To Detain or to Punish is a history of imprisonment in the London metropolis between roughly 1750 and 1840. It challenges traditional ideas about who and what prisons were for and how they operated. In so doing, it offers a radical revision of accounts of the ‘birth’ of the modern prison. In this work, Kiran Mehta charts how Londoners, through their interactions with police, magistrates and judges, became prisoners, and then she follows these prisoners into the prison, revealing how such institutions were managed and experienced. Greater use of imprisonment in this period, for both punishment and detention, sparked the wholesale reconstruction and redesign of London’s prison estate at the end of the eighteenth century. It also spurred the consolidation of the modern notion that prisoners who had not yet been convicted of a crime, or who had not been sentenced to imprisonment, should be held separately from and treated differently to those incarcerated for punishment. Most notably, the requirement to labour became a distinguishing feature of punitive confinement.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Kiran Mehta is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Leicester.

*The Law Society of Hong Kong has awarded this book talk 1.5 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points.