another element in von Hippel's work deserves attention. he spoke not of the rise of imprisonment, but of Freiheitsstrafe (penal bondage). This terminology implies both a narrows the subject to the extent that it focuses on the restriction of freedom as a penal measure. such a focus obscures the fact that the beginnings of imprisonment lay in the semijudicial sphere. prison-workhouses were punitive but not necessarily penal institutions; they served to discipline all kinds of deviants. von hippel's perspective broadens the subject because the concept of bondage refers to more than just imprisonment. Bondage also comprised galley servitude, transportation, and public works.These punishments all were based on a spatial principle, namely, that of confining deviants to a certain place or area instead of sending them away. galley servitude, moreover, in southern europe in the eighteenth century evolved into imprisonment. Imprisonment, then, is one of a class of punishments. Alternative forms of bondage competed with it for a long period: convict already manned galley in the late fifteenth century and the penalty of transportation was in use in frence until world war 2.
It is intriguing , though, that only imprisonment seems to have generated the admiration of later commentators. No twentieth-century author, as far as i know, attached a positive value judgment to either transportation or public works. Apparently the common practice in one's own day determines what one applauds in the past. What would be an appropriate reaction to these value judgments? We might simply take it for granted that we encounter and ignore value judgments in older studies, regardless of the subject matter. Since an approach that merely applauds the rise of prisons, in fact, is devoid of theory,there is no point in confronting it.
The self-styled revisionist authors of the 1970s, however, nevertheless confronted it. They attacked their predecessors directly, emphasizing that "social control" instead of "humanitarianism" was the major factor in the rise of imprisonment. Neither pity nor a sense of compession but rather the desire ti master the deviant population was the primary motivation of prison builders. The authors who advanced this argument fell into the trap of creating a mirror image. Instead of reassessing the evidence, they reversed the values. Humanitarianism simply cannot be used as a scholarly concept. Individual people may call themselves humanitarians, but there is no scientific standard to determine degrees of humanitarianism in persons from the past.