“The beginning and the end of the nineteenth century marked two of the more utopian moments In crime-control history..At the beginning were those Great Transformations with which this book started. The founders of the penitentiary system in America and Europe were confident that they could devise a solution to the crime problem, a solution that. would .result In a better society. Rothman describes well this Spirit of Optimism, the explicit utopIan thinking which informed the design of the asylums. And at the end of the century came the positivist 'revolution' in criminology. Whether it was genuinely innovatory or merely an elaborate justification of existing policy, the new science of criminology took its message from the more general faith In Scientific progress. Science and technology (and not just a belief in doing good) could solve social problems and create a new social order. . . While these agendas are set by political and .economic contingencies, the very idea that a Social problem IS solvable needs an appropriate belief system. Some beliefs are favourable and others unfavourable to planned intervention. Those nineteenth-century moments of crime control contained favourable beliefs about two constants in the human predicament: human nature and the social order. The crime problem had always presented many awkward cognitive impediments to intervention: original sin, Calvinist ideas of predisposition, social Darwinism and the fatalism even within early biological versions of criminological positivism ('crime as destiny'). But once these beliefs could be neutralized, by-passed or forgotten, the way was open. If only the right combination of benevolence and technology could be found, even the worst of people could be changed and a better social order created. We have already encountered some of the many twentieth-century assaults on these beliefs: pessimism about changing human nature, skepticism about organized benevolence, disenchantment with progress, distrust of technology, a willingness to settle for limited horizons. This was and is the new 'realism' of crime control. I want now to retrace these beliefs and counter-beliefs, and locate them in the wider context of utopian and dystopian visions. This. is not in order to indulge in cheap futurology but rather to show how social-control ideology is deeply embedded in these more general predictions, fantasies, visions and expectations. By the time that criminological positivism was establishing itself, the social sciences as a whole had taken it for granted that an analysis of the past and the present could be directed towards visualizing the future. As Kumar notes in his excellent guide to the sociology of industrial society: 'when sociology arrived in Europe early in the nineteenth century, it marked a strand of thinking about man and society that was increasingly directed towards the future.' This strand became dominant as sociologists came to dwell on the Great Transformation which was to become their subject matter - the new social order of industrialism. Not all this thinking, of course, was optimistic. We know Weber's forebodings about rationalization and bureaucracy, Marx's apocalyptic vision of what had to happen before the new social order could emerge. But an influential stream of these thinkers, represented by Comte, St Simon and the other 'prophets of progress', presented a much less complicated vision of the coming into being of the new social order. Social change was progressive; science and technology would usher in a new era; disease, misery and crime were capable of being vanquished. With the obvious (though complicated) exception of Marx, few of these nineteenth-century social thinkers expressed themselves in the classic utopian form. Unlike in Plato's Republic or the original utopia of Thomas More, they were not constructing ideal societies. Theirs were not visions of what should be, but what is likely to be. And here, while never being quite as complacent as the literary and technological utopianists of their era, they were deeply influenced by the more general cultural optimism about science and technology. 

After the First World War, however, even this cautious optimism was to disappear. A bleaker, even apocalyptic world view became dominant. Ominous, irrational forces were at work which made human nature and social order far less amenable to change than had been thought. This was the 'sense of ending'. Moral and material progress were not the same; scientific advances would not necessarily bring happiness. All this is now seen as characteristic of the twentieth-century world view: cynicism, disillusionment, pessimism. This is the 'cheap wasteland philosophy' about which Saul Bellow's heroes muse so often. In the social sciences, all those grand visions of progress and evolution were buried. Preoccupations became grandly abstract or minutely empirical. Within the limited fields that became known variously as social disorganization, social pathology, social problems and criminology, a degree of optimism remained. But it was only the degree needed to give credibility to the business of intervention. The evils of the big city, the disintegration of primary social control, the loss of community, the impersonality of technology - all such problems must get worse. Intervention could work, indeed it was desperately needed, but this was a rescue operation. The point was to save, treat or prevent the casualties of the machine. The social-problems industry remained the most optimistic part of the social sciences, but it was the optimism of the crusader, the muckraker, the lifesaver, and not the prophet of a new social order. In the 1950s there was some sort of recovery. Industrialism seemed more resilient, and the new theorists of 'the 'managerial revolution', 'convergence' and the 'end of ideology' began to imply that the structural problems of industrialism were working themselves out. A new note of complacency appeared which was not destined to last very long. By the 1960s the dark side of industrialism was rediscovered. It was not just the 'return' of ideology in the demands of Blacks and other ethnic minorities, gays and other groups labelled deviant, and the women's movement for a different place in the system, but a radical disenchantment with industrial progress itself. For many such groups, for the counterculture. and the new left, and then for the ecology movement, dystopIa was already on the way. Most of all, the danger came from the strong state; the quest for 'community' was an antistatist form of utopian thinking. The machine itself had to be destroyed before it destroyed us. This was the basis of the destructuring rhetoric. The old apparatus, with its bureaucracies, institutions, professionals (words which now acquired wholly negative meanings), had to be dismantled or by-passed. In the face of this apparent disintegration of the consensus, theorists started constructing a new vision and a new ideology.  'Post-industrial society' was now on its way. This was claimed to  be a transformation which would eventually produce societies as different from· the classic industrial society of Marx, Weber and Durkheim as theirs was in turn from early agrarian, pre-capitalist formations. But as Kumar points out, neither the radical harbingers of Future Shock, the Third Wave, the Greening of America nor their more sober academic successors have shown just where this qualitative leap is taking place. For, despite the pretensions of post-industrial theorists, the future which the real social world of 1984 indicates looks more like an extension of the processes begun in the early nineteenth century. Nothing very new needs to be added to that package of concepts - formalization, rationalization, centralization, bureaucratization, professionalization - through which we understood the coming of industrial society. Not a new social order, but more of the same. This, of course, was the burden of my account of the fate of those radical destructuring movements. For what is true of the social sciences and society in general, is no less true for criminology and crime, (and its control). The general literatures on futurology and post-industrlal society however, are remarkably silent about crime and its control, while students of crime rarely articulate more than a vague sense that things are getting worse. Only one criminologist, Sykes, has formulated this sense more exactly. conventional crime, he plausibly argues, is likely to continue increasing. Virtually every single causation factor - economy, ecology, family, education, values, immigration, population, community - points to increasing rates of crime and delinquency. His scenario is familiar enough: middle-class flight to the suburbs; decaying inner-city slums; unskilled and Isolated minority groups; chronic unemployment; zero economic growth; disintegration of social ties; alienation and despair; abandonment of welfare ideologies; and so, more homicide, assault, robbery, larceny, rape. At the same time, all sorts of other changes - in technology, property relationships, corporate organization, political legitimacy - are likely to increase the amount of 'unconventional crime': white-collar crime, political crime, official lawlessness and political corruption.

So much for crime. As for its control, beyond the assumption that current policy has arrived at a turning point and that some sort of crisis is ahead, Sykes presents a choice between pessimistic and modestly optimistic alternatives:

It is possible to envision a society marked by increasing violence and attacks on private property, by intolerance of any deviation from an obsessive morality and by far reaching police surveillance coupled with a loss of civil liberties in a totalitarian social order. It is also possible (though admittedly more difficult in this disenchanted era) to envision a society with widespread acceptance of and conformity to the criminal law. a modest view of the proper reach of the State, and methods of law enforcement that are just, humane and effective. 

A linear projection from current control trends suggests changes much more incremental and ambiguous. The assumptions which Wilkins noted more than a decade ago still apply. First, most criminal-justice planning will continue to seek solutions by means of more of the same. Second, the public will continue with the mistaken, and confused belief that because we do not like crime, what we do about it will decrease it. The results of these assumptions will be a total breakdown of the criminal-justice system (somewhere before the year 2000 Wilkins predicts), together with increasing pressure for more and more control. The resultant forms of control will be less noteworthy, for their effects on crime than their intrusive side-effects on ordinary citizens: a retreat into fortress living; streets abandoned to outlaws; inconvenience and erosion of civil liberty as a result of continual security checks and surveillance systems. We have already seen this prediction from several theoretical directions: for traditional law-and-order policies based on doing something to individual offenders, 'the game is almost up'. The next technology is the use of cybernetic planning at the level of systems and environments in order to make the initial act more difficult. The by-products might be unpleasant, but the old punitive technology will soon be extinct.

CHINA’S FIRST MODEL PRISON The movement for prison reform that appeared at the end of the Qing gathered momentum after the fall of the empire in 1911: Beijing No. 1 Prison, one of the first model prisons built in China to the highest international standards, took its first inmates in 1912. Built on a double fan-shaped plan with cell blocks radiating from two central towers, Beijing’s model penitentiary was based on Pentonville Prison: guards were able to see five different rows of cells. Most cells appeared well ventilated and lit, and all windows were to be open for part of the day; while most of Beijing still lived in darkness at night, the prison was lit by electricity with one bulb for every two cells. Each inmate was given a wooden bed, a cotton-wadded quilt, a hay mattress and a pillow. The prisoners were required to stay silent, not only during work but also when they were in their cells. Sidney Gamble observed that, although experience in many countries proved that a rule requiring silence not only failed to prevent men from communicating with each other but was also practically inefficient, it was rigidly applied in modern prisons in Beijing: 

‘They are allowed to talk about the necessary details of their work, but are not supposed to communicate about anything else, and in visiting a prison one is struck with the silence.’

In an emphasis on reformation and vocational training, workshops were placed across the ends of the cell buildings: these included carpentry, weaving, typesetting, printing and bookbinding, tailoring, stonemasonry and work with metal, leather and bamboo, with twenty-five to forty prisoners to each trade. Some limited land inside the prison compound was available for cultivation. Prisoners worked for ten hours in the winter and twelve in the summer; the pay depended on the quality and amount of work performed. Part of the earnings were allowed to be spent, the remainder being deposited with the Ministry of Justice and paid on release. According to one foreign visitor:

'anyone who visits the model industrial prison in Peking comes away impressed with the ability of Chinese officials to establish and manage industrial institutions.’

Prisoners were graded according to conduct and work: good behaviour could lead to extra privileges or even to conditional release. Many prisons in republican China used four different forms to mark achievements in behaviour (xingzhuang), work (zuoye), moral teaching (jiaohut) and basic education (jiaoyu). Behaviour was further divided into obedience, words and deeds, sensibility, thrift and hygiene, while labour included marks for learning, meticulousness, diligence, economy in the use of materials and care for machinery. Each form allocated a certain number of points, the total of which was calculated monthly and divided to obtain an average figure locating the prisoner on a scale of excellence: that single figure had the power to add or remove a variety of privileges which shaped the prisoner’s life. 

In Beijing No. 1 Prison, inmates who broke the rules were punished by reproach, loss of pay for work, and deprivation of the privileges of receiving visitors, writing letters, reading, using personal belongings and taking exercise. More serious offences resulted in rationing of food, solitary confinement for up to a maximum of seven days or confinement in a dark room for up to seventy-two hours. Baths were taken twice a week in summer, once a week in spring and only once every ten days in winter. Underclothes had to be changed every ten days in winter and twice a week in summer, while pillowcases and bedclothes were also regularly washed according to prison regulations. 

A doctor trained in modern medicine looked after the prisoners’ health needs, assisted by a well-equipped dispensary and a small hospital with two nurses. A special physical examination was given to all prisoners on entering and leaving the prison, while outdoor exercise, including marching around the courtyard for half an hour, was taken daily. Prisoners under eighteen years of age were given school work equivalent to that of ordinary primary schools, which amounted to one or two hours a day. In an emphasis on ganhua, religious and moral lectures were given to all the prisoners, either in the prison lecture room or during the noon rest in the workshops. 

“If central prisons were quintessentially urban institutions, penitentiaries were distinguished by their geographical remoteness from large population centers. Several, like Poulo Condore and the short-lived penitentiaries on Phu Quoc and the Ile de la Table, were located on islands completely isolated from the mainland. Annam’s two penitentiaries, Lao Bao and Buon  Ma Thuot, were situated in isolated mountainous areas near the Lao border. In Tonkin, penitentiaries were built along the Chinese frontier at Cao Bang, Ha Giang, and Lai Chau, and in upland regions dominated by ethnic minority communities, such as Thai Nguyen and Son La.

In choosing such remote sites, several considerations shaped the thinking of colonial officials. The isolation of penitentiaries from French and Vietnamese population centers served to diminish security concerns. The transfer of serious offenders to remote outposts was seen as a deserved intensification of punishment for serious offenders. Moreover, officials believed that Vietnamese convicts were less likely to escape in regions peopled by “hostile” ethnic minority communities. Each of these arguments may be found in the following report:

Lai Chau Penitentiary should be maintained because it is situated far enough away from the Red River Delta that imprisonment there represents a real punishment for the condemned. Its location also ensures that movements or revolts there will have as small a repercussion as possible in the provinces of the Delta. Moreover, the surrounding population, Thai and Meo, is completely devoted to us. Consequently, Lai Chau is inhospitable for escape attempts.

In addition, frontier regions and upland areas lacked the manpower necessary for infrastructural development. Hence, colonial officials in remote outposts looked to prison labor to meet a pressing administrative need. The decision to convert the provincial prison at Thai Nguyen into a penitentiary in 1908 confirms that labor demands played a key role in the selection of geographic sites. At the center of the provincial resident’s case for upgrading the prison was an argument about the “anticipated utility of penal labor for road building and excavation in Thai Nguyen.”

Like central prisons, penitentiaries were managed by officials recruited from the Penitentiary Service. The staff consisted of a director, a chief warder, a registrar, a medical doctor, and a clerk in charge of storage and supplies. Medical postings and clerkships were occasionally filled by ethnic Vietnamese, but the supreme posts of director and chief warder were reserved for Europeans. Officials acknowledged, however, that ethnic exclusivity was no guarantee of administrative competence:

The choice of director of Poulo Condore has not always been a happy one. Before 1917, the penitentiary was run by M. O’Connell whose administration, if certain echoes are to be believed, was far from model— negligence being the rule. He was replaced by Lieutenant Andouard from the Customs Office, who, during a revolt in 1918, brutally machinegunned seventy-one convicts. He was assassinated in 1919. His successor, Captain Lambert, was dismissed in 1927 after being tried and convicted for assault. Based on a report prepared by M. De Tastes in June 28, 1927, Lambert was also guilty of numerous miscarriages of justice and an astonishing accumulation of other charges.

A major difference between penitentiaries and central prisons was the ethnic composition of their surveillance staff. Most guards in central prisons were Vietnamese. In penitentiaries, on the other hand, they were recruited from ethnic minority communities that lived in the surrounding area. Ede, Jarai, and Mnong tribesmen staffed the penitentiaries at Buon Ma Thuot and Lao Bao. Tai and Mnong villagers manned the penitentiaries at Son La and Lai Chau, and most guards at the Cao Bang Penitentiary were ethnic Tay. Staffing the penitentiaries with minorities was one of the conventional divide-and-rule tactics of colonial administration. 

Because inmate populations were dominated by Vietnamese lowlanders, officials hoped that ethnic rivalries between guards and prisoners might reduce collusion between the two groups. This may well have been true.  On the other hand, an enduring French belief in the innate inferiority of upland minority groups relative to Vietnamese lowlanders generated reservations about  the wisdom of minority staffing policies. In 1913, the resident of Cao Bang speculated that a recent wave of escapes from the penitentiary was owing to “the fact that the Tho [Tay] guards were easily deceived by crafty Annamite detainees from the Delta.”

Such anxiety was compounded by the fact that penitentiaries typically held the most dangerous categories of prisoners. Most numerous were felons serving lengthy sentences (five years to life) of forced labor. Courts issued forced-labor sentences for murder, manslaughter, rape, pillage, highway robbery, grand larceny, counterfeiting, fraud, and embezzlement.

Penitentiaries also received prisoners sentenced to detention and deportation punishments applied exclusively to political crimes. They could also hold convicts serving longer terms of simple imprisonment. In addition, penitentiaries were expected to accommodate prisoners sentenced to relégation (banishment, or transportation), a special punishment reserved for recidivists.

In terms of architecture and design, penitentiaries were simply larger versions of provincial prisons. Although they held Indochina’s most menacing inmates, penitentiaries housed the majority of their prisoners in large, undifferentiated communal rooms. The first bagne built on Poulo Condore (1875), Bagne I, had ten dormitories (150 m2 in area), each of which held 80 prisoners. One hundred inmates could fit comfortably into the two main dormitories (75 m2 in area) of the Lao Bao Penitentiary (1896). Poulo Condore’s second (1916) and third (1928) bagnes had twelve and eight dormitories respectively, with dimensions similar to those of Bagne I. Buon Ma Thuot Penitentiary (1930) consisted of six large dormitories (100 m2 in area), each with enough capacity for 100 prisoners. The five dormitories of the Son La Penitentiary (1930) each held 80 inmates As in provincial prisons and central prisons, communal architecture and the heterogeneity of the inmate population led to unauthorized category mixing in penitentiaries. According to an inspection of Poulo Condore in 1910, the penitentiary was “characterized by a constant interpenetration of convicts serving different sentences.” An assessment conducted six years later reported little improvement: “Convicts on Poulo Condore are not divided into categories based on the nature of their penalty. Instead, they are mixed pell-mell, so that those sentenced to relégation or to short terms of forced labor mingle freely with those condemned to life sentences. In fairness, material inadequacies have prevented adherence to legal prescriptions.”

Several factors made the problem especially acute in penitentiaries. The concentration of political prisoners in penitentiaries magnified fears of “promiscuity” and “contamination.” Also troubling was the fact that their inmate populations included prisoners who, according to penal codes, simply did not belong there. Although prisoners sentenced to relégation were held in penitentiaries, these sentences did not, in fact, entail physical confinement.

Rather, they called for quarantining convicts in secluded regions, where they were supposed to be provided with seed, farming tools, and agricultural land. In 1896, the minister of colonies remarked that “the incarceration of such prisoners in the prison buildings on Poulo Condore constitutes a cruel and illegal aggravation of [their] punishment.” Such protests were ignored, however, and identical complaints resurfaced habitually throughout the 1930s”