The prison was originally embraced as a humane replacement for capital and corporal punishment.

Evidence

As I have already indicated, the origins of the prison are associated with the American Revolution and therefore with the resistance to the colonial power of England. Today this seems ironic, but incarceration within a penitentiary was assumed to be humane—at least far more humane than the capital and corporal punishment inherited from England and other European countries, Foucault opens his study, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, with a graphic description of a 1757 execution in Paris. The man who was put to death was first forced to undergo a series of formidable tortures ordered by the court Red-hot pincers were used to burn away the flesh from his limbs, and molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, and other substances were melted together and poured onto the wounds. Finally, he was drawn and quartered, his body burned, and the ashes tossed into the wind. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Recapitulates Foucault’s 1757 execution opening of Discipline and Punish. — connects to: The penitentiary made incarceration itself the punishment for the first time. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 63; Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence.

Related

• The penitentiary made incarceration itself the punishment for the first time. (similarity 0.84)
• The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era. (similarity 0.83)
• Modern universal imprisonment was not the reformers’ original design (similarity 0.83)
• Prison integrated correctional transformation into legal detention from the start (similarity 0.82)
• The rise of the prison institutionalized the power to punish (similarity 0.82)
• The rise of imprisonment was historically novel, not a natural succession. (similarity 0.81)
• Reform has always been proposed as the remedy for the prison’s failure (similarity 0.80)
• The birth of the prison is analyzed only within the French penal system. (similarity 0.80)
• Imprisonment’s rapid acceptance is poorly explained by the prestige of reform models alone (similarity 0.79)
• The prison’s failures were denounced at its very inception (similarity 0.79)
• The shift from spectacle to carceral punishment was a technical mutation, not a softening (similarity 0.78)
• The prison was conceived as an apparatus for transforming human beings (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence. #qualifies (0.50)