Bentham, convict transportation, and the Great Confinement Thesis

Since the 1970s the literature on the evolution of British criminal justice systems has been dominated by the history of prisons and penitentiaries. The 'great confinement thesis' - a narrative that seeks to explain the history of judicial sanctions as a function of state power - has shaped much of that literature. According to its proponents, where central authority was weak, systems of kin-based restorative justice dominated. As early modern states evolved, monarchs imposed their authority through the use of judicially sanctioned violence. The development of more effective institutions of government was accompanied by a rise in professional police forces and other systems of surveillance. Bentham's proposal for a panopticon is often seen as a pivotal moment in this transformation. In Michel Foucault's words, it formed a blueprint - not just for a new form of prison - 'but also for a hospital, for a school, for a workshop'. It was in short a template 'for all institutions'

Historical Databases Now and in the Future

Kees Mandemakers has enriched historical databases in the Netherlands and internationally through the development of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, the Intermediate Data Structure, a practical implementation of rule-based record linking (LINKS) and personal encouragement of high quality longitudinal data in a number of countries

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

Western Australia and transportation in the British Empire 1615-1939

This article explores the extent to which new understandings of the trans-imperial deployment of convicts within the British Empire can shed light on traditional interpretations of the rise of the prison. Through a demonstration of the ways in which the 'great confinement thesis' can be used to explain the transition in punishments and outcomes in the Australian penal colonies, the article argues for a shift in the way that convict transportation has been traditionally viewed. Rather than an alternative to incarceration in a metropolitan penitentiary, the Australian 'experiment' formed part of a wider trans-imperial carceral archipelago that was both informed by metropolitan initiatives and pre-empted subsequent British and Irish 'innovations'. A re-evaluation of rates of execution, flogging and solitary confinement, as well as other institutional and health outcomes, provides an illustration of the extent to which the Foucauldian shift in punishment from the body to the mind was as much a colonial phenomenon as a metropolitan one. While the convicts landed in Fremantle account for only a small proportion of those transported by the British state, the convict era in Western Australia played a critical role in this process

The State, Convicts and Longitudinal Analysis

In 2006 the Records of the Tasmanian Convict Department were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This extraordinarily intact collection of records document the lives of 73,000 male and female prisoners transported to Van Diemen's Land. This article examines ways in which this information can be used to explore the impact of forced labour migration on the lives of convicts. It focuses in particular on the assembly of cradle-to-grave datasets. Such longitudinal approaches to the past can be powerful, especially where they involve the analysis of multiple life course events for a large number of individuals. The first part of the article explores ways in which quantitative approaches can be used to reconstruct the circumstances that shaped the creation of record groups. The second part examines the way in which longitudinal analysis can be used to analyse the impact of state action on the lives of convicts

Convict bloodlines: Crime, intergenerational legacies and convict heritage

This chapter discusses the actual legacy of the convict era was far more complex. As David Roberts points out, views about convicts and their impact on Australian society have rarely been harmonious. While some have argued that the convicts were critical in shaping the cultural identity of Australians, others have downplayed the impact of convict descent. The desire to downplay convict origins was heightened by the nineteenth-century tendency to see crime as a form of infection. Convicts were regarded as a species of malignant disorder that could spread criminal vice to others - a process that could include intergenerational transmission. Most convict labour was assigned or loaned out to private settlers. It has only been with the digitisation of the convict archive that the extent to which punishments rose and fell in line with the costs of maintaining an assigned convict have become apparent

The Rise and Fall of Penal Transportation

Many societies have either transported convicted prisoners to a place of coerced labor or sold them as slaves. From the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries several European states made extensive use of penal transportation to supply labor to overseas colonies. A practice that operated in parallel to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, penal transportation was applied to both prisoners sentenced in European courts and those convicted in the colonies. Emerging at the same time as galley service and the workhouse, transportation expanded the range of sentencing options available to early modern states. Although criticized by European penal reformers in the nineteenth century because of its close association with slavery and other exploitative labor extraction systems, penal transportation survived into the twentieth century, largely because it was comparatively cheap and provided a means of punishing both metropolitan and colonial offenders

Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615-1875

Despite recent research which has revealed the extent to which penal transportation was employed as a labour mobilization device across the Western empires, the British remain the colonial power most associated with the practice.[1] The role that convict transportation played in the British colonization of Australia is particularly well known. It should come as little surprise that the UNESCO World Heritage listing of places associated with the history of penal transportation is entirely restricted to Australian sites.[2] The manner in which convict labour was utilized in the development of English (later British) overseas colonial concerns for the 170 years that proceeded the departure of the First Fleet for New South Wales in 1787 is comparatively neglected. There have been even fewer attempts to explain the rise and fall of transportation as a British institution from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries