Theorizing Penal Change (and Stasis)

My research on penal change focuses on two overlapping areas of penal change:

Revisiting “Moments” of Innovation and Replacement: Penal scholars have long been drawn to moments when an old punishment is apparently replaced by a newly innovated one. However, a closer look at such moments reveals that innovation always has longer roots (a prehistory) that precede these moments and the apparent replacement is usually something more like displacement and layering.
Understanding Diffusion After Innovation: As penal scholars have been drawn to these moments of innovation, we have also traditionally paid less attention to what happens next—the diffusion that follows.

The Black Flower’s Slow Bloom: The Life Course of Proto-Prisons, 1776–1822

Paper in development: This paper examines the rise of the concept of penal incarceration as prisons transitioned from administrative holding tanks for a variety of people into places of punishment. It develops an ideal type model of the proto-prison and examines how this model came about, manifested in the 1790s, and ultimately gave way to the modern prisons of the 1820s and 1830s.