PRISON BREAKS

A new study illuminates the origins of incarceration

- BY ADAM GOPNIK

A widespread myth holds extended imprisonment to be a modern development.

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. When scholars debate the dating of the Gospels, the time difference may seem small, but the stakes are obvious: Were these texts written by contemporaries of Jesus or not? Another book, say, on eighteenth-century musket design, may take many pages before it reveals that nothing less than the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment is in play.

Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney’s “Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration” (California) is a dense, sometimes exhaustingly detailed work, but its stakes turn out to be as high as can be: the origins and meaning of incarceration itself. The central question is whether incarceration is a special affliction of the post-Enlightenment world, as Michel Foucault argued in his epoch-marking 1977 book, “Discipline and Punish”—a position that by the late twentieth century had become, well, almost gospel. 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.