In his (recently published) 1972-73 course at the Collège de France, Foucault dealt with the emergence of correctional imprisonment in 19th century Europe, tracing its roots back to the religious milieu of Puritanism. However, as shown by more recent scholarship, the phenomenon was already on its way two centuries earlier, when a number of institutions aimed at amending people’s behavior (bridewells, houses of correction, lettres de cachet) began to flourish throughout the continent. Beyond their differences, what they seemed to share was a common interest in the private good of the convicted rather than in the common good of society, as well as a closer attention to those acts that can be better described as moral misbehaviors (debauchery, idleness, adultery etc.) rather than as actual crimes.
I would thus argue that a relevant nurturing ground of this institutional constellation can be found in the traditional notion of fraternal correction and in its 16th and 17th centuries revision by Catholic theologians and preachers. As canonically defined since the writings of the Church Fathers, fraternal correction is the reciprocal duty of reproaching one’s neighbor with the purpose of reforming him or preventing him from sinning. However, mainly through the works of Counter-Reformation’s standard-bearers (especially, but not uniquely, those of Jesuits and Oratorians), the interpretation of fraternal correction underwent a process of “verticalization”, gradually becoming the sole responsibility of superiors towards inferiors – of fathers towards their sons, of prelates towards their flock, of princes toward their subjects. Within this context, the concept of correction was able to move from the religious domain to the secular one, designing a normative landscape that was quite different from the traditional one of penal punishment, and that was going to be the condition of possibility for the birth of the aforementioned correctional institutions.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 