09 “To hold until satisfaction”. Imprisonment for debt and carceral discipline in eighteenth century England
Since Foucault, the majority of critical research into prisons, whether historical and contemporary, has focused on the incarceration of criminals, and to a lesser extent on the confinement of the disorderly ‘othered’: vagrants, juveniles, lunatics. Yet in England, before the interruption of transpo...
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| Format: | Book chapter |
| Publication date: | 2020 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha |
| Repository: | RUIdeRA. Repositorio Institucional de la UCLM |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ruidera.uclm.es:10578/25247 |
| Online Access: | http://doi.org/10.18239/jornadas_2020.25.09 http://hdl.handle.net/10578/25247 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | England carceral discipline eighteenth century |
| Summary: | Since Foucault, the majority of critical research into prisons, whether historical and contemporary, has focused on the incarceration of criminals, and to a lesser extent on the confinement of the disorderly ‘othered’: vagrants, juveniles, lunatics. Yet in England, before the interruption of transportation by the American Revolution, the majority of prisoners were debtors. Thousands of people, unable or unwilling to pay their debts, were incarcerated in an extensive network of over 200 prisons right across the country. This paper presents new data on the extent of imprisonment for debt, drawn from the relief lists published in the London gazette. It then focuses on the disciplinary crisis of the late eighteenth century: the temporary end of transportation and the destruction of London’s prisons in the Gordon Riots. It argues that imprisonment for debt was not a forerunner of modern prison discipline, but a separate punitive system, that could not be easily converted to criminal detention. The attempt to do that created a fundamental contradiction that undermined its own ambitions. Only with the supposed abolition of imprisonment for debt in 1869, and its conversion from a civil offence into a criminal offence, was this contradiction removed. |
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