Over the course of the long nineteenth century (c. 1770s–1922) the Ottoman Empire experienced a series of internal and external crises that included separatist movements, rebellions, fiscal problems, numerous wars, and European imperialism. In the face of these threats, sultans and administrators attempted vigorous plans of reform aimed at transforming the bureaucracy, legal and education systems, economy, population, and military. As part of this overall restructuring programme, Ottoman statesmen included efforts to create a criminal justice system. Therefore, when the Young Turks, led by members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), deposed Sultan Abdülhamid II and created the first of their two major penal institutions in August 1909 (the Directorate of Public Security), the association between penal reform and concepts, such as civilisation, developmentalism, social engineering, and the centralisation and rationalisation of government power were already part of Ottoman political and intellectual mentalité. The close correlation between penal and broader imperial reforms makes the prison an effective window into the process of Ottoman modernity as the empire appropriated and adapted processes of modern statecraft and nation building to its particular imperial context.

This chapter highlights the change and continuity of Ottoman criminal justice policy and practice as lawmakers applied greater measures of state consolidation, standardisation, and rationalisation in order to transform the empire's Islamic legal structures over the course of the long nineteenth century. Taken in aggregate, these changes to criminal justice are astounding, however, seeing only the forest while disregarding its individual trees results in making one forest indistinguishable from another. In other words, without historical specificity, the description and analysis of the dynamism of Ottoman criminal justice and imperial transformation often obfuscates the process of adoption and adaptation, continuity and change, and innovation that took place within the empire.