Abstract
More than 40 years ago, I wrote Carcere e fabbrica with my friend Dario Melossi. This work turned out to be a scholarly undertaking, a bit unripe in several respects. It received, however, unexpected acclaim, especially at the international level, when it came out in an English edition under the title The Prison and the Factory. Dario and I wrote the book in only a few months upon returning from a stay in England, and the initial spark for it came from a footnote we came across in Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism. In it Dobb mentioned two Frankfurt sociologists, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, noting that in a work of 1939 they had investigated the historical connection between the development of the labor market and punitive systems. We felt compelled to look for this “forgotten” book and found a copy at the library of the London School of Economics. We immediately began work on an Italian translation of it, which came out one year after the publication of Carcere e fabbrica.
Massimo Pavarini had written this chapter in Italian and had it translated into English shortly before passing away on 29 September 2015. The translation was done by Elisabeth Barili and was then revised by Filippo Valente and edited by Dario Melossi.
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Notes
- 1.
Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, Carcere e fabbrica: Alle origini del sistema penitenziario, XVI–XIX secolo (Bologna: il Mulino, 1977).
- 2.
Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System (London: The Macmillan Press, 1981).
- 3.
Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1946, pp. 23, 235).
- 4.
Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).
- 5.
To be honest, this rediscovery was due more to luck than to the sleuthing skills of two young scholars from the University of Bologna. Only one copy of the book was held at the library: It had been sitting on the shelves for years and was at serious risk of being left to the “gnawing criticism of the mice.”
- 6.
Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Pena e struttura sociale (Bologna: il Mulino, 1978). New editions in English had come out in 1967, again by Columbia University Press, then reissued in 1968 by Russell & Russell, and would then come out again in 2003 (New Brunswick (NJ): Transaction Publishers). Our Italian translation was followed by a Spanish and a German one, followed by translations in French and Portuguese.
- 7.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).
- 8.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, cit., p. 24.
- 9.
See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), and Pietro Costa, Il progetto giuridico: Ricerche sulla giurisprudenza del liberalismo classico (Milan: Giuffrè, 1974).
- 10.
On this point, see David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1980).
- 11.
See Piers Beirne, Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of “Homo Criminalis,” ed. Ronald A. Farrell (Albany: University State of New York Press, 1993).
- 12.
See the recent Michele Pifferi, L’individualizzazione della pena: Difesa sociale e crisi della legalità penale tra otto e novecento (Milan: Giuffrè, 2013) (English transl.: Michele Pifferi, Reinventing Punishment: A Comparative History of Criminology and Penology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)).
- 13.
See Andrew T. Scull, Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant—A Radical View (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1977).
- 14.
See David Garland, The Culture of Social Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 4.
- 15.
See, among others, Jock Young, The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity (London: Sage, 1997).
- 16.
See Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon, “The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and Implications,” Criminology 20 (1992): 440–74; idem., “Actuarial Justice: The Emerging New Criminal Law,” in The Futures of Criminology, ed. David Nelken, 173–201 (London: Sage, 1994).
- 17.
Costa, Il progetto giuridico, cit., p. XIII (my translation).
- 18.
See Marcus Felson, Crime and Everyday Life (Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Pine Forge Press, 1994) and James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1983). In Italian criminology, see Marzio Barbagli, L’occasione e l’uomo ladro: Furti e rapine in Italia (Bologna: il Mulino, 1995).
- 19.
Alessandro Baratta, “Politica criminal: Entre la politica de seguridad y la politica social,” in Delito y seguridad de los habitantes, ed. Elías Carranza, 85–95 (San Josè de Costa Rica: Siglo XXI, 1997).
- 20.
Cf. Digby Anderson, ed., This Will Hurt: The Restoration of Virtue and Civil Order (London: Social Affairs Unit, 1995), and Joel Best, Random Violence: How We Talk about New Crimes and New Victims (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
- 21.
The underlying distinction here is between anorexic and bulimic societies. It was introduced by Jock Young in The Exclusive Society, cit., who draws on a similar distinction by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
- 22.
One of the most compelling and interesting books I have come across on the criminal question is by an author who is neither a criminologist nor a historian of penal thought but is rather the most recognized critic of contemporary work on the reconstruction and history of English deportation to Australia: Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Foundation, masterfully translated into Italian as La riva fatale: L’epopea della fondazione dell’Australia (Milan: Adelphi, 1990).
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Pavarini, M. (2018). Understanding Punishment Today (2017): The Prison Without the Factory. In: The Prison and the Factory (40th Anniversary Edition). Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56590-7_7
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