Brief History
China: Ancient China employed various methods of punishment, including corporal penalties, exile, forced labor, and imprisonment. However, it wasn't until the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) that organized prison systems resembling modern penitentiaries began to take shape. The Qing Dynasty saw high levels of overcrowding, often leading to death and disease. Banishment, considered 'more humane' a punishment than the death penalty, grew in use as as Qing Dynasty rulers were unable to deal with a rapidly growing population (Dikotter 2007, see also Waley-Cohen 1991), very similar to the European transport of convicts to the colonies of Australia and in the Americas. During this period, the Qing government established "yamen" or administrative offices that also served as detention centers for accused individuals awaiting trial or punishment.
The first significant influence of European standards on China's penitentiary system came during the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republican era. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as China grappled with internal reforms and interactions with Western powers, ideas about modernizing legal and penal institutions gained traction. In the late 1800s, the Qing sent envoys to U.S. and European prisons to observe and bring back prison technologies, both in the form of prison design and in prison order. In a series of deals with foreign powers (namely Great Britain) to 'modernize' their legal code and systems of punishment, in 1905 the Qing began to implement these changes: they abolished bodily dismemberment and beheadings immediately, and began to phase out corporal punishment. "This profound transformation of the regime of punishment entailed an overhaul of the existing detention system: not only should old gaols be reformed in line with modern penal principles current in Europe, but their number had to be drastically increased in order to accommodate a rising tide of inmates, as the custodial sentence became the most common form of punishment next to fines." (Dikotter 2007). As elsewhere, what were intended as reforms for the better treatment of prisoners inadvertently created a huge network of spaces of detention, as well as an ideology that saw custody/imprisonment as the solution to social ills.
One of the pivotal moments of this transition was the establishment of the Beiping Prison (later renamed the First Prison of Beijing) in 1912 under the influence of European models, specifically the U.K.'s Pentonville Prison. Beiping Prison in Beijing was designed based on Western penitentiary principles combined with Chinese architectural design, with separate cells, classification of prisoners based on offenses, and structured routines aimed at rehabilitation rather than mere punishment. This institution marked a departure from traditional Chinese methods of incarceration and set the stage for further changes. As elsewhere, the prison was a “prestige institution” that its supporters hoped demonstrated the country’s modernity, progress, and forward thinking. It is still functioning today, now known as Capital Model Prison.
The early 20th century also saw efforts to codify Chinese criminal law and establish standardized procedures for sentencing and imprisonment. The Penal Code of 1907, influenced by both Chinese legal traditions and Western legal concepts from Germany, France, and Japan, provided a framework for the administration of justice and the management of prisons. China also began collecting criminological data, a practice that allowed them better analysis of crimes committed and from where the accused came from, a criminological enterprise with counterparts in the positivist criminology of Italy which would have a great influence on Latin American and European punitive systems and that manifest there and in the United States in eugenics programs which sought to reduce what it saw as "criminal" populations, often through the prisms of race, class, and gender. The Penal Code of 1907 was not adopted formally until 1912, due to the downfall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, after the Xinhai Revolution.
However, China's 20th-century history, marked by revolutions, wars, and political upheavals, significantly impacted its penitentiary systems. The establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 under the Communist Party leadership led to major reforms in the legal and penal spheres. The system expanded with the establishment of labor camps and reform-through-labor institutions, such as the notorious Laogai camps (reform through labor) and Laojiao facilities (reeducation through labor), which became prominent features of China's penal system during the Maoist era. During this time, incarcerated populations exploded; According to Domenach's 1992 study (which, it should be noted, as has been contested), during the early years of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party 4 to 6 million Chinese were held in labor camps, as well as potentially up to 2 million executed for crimes against the party. For more on the prominence of prison camps in China, see Williams 2004.
In the post-Mao era, particularly after the economic reforms of the late 20th century, China witnessed further changes in its penitentiary systems. Efforts were made to improve prison conditions, enhance legal protections for prisoners, and align with international standards of human rights and imprisonment. Despite these changes, concerns persist regarding issues such as overcrowding, judicial transparency, and treatment of prisoners, prompting ongoing discussions and reforms within China's criminal justice and corrections systems. The ongoing detention of Uyghur and other Turkic muslim minorities in Xinjiang Province, a prison population whose numbers the Chinese government so far has not disclosed, is notable in its parallels to racial segregation through the prison system elsewhere, and at the same time for being very much particular to China and to the 20th century. The Chinese government's reticence about releasing prison population numbers, combined with the persistence of Cold War era influence on Western scholarship about the region, makes the study of prisons in China a particularly thorny one, and one that deserves greater examination in the future.
India:
Prisons in India have evolved from ancient forms of confinement and punishment to modern institutions influenced by colonial legacies, indigenous legal traditions, and contemporary political questions.
Ancient India had various methods of punishment and confinement, including imprisonment, fines, exile, and corporal punishment, as outlined in ancient legal texts such as the Manusmriti and Arthashastra. Prisons, known as "bandi grihas" or "bandi khana," existed in ancient Indian kingdoms and were used to detain criminals, political dissidents, and prisoners of war. However, these early forms of incarceration were often rudimentary and lacked the structured systems seen in modern prisons.
The Mughal Empire (1526-1857) introduced centralized administrative structures that included the establishment of "dungeons" or "qilas" for imprisoning criminals and political opponents. These facilities varied in conditions and management, with some known for their harshness and lack of basic amenities.
During British colonial rule, the Indian penal system underwent significant transformations influenced by Western ideas of punishment, deterrence, and ostensible rehabilitation. The British introduced modern penitentiary concepts, such as the separation of prisoners based on offenses, labor-based rehabilitation programs, and the construction of structured prison buildings.
Saumya Dadoo argues this classification system was instrumental not only in the development of prisons, but in the ‘classificatory logics’ that structured British colonial rule through race and gender. “Central to the rise of the colonial prison regime was the enforcement of classificatory logics, i.e.: defining, ordering and dividing the prison population. Anxieties around “moral contamination”, enmeshed with Victorian era evangelical Christian ideals of morality and discourses around health and hygiene, made the classification of prisoners an essential feature of prison discipline. Classificatory logics were not only a means of managing deviancy and crime but also an end in themselves… used to control and disciplining the native population as a whole.” (Dadoo, Colonial Carcerality: Classificatory Logics and Gender in the Prison Regime of Colonial India, 2019).These prisons were “paradigmatic products of colonial modernity,” in that they were informed by Enlightenment notions of reason and order, and were systems for the control of what the British saw as an unruly and disordered population “predisposed to crime” by way of their race (Waits in ‘Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823–73,’ 2018). For a brief but comprehensive timeline of Indian incarceration, see Raju's 'Historical Evolution of Prison System in India', 2014.
One of the earliest modern prisons in India was the Cellular Jail in Port Blair, Andaman Islands, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But while construction didn't begin until 1896, the Andaman Islands had been used as a penal colony by British colonial authorities since at least 1857, when, in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857 (known variously as the First War of Independence, the Indian Insurrection, Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny, the Great Rebellion, or the Revolt of 1857), over two hundred rebellion participants were exiled there. Many famous revolutionaries and independence activists were held on the island and later in the Cellular Jail, including Sardar Singh Artillery, Diwan Singh Kalepani, Yogendra Shukla, Batukeshwar Dutt, Shadan Chandra Chatterjee, Sohan Singh, Vinayak Savarkar, Hare Krishna Konar, Shiv Verma, Allama Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, and Sudhanshu Dasgupta. In bringing together those considered dangerous by the British state, this prison (and the Indian prison system more broadly) inadvertently functioned as an incubator for the revolutionary thought and revolutionary groups, much like its counterparts in Vietnam, The United States, and parts of Latin America and Africa, which would produce the national movement for independence. The Cellular Jail symbolized the harshness of British colonial rule and became a symbol of resistance and sacrifice in the Indian freedom movement. It is now a memorial and tourist site.
After India gained independence in 1947, efforts were made to reform and modernize the country's prison system. The Prisons Act of 1894, inherited from British colonial rule, was amended and updated to reflect contemporary legal and human rights standards. Indian prisons today operate under the guidance of this act, which outlines regulations for the management, treatment, and rehabilitation of prisoners.
(Cellular Jail on the Andaman Islands, 1911. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_Jail)
Ross Island, 1872. Precursor to Cellular Jail. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_Jail
(Model Prison of Beijing Beijing. Sidney D. Gamble, Peking: A social survey, London: Oxford University Press, 1921)
Texts
Cultures of Confinement by ISBN: 1501721267Publication Date: 2018-07-05Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.
The Colonial Bastille by ISBN: 0520224124Publication Date: 2001-03-04Peter Zinoman's original and insightful study focuses on the colonial prison system in French Indochina and its role in fostering modern political consciousness among the Vietnamese. Using prison memoirs, newspaper articles, and extensive archival records, Zinoman presents a wealth of significant new information to document how colonial prisons, rather than quelling political dissent and maintaining order, instead became institutions that promoted nationalism and revolutionary education.
Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China by ISBN: 0231125089Publication Date: 2002-05-29Based on extensive research and many newly discovered sources, Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China examines the radical changes in Chinese society during the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of the Chinese prison system. More than a simple history of prison rules or penal administration, this book explores the profound effects and lasting repercussions of the superimposition of Western-derived models of repentance and rehabilitation on traditional Chinese categories of crime and punishment. A society's prisons reflect much about its notions not only of law and order and the rights of the individual, but of human nature itself, its tractability and capacity to change. In China during the tumultuous years from 1895 to 1949, these notions were transformed in dramatic ways. Frank Dikötter identifies penal reform as a radical modern tool to achieve an indigenous Chinese vision of social cohesion and the rule of virtue. Modernizing elites in China viewed the reformation of criminals as a constitutive part of a project of a national regeneration in which good order, economic development, and state power could only be obtained by shaping obedient subjects. This groundbreaking account of the evolution of Chinese penal theory is brought together with a richly textured portrait of daily life behind bars. Petty villains, abusive guards, ambitious wardens, and idealist reformers people its pages and vividly trace China's complicated movement from empire to republic to communist state.
The Great Wall of Confinement by ISBN: 0520938550Publication Date: 2004-08-17China is the only major world power to have entered the twenty-first century with a thriving prison camp network--a frightening, mostly hidden realm known since 1951 as the laogai system. This book, the most comprehensive study of China's prison camps to date, draws from a wide range of primary sources, including many compelling literary documents, to illuminate life inside China's prison camps. Focusing mainly on the second half of the twentieth century, Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu outline the evolution of the laogai system, construct a vivid picture of prisoners' lives from arrest and interrogation to release, and provide a troubling new perspective on the human rights issues plaguing China.
Punishment and the Prison by ISBN: 0761993584Publication Date: 2000-01-07While there are books on prison and others on punishment, there are few that relate these two important themes. That is the central purpose of this multi-disciplinary volume which connects prison practices with punishment theories in order to highlight the manner in which each society`s ethos and politico-cultural traditions are reflected in the way it punishes its wrongdoers.
Prisons in colonial Bengal, 1838-1919 by ISBN: 9788186017678Publication Date: 2007Through her close study of how criminals were handled and treated in the British prisons in colonial Bengal in the period under review. Dr Madhurima Sen shows an administration wavering between the new ideas in the air perceiving the prison as a site of moral reform of the convict and the punitive thrust that came more naturally to the colonial rulers. She ferrets through a large body of archival material, documents, reports, and reminiscences, to reconstruct prison life in Bengal and the cellular prison at Port Blair in the Andamans, in all its details.
Roads to freedom : prisoners in colonial India by ISBN: 0199087024Publication Date: 2016This text examines the history of prison and prisoners in colonial India. Based on substantial archival research, it presents the conditions of the prisoners, their vision for the freedom movement and the various aspects of prisons in the subcontinent
The Architecture of Confinement by ISBN: 9781009007191Publication Date: 2022-02-17In this global and comparative study of Pacific War incarceration environments we explore the arc of the Pacific Basin as an archipelagic network of militarized penal sites. Grounded in spatial, physical and material analyses focused on experiences of civilian internees, minority citizens, and enemy prisoners of war, the book offers an architectural and urban understanding of the unfolding history and aftermath of World War II in the Pacific. Examples are drawn from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, and North America. The Architecture of Confinement highlights the contrasting physical facilities, urban formations and material character of various camps and the ways in which these uncover different interpretations of wartime sovereignty. The exclusion and material deprivation of selective populations within these camp environments extends the practices by which land, labor and capital are expropriated in settler-colonial societies; practices critical to identity formation and endemic to their legacies of liberal democracy.
The Indian Uprising Of 1857-8 by ISBN: 1283377659Publication Date: 2014-05-09This fascinating book, based on extensive archival research in Britain and India, examines why mutineer-rebels chose to attack prisons and release prisoners, discusses the impact of the destruction of the jails on British penal policy in mainland India, considers the relationship between India and its penal settlements in Southeast Asia, re-examines Britain’s decision to settle the Andaman Islands as a penal colony in 1858 and re-evaluates the experiences of mutineer-rebel convicts there. This book makes an important contribution to histories of the mutiny-rebellion, British colonial South Asia, British expansion in the Indian Ocean and incarceration and transportation.
Women in prison : an insight into captivity and crime by ISBN: 8175965479Publication Date: 2008Women in Prison takes a look at the multiple specificities that bring women into the prison system. Drawing on empirical sources and original research, and relying primarily on interviews of women inmates, this book explores the contexts of female crime and punishment in India and looks at gendered disciplinary mechanisms that are used to control women inmates. The work invokes not only a sense of history in understanding women's crimes and imprisonment, but also engages in a critical dialogue in terms of gender, caste, culture and sexuality. Unique in its analysis of the lives of women prisoners within social and legal contexts, the book is a major contribution to international literature on women's offences and their experience of imprisonment.
Last Weapons by ISBN: 0520972155Publication Date: 2019-06-18Last Weapons explains how the use of hunger strikes and fasts in political protest became a global phenomenon. Exploring the proliferation of hunger as a form of protest between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Kevin Grant traces this radical tactic as it spread through trans-imperial networks among revolutionaries and civil-rights activists from Russia to Britain to Ireland to India and beyond. He shows how the significance of hunger strikes and fasts refracted across political and cultural boundaries, and how prisoners experienced and understood their own starvation, which was then poorly explained by medical research. Prison staff and political officials struggled to manage this challenge not only to their authority, but to society's faith in the justice of liberal governance. Whether starving for the vote or national liberation, prisoners embodied proof of their own assertions that the rule of law enforced injustices that required redress and reform. Drawing upon deep archival research, the author offers a highly original examination of the role of hunger in contesting an imperial world, a tactic that still resonates today.
Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes by ISBN: 1441620214Publication Date: 2009-01-01During the nineteenth century, Singapore was established as a free port of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company's Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary experimental site for the colonial plural society and convicts were graduated by race and the labor needed for urban construction. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes investigates how a political system aimed at managing ethnic communities in the larger material context of the colonial urban project was first imagined and tested through the physical segregation of the colonial prison. A description of the evolution of the ideal plan for a plural city across three settlements is followed by a detailed look at Singapore's colonial prison. Chapters trace the prison's development and its dissolution across the urban landscape through the penal labor system. The author demonstrates the way in which racial politics were inscribed spatially in the division of penal facilities and how the map of the city was reconfigured through convict labor. Later chapters describe penal resistance first through intimate stories of penal life and then through a discussion of organized resistance in festival riots.
Black Hole of Empire by ISBN: 1280494166Publication Date: 2012-01-01When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of "the black hole of Calcutta" was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. "The Black Hole of Empire" follows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the "civilizing" force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India. Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan by ISBN: 0691114919Publication Date: 2004-12-26The kinds of punishment used in a society have long been considered an important criterion in judging whether a society is civilized or barbaric, advanced or backward, modern or premodern. Focusing on Japan, and the dramatic revolution in punishments that occurred after the Meiji Restoration, Daniel Botsman asks how such distinctions have affected our understanding of the past and contributed, in turn, to the proliferation of new kinds of barbarity in the modern world. While there is no denying the ferocity of many of the penal practices in use during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), this book begins by showing that these formed part of a sophisticated system of order that did have its limits. Botsman then demonstrates that although significant innovations occurred later in the period, they did not fit smoothly into the "modernization" process. Instead, he argues, the Western powers forced a break with the past by using the specter of Oriental barbarism to justify their own aggressive expansion into East Asia. The ensuing changes were not simply imposed from outside, however. The Meiji regime soon realized that the modern prison could serve not only as a symbol of Japan's international progress but also as a powerful domestic tool. The first English-language study of the history of punishment in Japan, the book concludes by examining how modern ideas about progress and civilization shaped penal practices in Japan's own colonial empire.
Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire by ISBN: 0748677690Publication Date: 2014-01-01Contrary to the stereotypical images of torture, narcotics and brutal sexual abuse traditionally associated with Ottoman or 'Turkish' prisons, Kent Schull argues that, during the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918), they played a crucial role in attempts to transform the empire. It was within these prisons' walls that many of the pressing questions of Ottoman modernity were worked out; questions of administrative centralisation, Islamic criminal law and punishment, gender and childhood, prisoner rehabilitation, bureaucracy, identity and social engineering.
Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes by ISBN: 1441620214Publication Date: 2009-01-01During the nineteenth century, Singapore was established as a free port of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company's Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary experimental site for the colonial plural society and convicts were graduated by race and the labor needed for urban construction. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes investigates how a political system aimed at managing ethnic communities in the larger material context of the colonial urban project was first imagined and tested through the physical segregation of the colonial prison. A description of the evolution of the ideal plan for a plural city across three settlements is followed by a detailed look at Singapore's colonial prison. Chapters trace the prison's development and its dissolution across the urban landscape through the penal labor system. The author demonstrates the way in which racial politics were inscribed spatially in the division of penal facilities and how the map of the city was reconfigured through convict labor. Later chapters describe penal resistance first through intimate stories of penal life and then through a discussion of organized resistance in festival riots.
Beyond Papillon by ISBN: 1280550783Publication Date: 2006-01-01For French criminologists and colonialists of the mid-nineteenth century, the penal colonies of Guiana and New Caledonia seemed to satisfy two needs, namely, to incarcerate a growing number of criminals and to supply manpower for these developing colonies. But were these two goals not contradictory? Was the primary purpose of the penal colonies to punish or to colonize? In the prisons, inmates found means of subversion, guards resisted militaristic discipline, and camp commanders fought physicians for authority. Back in the metropole, journalistic exposes catered to the public s fascination with the penal colonies horror and exoticism."
