Ducrkheim's (1984: 114) second law Penal evolution makes more specific the notion of ‘lesser intensity' which he says punishments acquire as societies develop He says that imprisonment will become the main sanction, replacing death and torture: 'Deprivations of liberty, and of liberty alone, varying in time according to the seriousness of the crime, tend to become more and more the normal means of social control.' Again, he cites as evidence the absence of prisons in ptimitive societies, their slight use in Athens, and their development first in religious institutions in Christian societies, with their later transfer to secular society as legal punishments.
He cites the penal law of 1791 following the French Revolution, which made imprisonment the main punishment, and the refinement in the Penal Code of 1810 (the famous Code Napoleon which was the basis for much of the penal law of continental Europe in the nineteenth and into the twen¬tieth centuries) which abolished accompaniments to imprisonment such as meagre diets and the wearing of chains. Durkheim associates the use of imprisonment as punishment with the developing moderation in punish¬ment, but in his explanation of the second law he says more about why- imprisonment took so long to be established as a punishment, rather than accounting positively for why it did become so established. In his account, he to some extent prefigures the explanations linking the rise of the prison to the rise of other forms of 'total institutions' in capitalist industrial societies, which will be examined in the following chapters.