Mary Gibson, Review Essay: Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison, The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 4 (October 2011), pp. 1040-1063
https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.4.1040
In a review essay, “Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison,” Mary Gibson surveys the globalization of prison history since the turn of the twenty-first century by focusing on new books about Vietnam, Africa, China, Japan, and Peru. Originating in Europe and the United States, prisons have become the dominant mode of punishment through cross-cultural interaction that makes them truly global institutions. Historiographical interest turned to prisons in 1975 with the publication of Michel Foucault’s landmark work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which challenged the traditional Whig interpretation of the prison as a humane institution of reform. Instead, Foucault and other “revisionist” historians argued that prisons replaced corporal punishment with a more insidious type of discipline typical of the “carceral continuum” of modern society. During the 1980s and 1990s, historians of Europe and the United States both embraced and critiqued the revisionist paradigm. More recently, the focus has shifted to the non-Western world, where the “birth of the prison” occurred in the context of colonialism and imperialism. Rupp argues that new works on Africa, Asia, and Latin America complicate the Foucauldian paradigm by emphasizing the centrality of race and prisoner agency to the theory and practice of punishment.
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