My house gives birth to a just person but exterminates a false one. Since there are pity and tears within its brick walls, and it is built with compassion, it soothes the heart of that person, and refreshes his spirits.
“Hymn to Nungal,” the prison goddess (lines 103–5)
Ancient Mesopotamia is known for being a land of historical firsts. The title of Samuel Kramer’s book, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History,1 illustrates the point well. While Kramer did not include prisons in his list of firsts, his discussion of another, more benevolent institution can serve as an example of one of the problems with his approach. The initial chapter is entitled, “Education: The First Schools.” Yet, scribal education in Mesopotamia was not exactly like school as we understand it. Dominique Charpin writes,
The term “school” appears to be misleading, then, in that it confers an institutional character on the training of scribes. It also suggests a certain continuity of that activity at a single site. The archeological evidence yields a different image: that of houses of literati who trained apprentices at home. All in all, scribal apprenticeships may hardly have been different in their sociological reality from the other ways of transmitting knowledge. That is, they occurred primarily within the context of the family.2
Charpin rightly notes that there are a number of ways in which the term school, as we understand it, blurs certain distinctions about Mesopotamian scribal training, which might have been very similar to the transmission of other knowledge such as making pottery. While not strictly a school, at least as we understand them, the Mesopotamian historical phenomenon surely belongs to a history of education and schools, because it serves as an early example of humans passing on the knowledge and the skill of reading and writing from one generation to the next, even if numerous differences exist and a direct linear connection cannot be made.
History should not be restricted to an assessment of our institutions against theirs. This is where Charpin’s more nuanced approach is valuable. How they educated and passed on the craft of reading and writing is more important than whether or not their schools were like our schools. The same may be said of prisons. And although it will be discovered that imprisonment or detention was multifunctional and only had limited intersection with “crime,” this work shows how religion, power, and politics can shape ideology attached to very different social-historical realities.
As such, this book is not about whether Mesopotamia had the first prisons, as defined predominantly by modern, Western political realities. The answer to that question hardly deserves a page. Instead, this book is concerned with discovering how imprisonment, as an historical phenomenon, was employed at the dawn of history.
The editors of the Oxford History of Prisons connect the origins of the prison to the existence of the cage:
If the cage exists, and if we do not know what else to do with a convicted criminal who does not need to be killed or whipped or exiled yet who cannot be allowed to escape adverse consequences for his crime, why not continue caging? So, we are suggesting, the original justification for the prison may well have been incapacitation. Whatever else, incarceration serves to remove a potential offender from the community.3
Such a statement suggests the prison, which they define as an institution of punishment, finds its origin in the jail as the holding place, which they call the cage. This book, however, is about what happened before the cage. The various forms of detention and imprisonment in early Mesopotamia arose originally out of the desire to gain access to and control labor, resulting in a multifunctional and multicontextual practice that was adaptable to a variety of circumstances. Detention in ancient Mesopotamia had limited intersection with “crime,” a term which will be used loosely to refer to any action that is considered a breach of a norm that is punishable in some manner. When those accused of some infraction were detained, the existing social structures for corporal confinement were available to be used in order to meet the needs of the controlling entity. The need to detain in relation to judicial process likely only increased with the emergence and expansion of city states, where detention and transportation were employed to bring certain high-level cases before the palace.
This origin of imprisonment helps to elucidate and assess stated or literary goals about the prison, disentangling the ideology that came to be attached to imprisonment from the much more complicated realities of the everyday practice. As will be seen, imprisonment, as a mechanism of detention that restricts movement, has a long history of being adaptable to a variety of circumstances for practical reasons and through the attachment of ideology. Further, it will be evident that imprisonment has been employed to meet a number of social goals, as it is historically multifunctional. This is true of then as it is of now. For example, modern imprisonment in the US where the stated goals of correction and punishment must be squared with the everyday realities of how imprisonment is employed and what it accomplishes is illustrative of this reality.
The Birth and Evolution of the Prison in Modernity
What is it about imprisonment that resulted in it being fully enveloped into modern society as a just, safe, and productive response to crime? Until recently, the almost wholesale acceptance of imprisonment has been viewed as an advancement in humanity. Criminals were taken off the streets. Society was safer. And punishment was more humane. Convicts had their needs met as they were taken out of society and provided with the opportunity to reflect on their misdeeds, with many even afforded the chance to re-enter normal life, after paying their debt to society. If the system worked, the end result was a positive change in the prisoner, who through punishment, isolation, and reflection became a better citizen. In fact, many Americans believe that imprisonment will result in some form of rehabilitation.4 But rarely does it work.5 I will limit myself to one example.
On June 6, 2015, a young man named Kalief Browder was found by his mother hanging from her window-unit air conditioner.6 He had attempted suicide on at least four prior occasions, but this time was successful. As a young, black man growing up in New York City, Browder was accused of stealing a backpack with some valuable belongings. A few months before his seventeenth birthday, Browder was arrested and taken to the jail at Rikers, where he would spend the next three years imprisoned without conviction or trial. For two of those years, Browder lived in solitary confinement. Eventually, Browder was unceremoniously released from jail when the charges were finally dropped. But the damage was done. This is but one example of a negative outcome of a very broken system that has numerous problems.
Efforts to raise awareness have resulted in what appears to be a general recognition of the problems of imprisonment, even if most do not seem to grasp the full scale of the problem.7 Even as many of the problems come into focus,8 few positive alternatives have been offered,9 leaving the system broken and largely unchanged.
The nature and effectiveness of imprisonment, as well as the need for reform, has been a topic of debate for some time, but the study of prisons as an historical discipline is a relatively recent trend.10
The Prison and Punishment
The historical inquiry into prisons has been dominated by the idea that the prison is by definition the use of imprisonment for the purpose of punishment. I have written on this topic and even utilized this approach to some extent, while also attempting to move beyond it.11 The reduction of the prison to its relationship with punishment intends to reflect modern notions about prisons particularly in the West, as opposed to related institutions such as jails; a distinction that has nothing to do with ancient Mesopotamia.
From a methodological perspective, the editors of the Oxford History of Prisons, although recognizing the limitations of the approach, state that the punishment of prisons separates such institutions from jails, which are used for temporary confinement as part of a judicial process or in relation to relatively short stays, typically under a year in the US.12 Other approaches to the historical inquiry into prisons have also been taken.
David Skarbek, in his book on diversity among approaches to and various contexts of imprisonment around the world, states there are certain fundamental realities belonging to all modern prisons:
All prisons are similar in fundamental ways. They incarcerate people who are charged with or convicted of crimes. They tend to hold a disproportionately large number of people from disadvantaged and ethnic, racial, and other minority communities. Prisoners tend to be more violent, less patient, less trusting, and less educated than the population outside of prison. Most prisoners must live and interact with other prisoners; they have no voluntary exit option. When social scientists think about social dilemmas, these are some of the most important theoretical characteristics that determine the nature and outcome of the interaction.13
For Skarbek, the prison is for those who are charged and those who are convicted, which means he takes a broader view of what constitutes a prison than the editors of the Oxford History of Prisons. Skarbek, as such, does not confine his study to the distinctions based on punishment and time, which are formed largely by the US prison/jail distinction. These central characteristics of prisons provide Skarbek with the theoretical basis to compare diversity among approaches to imprisonment in different locales.
In my prior research on Mesopotamian imprisonment, I sought further connections beyond punishment such as concepts of reform and administrative mechanisms, both of which are found in the ideology connected to modern examples of prisons.14 I expanded my research question to understand functionality, length of imprisonment, and what life was like on the inside. The goal, however, was not to assert that prisons, as we currently understand them in the modern Western world, were also present in ancient Mesopotamia. Instead, I sought to understand how Mesopotamian imprisonment functioned, while arguing for the relevance of the Mesopotamian evidence for the broader inquiry into a world history of prisons.
The more time I have spent reflecting on the Mesopotamian phenomenon, the more I am convinced that the historical inquiry into a world history of prisons cannot be reduced to the notion of punishment. In other words, the historical inquiry should not be restricted by the claimed modern motivation of punishment through imprisonment as a supposed civilized form of justice when even the modern mechanism is used much more expansively to include the control of the population or subsets of the population and to achieve certain religious and political ends.
For example, modern, Western examples of the prison cannot be reduced to whether they are used for punishment or not. In Britain, all local and state facilities are called prisons because of current political realities.15 Length of time, while a factor, cannot be viewed consistent either. In places where the US court system is inundated with cases, the District Attorney’s office may file extensions, holding non-convicted individuals for over a year.16 Finally, those convicted of minor violations, such as simple assault or public intoxication, can be punished with very short stays in a jail. Further, it should be noted that in certain cases in the US, the prison has been used to detain high-profile suspects while they wait for trial. In the book, Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson writes about an example from the 1980s where two suspects were detained on Death Row in Alabama prior to conviction.17 While anomalous and unjust, as one person was innocent and the other was held there to coerce false testimony against the innocent person, it shows the complicated and multifunctional life of imprisonment, even in our modern political context. This suggests that intentionality must be squared with functionality in the history of prisons. All of this together with the historical process and non-linear development of imprisonment indicates that our inquiry should not be restricted merely to the important question of punishment.
Despite the expressed concepts of just punishment and correction with modern examples of imprisonment, the functional nature of imprisonment extends beyond mere punishment and relates to control. With the US, some theories link mass incarceration to an attempt to control and/or diminish the rights of minorities through criminalization and imprisonment.18 The punishment, in a sense, relates to a broader concept of asserting dominance. The primary goal is not punishment; it is rather the assertion of power through the mechanism of punishment. It is through this concept of control that one can further grasp the connection between imprisonment and correction. If imprisonment is about controlling society and asserting prescribed norms, the movement from imprisonment to the release of the offender naturally relates to the goal of submission to those norms as a precondition for reinsertion into society. The role of power is but one contributing force to the practice of imprisonment as it exists today.
Whether you love it, hate it, or find yourself somewhere in between, one of the most impactful books on the study of prisons is written by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.19 In it, Foucault argued that prisons are a modern phenomenon that developed as punishment moved from the spectacle of public, corporal punishment towards the stated goal of affecting positive change in the person of the prisoner, even if in reality the assertion of power was the real goal.
Foucault situates his study of the prison in relation to power, knowledge, and the body.20 Foucault’s work is reasonably easy to understand, yet he chose to adopt a more literary style, which makes it useful to summarize his works in relation to reviews that draw out his theses in a concise manner.21
David Garland describes Foucault’s conception and use of power as follows: “the various forms of domination and subordination that operate whenever and wherever social relations exist.”22 Knowledge is a mechanism of power. Increased knowledge allows greater control for Foucault. Finally, as summarized by Garland, for Foucault “the human body is the ultimate material that is seized and shaped by all political, economic, and penal institutions.”23 Power, as such, is offered by Foucault as the cause for the shift in punishment from torture to imprisonment.
Despite numerous great insights found in his work, Foucault’s argument that the movement from the punishment of the body to the punishment of the soul for the purpose of control fails to account sufficiently for the gradual shifts in punishment in modern Western society. Thus, although simple historical explanations can be attractive, since they offer straightforward answers to complicated developments and changes, historical factors that lead to major social changes are often more complex and variegated.
As such, Foucault’s account of the birth of the prison has received criticism for his structuralist philosophical approach and his failure to argue his case on the basis of documentary evidence.24 Further, his notion that power and control are the driving forces behind the prison fails to recognize many other factors, which contributed to shifts in approaches to punishment. As stated by Garland, “The prison may thus be retained for all sorts of reasons—punitiveness, economy, or a plain lack of any functional alternative—which have little to do with effective control or political strategy.”25 While Foucault offers numerous cogent insights into the birth of prison, power for the purpose of control is but one reason for the modern prison system, and it is precisely the multifunctional nature and adaptability of prisons that require more nuanced historical explanation.
Pieter Spierenburg offers a “counter paradigm” and several critiques to Foucault’s history. Spierenburg criticizes Foucault’s explanation for its structuralist approach. As such, Foucault treats the historical development of punishment as a series of sudden changes rather than as gradual overlapping shifts that existed between one approach to punishment and another.26 Further, Spierenburg notes that Foucault fails to discuss the societal developments that contributed to the changes that took place.27 Most Western European countries shifted from early modern to nation-states during the same periods that saw radical changes in approaches to punishment.
The movement from the early modern to the nation-state carried with it a growing distaste for physical suffering.28 The city and county stopped being treated as “individual entities” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The early modern state continued beyond the revolutionary period until the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, the distaste for physical torment only increased. “Repugnance to the sight of physical punishment spread and intensified. In the end the ‘political conclusion’ was drawn and public executions were abolished. Still the privatization of repression had been completed.”29 The focus became less on physical torment as a deterrence for crime. The certainty of being caught through the presence of policing, a product of the growing central power of the nation-state, became the focus of crime deterrence.30 The privatization of punishment continued to have a public presence in the strategic placement of prisons and across media such as newspapers.31 Other factors should also be considered.
In the England, the Convict and Penitentiary Acts of 1776 and 1779 resulted in extended periods of imprisonment for criminals “with hard labour, solitude, and religious instruction in hope that their character could be amended.”32 When considering the eighteenth century, Laurie Throness describes a complex overlap similar to what is depicted by Spierenburg, as described above. There was not an immediate shift from physical punishment to focus on the soul. Instead, Throness discusses conflicting desires existing in a single historical context in eighteenth-century England. The competing desires to afflict and transform the criminal co-existed in a single legal context. “Sentimental choruses about the leniency and humanity of English law were contradicted by awful conditions in prisons and on convict ships. Both proportion and disproportion in punishment were thought to follow the divine pattern.”33 The penitentiary promised to reconcile these two, where the severity of punishment, sometimes in solitary confinement, placed the prisoner under the gaze of God.34 Through isolation, prayer, reflection, and religious instruction, the criminal was to be reformed. The establishment Protestant Church, such as the Church of England, thus helped to create effectively a “Protestant Purgatory,” which was intended to spare the criminal from the torments of Hell.35 Throness writes,
As God mercifully, allowed all a lifetime to repent, so long prison sentences in proportion to the gravity of the crime would be a benevolent gift to serious criminals to allow them enough time to reflect, to produce sorrow in proportion to their faults, and to demonstrate the fruits of reformation found in a pattern of industry.36
Since death is final for Protestants, as they do not hold to the doctrine Purgatory, the Penitentiary became a place where judgment and mercy could meet. If punishment produces positive change and spares the criminal from the torments of Hell, then punishment becomes an act of kindness and moderation, at least conceptually.
The goals of social control and criminal reform can also be seen in the American example. By 1876, the Elmira Reformatory was opened in New York state, which marked the beginning of a new approach to crime in the United States. Twenty reformatories were opened between 1876 and 1920, promising “benevolent reform: humane, constructive, and charitable treatment.”37 Andrew Pisciotta describes how attempts at instilling a Protestant work ethic of discipline and self-control for the purpose of creating good, Christian citizens, who are productive members of society, failed. Instead, Pisciotta concludes that “reformatories did not achieve their overt goal of benevolent reform or their covert aim of benevolent repression.”38 Further, the end result was not the effective control of criminals that Foucault describes; Pisciotta states “these institutions did not effectively discipline the dangerous class.”39 Despite the failures of the reform movement, the notion that imprisonment was an effective means of benevolent punishment that could lead to positive change in criminals remains reflected in many institutions bearing the name penitentiary or correction to this day. But power can take mechanisms that exist for one purpose and use them in other ways, as seen in imprisonment in the US.
To understand the more recent historical implementation of imprisonment in the US, one has to go back to at least the Civil War.40 The thirteenth amendment to the US Constitution, which in 1865 abolished slavery, includes one exception. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for ‘crime’ whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This caveat, which permitted involuntary servitude for criminals, became exploitable to control minority populations and to gain access to labor.41
Not long after the abolition of slavery, laws were developed in order to control the newly freed people.42 After the Civil War, Union troops occupied the Southern States. But with the Compromise of 1877, Southern Democrats negotiated the withdrawal of federal troops in exchange for not contesting the Republican presidential victory of Rutherford B. Hayes in the election of 1876. This left the newly freed black population, which had been integrated in the South, vulnerable to segregation and violent control in the years that would follow.
The gains made during the Reconstruction period were curtailed in part by the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, where segregation and discrimination were also implemented by white vigilante “justice.” As the only legal form of “slavery” remaining in the US, imprisonment became an effective means of repression and control of the black population. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander writes,
After a brief period of progress during Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves, once again virtually defenceless. The criminal justice system was strategically employed to force African Americans back into a system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to prove successful for generations to come.43
Even after the Civil Rights movement and the end of Jim Crow segregation, Alexander demonstrates how incarceration extended many of the problems of the Jim Crow era by continuing disenfranchisement and dehumanization under the term “criminal” instead of the former overtly racial terminology employed.44
For Alexander, the now infamous “War on Drugs,” through stiff sentencing and aggressive policing, resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of minorities. This insightful work raised awareness of the problem of mass incarceration in the United States and inspired the popular Netflix documentary, 13th. Although highlighting a very important contributing factor to the problem of mass incarceration in the United States, numerous other problems also exist with the modern American system. As Anthony B. Bradley writes: “we could legalize all drugs and release everyone from prison incarcerated for a drug-related charge and America would still have a mass incarceration and overcriminalization problem.”45 As such, the US problem of mass incarceration extends well beyond drugs.
John F. Pfaff is perhaps the most important voice for understanding the greater problems related to mass incarceration in the United States. Pfaff writes:
In other words, the single biggest driver of the decline in prison populations since 2010 has been the decrease in the number of people in prison for drug crimes. But focusing on drugs will only work in the short run. That it is working now is certainly something to celebrate. But even setting every drug offender free would cut out prison population by only about 16 percent. There is a hard limit on how far drug-based reforms can take us.46
Pfaff argues convincingly on the basis of data that the larger structural problems can hardly be met by merely legalizing drugs; nor can the legalization of drugs result in a significant change of demographics in the prison population.47 So while drug related incarceration remains a major problem, such reform would only touch on a portion of the related problems of mass incarceration.
Part of the reason for the complexity of real prison reform is that imprisonment was used as punishment and as a means of control to deal with numerous social “problems.” Although vigilante “justice” was also carried out in public ways during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the private nature of punishment through imprisonment was exploitable to meet a variety of ends but in subtle and hidden ways. This subtlety enables an ongoing problem of imprisonment, long after the reduction of violent, public punishment. The jail and prison, as such, became effective mechanisms of oppression, but largely out of plain view, precisely because of their hidden and adaptable nature. Even if one were to buy into the public presentation of the goals behind imprisonment, its more discreet mode of oppression makes it exploitable for numerous ends by any who wield the power to cage.
This complicated example of modern imprisonment illustrates that when thinking of a history of prisons and imprisonment, one must look beyond the stated goals and stated functions of the prison to the actual practice. As a mechanism of punishment that has a presence but occurs out of plain sight, imprisonment is adaptable and easily shaped by complex social and religious factors, since the human cost and impact of imprisonment remain largely hidden or otherwise easily ignored by obscuring basic human dignity through labels such as “criminals” and under promises of increased societal safety. In the end, the human cost is deemed acceptable because it claims to deal with “problem” individuals in service to what are considered greater societal goals of safety and crime deterrence, and all of this is done with the claimed hope of the betterment of the criminals themselves.
To summarize, modern imprisonment is not just about punishment. In the US, imprisonment is used for “deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, and restitution.”48 As such, imprisonment is multifunctional. This fact requires a broader historical inquiry and suggests that simple and singular solutions to the problem of mass incarceration will hardly account for real change. Better conditions in prisons will hardly address disproportionality among those who end up imprisoned. Disproportionality can hardly be addressed until money and politics play a smaller role in our justice system. For example, everyone knows that those who can afford better, more competent legal representation will receive more favorable outcomes in the current system than those who are dependent upon public defense, particularly in contexts where public defendants are weighed down by volume. Much more could be said.49 But the foregoing discussion of Western models and the developments attached to them demonstrate the complicated history and adaptable nature of imprisonment. Since prisons are multifunctional, the historical investigation into imprisonment should not revolve solely around the question of punishment. The study of early Mesopotamia provides the opportunity to consider the origins and multifunctional nature of imprisonment at the dawn of history. The adaptability of limiting corporal movement through imprisonment to meet numerous social goals and handle numerous social “problems” has deep roots in history, even though direct connections and linear developments do not exist.
A Roadmap to This Book
Chapter 1 introduces the period of investigation as well various Assyriological conventions employed when presenting the primary evidence. This is followed by a discussion of the secondary literature to demonstrate the current state of the discussion about imprisonment in early Mesopotamia. After discussing the state of research on the topic, I introduce the primary sources related to Mesopotamian imprisonment by using a hymn to a prison goddess. This literary text provides both an entry point into the discussion and allows me to explain the methodological approach I use to study the sources related to imprisonment in early Mesopotamia.
In the second chapter, I discuss key terms denoting some form of detention in ancient Mesopotamia in relation to the socio-economic status of the various types of prisoners housed in these centers of detention. What will be demonstrated is that the overwhelming evidence suggests that most prisoners were not held because of “crimes.” This is not to suggest that imprisonment did not relate to disputes and “criminal” activity. Rather, imprisonment was utilized throughout the judicial process. But this intersection between “crime” and detention seems to be a practical extension of existing mechanisms (administrative bodies, guards, etc.), rather than a prison in the strict sense.
In the third chapter, I consider how to end up imprisoned in early Mesopotamia. To do so, I discuss the so-called law codes of ancient Mesopotamia. This is followed by a discussion of the ways in which justice was administered in everyday life. The overall approach involved retributive and restitutive actions. While imprisonment was not the normal response to “crimes,” I discuss the attested infractions that led to imprisonment of one sort or another. The numerous ways by which a person could be imprisoned points to the multifunctional nature of prisons. This is to be expected as ancient Near Eastern space was typically multifunctional.50 Nevertheless, functionality is kept in view.
Chapter four deals with key aspects of the judicial process in ancient Mesopotamia. Beyond the use of various forms of evidence in trials, ordeals are attested. These ordeals were intended to determine cases in reliance upon the gods, which also provided an element of religious coercion. In particular, the River Ordeal and the Oath Ordeal are discussed in relation to the prison goddess. The literary vision of the judicial process is situated in the context of the actual judicial process as attested in the documents of practice. The literary vision and awe of the judicial ordeal are also attested in other literary texts, which receive consideration in this chapter, as well. The awe-inspiring context of approaching the king and partaking in ordeals before the gods were intended to reveal the truth, induce honesty, and determine guilt. In particular, by considering the judicial process in connection with imprisonment, it is demonstrated that imprisonment in relation to “crime” largely functioned as a place of holding until trial and until punishment but not as punishment.
Chapter five discusses what the imprisoned life was like. After considering the descriptive account in the literary vision attested in the relevant portion of the “Hymn to Nungal,” life on the inside will be discussed through a number of documents of practice to answer questions about the provision of food, abuse, suffering, and time spent on the inside. In particular, it will become further evident that imprisonment was multifunctional, not just in relation to purpose but also its context. For example, the administrative approaches to imprisonment and spikes in lengths of stay in prison are two areas in which development can be observed, suggesting that imprisonment was available to be used but the approach was not standardized. Such observations fit with other known changes across locales and periods of time in early Mesopotamia. The concepts of suffering and misery introduce the topic of the resultant lament, which bears mentioning in its Mesopotamian context in the following chapter.
In Chapter six I discuss the topic of purity in ancient Mesopotamia. Purity touched upon life from top to bottom. While there is not a codified discussion of purity from ancient Mesopotamia, the topic features prominently in the extant sources.51 An exhaustive discussion of the topic is beyond the scope of this book, but ritual purification is essential to understanding the literary vision of the prison and later rituals that connect imprisonment to the process of purification. While this literary vision is not to be taken as exemplary of what actually occurred, it asserts the idea that a person can benefit from the process of imprisonment. When imprisonment is connected to the notion of reform or positive, personal change, it presents the prisoner’s suffering and the assertion of control over that person’s body as something that is in the end beneficial for the individual. This adds a further coercive element to the process of imprisonment. As C. S. Lewis wrote in his essay on punishment, “Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their conscience.”52 In Mesopotamia, the transformation that occurs through imprisonment includes the restoration of the relationship between the prisoner and their god, adding another religious dimension to imprisonment. This imprisonment is further presented as a merciful act, since the “crime” deserved a greater corporal punishment in the “Hymn to Nungal.” That is why the prison goddess’s house is a house of compassion. Again, while not necessarily reflective of the everyday Mesopotamian’s perspective about prison, this literary and ideological conception came to be attached to ritualistic practice.
In the conclusion, I reflect on imprisonment and how ideology must be disentangled from historical realities. The social-historical picture suggests imprisonment was a multifunctional practice that only occasionally intersected with the detention of criminals and almost never, if at all, related to the rehabilitation or punishment of criminals. Yet ideology came to be attached to imprisonment in literature and rituals that offers a very different vision of the goals of imprisonment at the dawn of history. I conclude this book with a discussion about the role history can play in helping to create change in social institutions.
Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia: Confinement and Control until the First Fall of Babylon. J. Nicholas Reid, Oxford University Press. © J. Nicholas Reid 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849618.003.0001
1 Kramer 1988.
2 Charpin 2010a: 32.
3 Morris and Rothman 1998: ix.
4 Jonson, Cullen, and Lux 2013.
5 See discussion of the failure of prisons in Foucault 1995. The original French version was published in 1975 under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Discipline is not the best translation of surveiller, which deals with the idea of monitoring or surveillance. For a discussion of the ways in which the prison has been ineffective in rehabilitation, see Pisciotta 1994.
6 See the New Yorker essay: Gonnerman (October 6, 2014 Issue). See too the New York Times article by Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip: “Kalief Browder, Held at Rikers Island for 3 Years Without Trial, Commits Suicide.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html (accessed December 16, 2019).
7 The war on drugs was the popular answer for a while. For this important thesis in connection to the disproportionate incarceration of minorities, see now the updated tenth anniversary edition Alexander 2020 (originally published in 2010) and The Prison and Punishment below. See Frost and Clear 2018 for a summary of theories related to mass incarceration.
8 See, for example, Pfaff (2017), who looks at systemic problems such as the politicization of punishment and issues related to the authority of district attorneys among other things. Pfaff further demonstrates how violent crimes must also be dealt with to move beyond mass incarceration.
9 Scholars are paying increasing attention to the ways in which environment, age, and other factors contribute to the emergence of crime. See, for example, Sampson and Laub (2005), who apply a life-course theory to the emergence of crime. For a fascinating article on recidivism, see Gladwell 2015. Gladwell reports on efforts to trace rates of recidivism before and after Hurricane Katrina. They found that those who relocated because of Katrina were more successful at breaking the pattern of crime emergence than those who returned to their communities. For suggestions on how to make differences in the existing system, see Bradley (2018), who offers a number of solutions within prison systems and communities. For a less optimistic perspective, see Sim (2009) for an argument for the abolition of prisons.
10 Little was written about prisons from an historical perspective until the 1970s. See Morris and Rothman 1998: vii.
11 Reid 2016: 81–116.
12 Morris and Rothman 1998: ix.
13 Skarbek 2020: 149.
14 Reid 2016. Many facilities in the US, for example, bear the name correctional facilities. This relates to the ideology that imprisonment will serve as a crime deterrent. See Tahamont and Chalfin 2018 and Bonta and Wormith 2018.
15 McConville 1998: 267–87.
16 See discussion in The Birth and Evolution of the Prison in Modernity above on Kalief Browder for an example of this. On the inefficiencies of the system, see further the recent work of Pfaff 2017.
17 Stevenson 2015: 52–53, 55–57, 60, 63.
18 See most prominently the work of Alexander (2020), whose work was made famous in part by the Obama Administration. For an overview of theories relating to mass incarceration and its potential demise, see Frost and Clear 2018: 104–22.
19 Foucault 1995.
20 Foucault 1995. See Garland 1986: 852.
21 See similar observation in Garland 1986: 849–50.
22 Garland 1986: 852. According to von Schriltz, “Foucault’s approach revolves around his theory that ‘power’—his term for clandestine social forces—shaped history more decisively than the more visible forces of religion, intellectual currents, or individuals” (von Schriltz 1999: 391).
23 Garland 1986: 852.
24 Spierenburg 1984: viii. See criticism of Foucault’s historical work in Garland 1986: 868–72. See further von Schriltz (1999) who criticized Foucault’s inaccurate portrayal of history. Von Schriltz goes as far to say, “Nor should it be forgotten that this tale is, in virtually every major detail, wrong” (von Schriltz 1999: 410). Note further still, Alford, who argues that “the empirical reality of prison (not the same thing as the discourses of penology) shows Foucault to be wrong” (Alford 2000: 125).
25 Garland 1986: 876.
26 Spierenburg 1984: viii.
27 Spierenburg 1984: viii.
28 See Spierenburg 1984: 204–5.
29 Spierenburg 1984: 205.
30 Spierenburg 1984: 205.
31 Spierenburg 1984: 205. Privatization is not being used here to indicate who owns the prison, which is a matter of no small importance for current debates about imprisonment. Privatization is being used here to refer to the non-public nature of punishment with the modern prison. On private prisons, see Pfaff 2017: 79–104.
32 Throness 2008: 2.
33 Throness 2008: 295.
34 Throness 2008: 295.
35 Throness 2008: 295–300.
36 Throness 2008: 296–97.
37 Pisciotta 1994: 4.
38 Pisciotta 1994: 4.
39 Pisciotta 1994: 5.
40 This is not to suggest that earlier examples and overlap are not significant. The Civil War, however, remains a significant historical marker in many developments that would later take place. Interestingly, the history of the prison begins much earlier in what would become the US; von Schriltz states, “In 1690, William Penn made prison the sole means of punishment in Pennsylvania, until the Queen restored the English penal law in 1718” (1999: 398).
41 Note for example Alexander’s discussion of the Thirteenth Amendment in relation to the Jim Crow laws (2020: 38–44).
42 See, for example, Blackmon 2008.
43 Alexander 2020: 40.
44 The disenfranchisement of criminals was one key way in which the Jim Crow laws were revitalized after they were long gone. According to the study found at sentencingproject.org, “A record 6.1 million Americans are forbidden to vote because of felony disenfranchisement, or laws restricting voting rights for those convicted of felony-level crimes. The number of disenfranchised individuals has increased dramatically along with the rise in criminal justice populations in recent decades, rising from an estimated 1.17 million in 1976 to 6.1 million today” (Uggen, Larson, and Shannon 2016). On these issues, see Alexander 2020.
45 Bradley 2018: 2.
46 Pfaff 2017: 35. It is surprising that Alexander chooses not to engage with Pfaff directly in her recent tenth anniversary volume of The New Jim Crow when she offers explanations for her decision to discuss drugs not violence, since she offers a different picture than the one provided by Pfaff and other scholars. See in particular Alexander 2020: xxii–xxxi.
47 Pfaff 2017: 26.
48 Bradley 2018: 18.
49 For the structural problems and many real solutions, see Pfaff 2017 and Bradley 2018. Among these include less politicization and more oversight of District Attorneys and increased flexibility with sentencing for judges. For a scathing critique of the effectiveness of reform movements in relation to imprisonment, see Sim 2009. Sim, who has been very influenced by Foucault, states that the reform movements have been good for bringing to light many problems that were hidden but argues that such piecemeal efforts have been incapable of producing real, positive change.
50 See Reid 2016.
51 See the excellent discussion in Guichard and Marti 2013.
52 Lewis 1987: 151.