Global Networks and Local Prison Reforms: Monarchs, Bureaucrats and Penological Experts in Early Nineteenth-Century Prussia

This essay takes the Prussian prison reforms of the first halfof the nineteenth century as an example to demonstrate the emergenceof specific networks of penological experts which crossed nationalboundaries as well as the seemingly clear division between stateand non-state agencies. It is based on the actor-network approachas developed initially in the works of Bruno Latour and others.The paper tries to show that this approach can help us to understandhow state reform processes actually worked. Building on this,it argues that networks of such different groups as state administrations,monarchs, lawyers and penological experts overlapped in thepenitentiary as the central tool of the state's treatment ofprisoners. These groups claimed for themselves a monopoly ondefining the function, construction and legitimization of thereforming machine. For each of these groups, the prison meantsomething different, but no group could implement its ideaswithout the support of the others. Each group had to seek alliesin order to overcome resistance, whether from the interestsof other agents or technological faults. Reform, therefore,must not be understood as a one-way process in which one reformingparty translates its ideal type of prison into practice. Rather,it must be seen as a process of adaptation in which power relationsbetween the actors balance each other out via networks.