “places of custody” (Orte der Verwahrung). On the one hand, this revived interest has sharpened an earlier focus on the coercive aspects of confinement (typified by research in the 1970s on “total institutions”). On the other hand, it has prompted an effort to cast fresh eyes on the variously inflected “punitive regimes,” on the way their models took hold, on gender roles as fundamental to an understanding of these systems, and on the ways in which the perspectives and approaches of global history might be brought to bear on the history of prisons and incarceration.
The most recent investigations into the organizational, institutional, and economic aspects of prisons and similar facilities have consi...