The Ancient Roots of Doing Time

"In Ryan George's wonderful "Pitch Meeting" series, on YouTube, the excitable producer character, relishing the eager screenwriter character's ability to load a conflict with life-or-death consequences, always enunciates "stakes!" with shivering excitement. Similarly, when we read non-narrative scholarly books, what we want in exchange for all the minutiae is a sense that something significant, something we might call stakesy, is on the line."

"What if the history of incarceration is, in fact, remarkably continuous across time, place, and circumstance? Foucault's enveloping project was to recast Western history as a series of closed "epistemes," or governing structures of thought, each redefining conventional terms like "reason" and "humanity" according to the brute dictates of power. If the central plank of this hugely influential model is rotten, then the whole might be shakier than it looks."

Archaeological and historical records reveal long-term incarceration practices in the ancient Mediterranean, including facilities, legal records, and social uses of detention. Those practices demonstrate continuity with modern forms of imprisonment rather than a uniquely modern origin. Michel Foucault’s thesis that incarceration arose as a post-Enlightenment disciplinary innovation faces challenge from evidence of premodern carceral systems. Legal enforcement, detention architecture, and punitive logics in ancient societies show organized, sustained imprisonment for crime, debt, and social control. Recognition of ancient incarceration reframes understandings of penal evolution and complicates reform debates that assume prisons are purely modern state inventions.

Read at The New Yorker