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Transportation versus Imprisonment in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Penal Power, Liberty, and the State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

James J. Willis
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Abstract

Existing explanations for historical changes in punishment in Britain have tended to examine the replacement of disorderly prisons and public executions with national penitentiaries from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Despite their significant contributions to our understanding of how punishments operate in a broader social, political, and economic context, these scholarly accounts have narrowed debate on the mechanisms of penal change to the intentions of penal reformers. This analysis extends this time frame and uses historical data to compare the development of the penitentiary in Britain to its primary, yet less studied, penal substitute, the transportation of felons to America and Australia. In doing so, it provides an alternative explanation for the ascendancy of national penitentiaries. I argue that the development of these penal institutions in Britain was historically made possible by two interdependent sets of changes: (1) changes in the structure and administration of the state's penal apparatus (from decentralized to centralized and patrimonial to bureaucratic); and (2) transformations in popular understandings of the state's power to punish in correspondence with the expansion of a broader and more equal definition of citizenship (democratization). In conclusion, I argue for the value of perspectives on punishment that identify the explicit relationships between state organization and social relations in order to clarify how culture inheres in material conditions to influence specific penal outcomes.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 171 - 210
Copyright
© 2005 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I wish to thank Steve Mastrofski, Nicky Rafter, Russell Schutt, Susan Silbey, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am especially grateful to a member of the Review's Editorial Board and Paul Benson for their extensive suggestions. Generous funding for this research was provided by a Henry Hart Rice Fellowship from the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and by a doctoral dissertation grant from the National Science Foundation (No. SBR-9700418). Points of view expressed in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of NSF.

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