Typologizing Carcerality: What is a Prison, What was the First Prison, and Why it Matters

• In Event: Roundtable: (Re)Theorizing "The Prison" as an Institution

Abstract

The question of what exactly constitutes a prison has direct implications for how we historicize the prison and especially for debates over which facility was the first prison. Using different definitions, different countries can lay claim to having built the world's first prison; following certain definitions, however, these contenders are not prisons but instead part of a continuum of coercive facilities created to contain and manage different groups that society's elites considered disruptive, unseemly, or otherwise problematic. In this paper, I cull the prison history literature to identify the various contenders for the world's ``first'' prison; using this expansive list, I enumerate the various characteristics we can use to typologize prisons from other forms of coercive confinement generally, noting different possible definitions of prison. I close by discussing the limitations of these definitions (particularly where they are belied by contemporary prisons' daily routines) and these definitions' implications for other historical forms of coercive confinement (e.g., prisoner of war camps, prisons for slaves, penal colonies, prison camps) as well as contemporary (or at least more recent) forms of coercive confinement, including non-state punishment facilities (e.g., Magdalan laundries) and state non-punishment facilities (like immigration detention).

Author

• Ashley T. Rubin, University of Hawai'i at Manoa