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Chapter One provides a brief overview of the early modern Ottoman legal system and its transformation during the long nineteenth century with special emphasis on the creation of a comprehensive criminal justice system including policing and surveillance, new courts, penal codes, and prisons. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the relationship between prisons and the transformation of Ottoman criminal justice, especially the links between the Imperial Ottoman Penal Code and incarceration. This transformation was fully rooted in past legal practices while also appropriating and adapting new legal policies from abroad. This process of transformation does not represent an Ottoman progressive march towards Westernisation and secularisation, but one that consciously reinterpreted its Islamic legal system and transformed it through the application of modern methods of governance, such as legal codification, administrative centralisation, the rationalisation and standardisation of legal practice, and the utilisation of incarceration as the primary form of punishment for criminal behaviour.

This chapter discusses the end of public punishment in England during the civilizing process. The history of punishment is usually portrayed as a simple record of progress away from the horrors of Newgate, the pillory, the convict ship, and above all the public execution. It suggests that England experienced the most remarkable shifts in the punishment of criminals during the mid-seventeenth century. This trend may be attributed to the demographic growth, which had been one of the basic facts of English social life for a century before the 1630s.

In the context of a late twentieth‐century politics of race and gender—a politics often suspicious of the liberal ideal of equal dignity—what is the value of the realist novel? What kinds of moral and political thinking are bound up in the very form of this distinctively modern literary genre, and what claim should they have upon us today? This chapter shows that while Coetzee's Foe reflects on the origins of the form of the novel by way of its allusions to Defoe, its exploration of these more complex questions is indebted to Dostoevsky's seminal exploration of novelistic form in Crime and Punishment.

This chapter shows how the mutiny of 1857 produced a version of Indian criminality that further problematized the myth of the British rule of law. This may seem odd because the event is traditionally seen as a fertile source in the construction of a version of ‘criminal India’ where all the natives were represented as variations of the stereotypical thugs and rebels. However, once placed within the context of the shifts in ideas about crime and punishment emerging in Britain, the colonial ‘just retribution’ paradoxically threw up disturbing questions about the claims to a rule of law.

This chapter turns to the birth of the homo sexualis, and of the discourse of sexuality, as the second pillar of liberalism investigated in the book. Its main (seemingly paradoxical) thesis is that the question of punishment as it arises in the liberal context also accounts for the emergence of a different discourse, that of forensic psychiatry and psychopathology which, very quickly, and as early as the 1840s, established itself as a science of sexuality. Faced with a number of criminal cases that resisted its rationality of crime and punishment, based on the notions of interest, utility, motive and efficiency, liberal governmentality found it necessary to supplement the rationality in question with another, based on the distinction between normal and abnormal (or pathological) individuals and instincts. Desire was thus inserted into a new rationality (that of psychopathology and the scientia sexualis), and a new family of concepts (that of natural, normal instincts or drives, and deviations or perversions).

This chapter examines fictional portrayals of murder as a means of understanding how Russian audiences adjusted to the postreform society. A murder with no mystery, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) established what would become identifiable as the generic conventions of crime fiction in Russia. Crime fiction takes up the ideological challenge of why individuals transgress the boundaries established by the society of which they are members. The emphasis on the why rather than the who, the greater interest in the motive rather than in an identity that must be uncovered, would characterize Russia's fictional forays beyond the law. By the turn of the twentieth century, because of the effects of the reforms and the government's push toward industrialization, crime fiction began changing perceptively, moving away from moral melodramas toward shorter stories that emphasized violence.

Conan Doyle is best known for his crime stories. This chapter shows that the police, judiciary, and penal systems were all subject to debate and reform in his lifetime. Criticism usually sees detective fiction as complicit with the disciplinary regimes of its time. This chapter however shows the Holmes stories to be remarkably uninterested in, and uninformative about, the policing and judicial process, focusing instead on the adventure of uncovering secrets and creating knowledge. But in his non-fictional work, and especially in his campaigns for the victims of official injustice like Edalji and Slater, Conan Doyle emerges later in his career as an alienated observer and radical critic of his society's institutions of law and order, and the interests they serve.

This chapter presents an authoritative overview of the economics of crime control, with particular emphasis on Gary Becker's arguments as set forth in his seminal paper, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach. It begins with a description of Becker's principal conclusions and then explores some of the developments in the literature since the publication of his paper. Topics range from the economic model of criminal behavior to the optimal size of criminal sanctions the state should impose, the optimal type of sanctions it should imposed, and the economics of fines and incarceration. The chapter includes comments by some of the nation's top legal scholars from the field of criminal law, tackling relevant issues such as deterrence and the law, economics, and neuroethical realism of crime control.

This chapter looks at Humphry Tristram Potter's New Dictionary of all the Cant and Flash Languages (1795), which has a dishonest bibliography and a dubious biography. More than 80 per cent of the dictionary's word-list is derived from earlier slang dictionaries, some up to fifty years old. From these, Potter selected terms labelled as ‘cant’ and those dealing with crime and punishment. Terms listed in both The New Canting Dictionary and the second edition of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue also had a good chance of selection. Potter deleted citations, authorities, and etymologies found in his sources, resulting in a more concise dictionary. However, some of his efficiencies led to ambiguities that left a characteristic signature on all later dictionaries derived from his. Although some of his additions appear to be fabricated from the raw material found in his sources, Potter does have some new entries that seem to represent contemporary cant, or at least slang.

Once the object of government is identified as population, the question becomes one of knowing whether, beneath all the natural variables that define a population, there is something like an invariant, or a “mainspring of action” shared by the population as a whole. That, Foucault claims, is precisely desire. In the philosophical anthropology and moral psychology of the eighteenth century, desire is integrated as a key mechanism for the government of individuals, but only at the cost of being associated with new concepts, corresponding to a new conception of human nature, namely, self-interest and utility. The natural conclusion to draw from those observations is that, since human beings are naturally governed by interest, it would be unwise, if not altogether foolish (or simply ineffective) to govern them any differently than according to their own interest and relative selfishness, especially regarding private property and the acquisition of riches. Thus, a new conception and technology of government were born, which continue to operate today. Crucial, in that respect, is the role of the market, now seen as the place where the maximization and realization of interest and utility takes place, and the vehicle for the realization of one's desires.

This chapter explores two of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's remarkable characters — Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment and the Grand Inquisitor of The Brothers Karamazov — exhibit a Machiavellian “understanding” of things. It notes that NiccolÒ Machiavelli can be regarded as critical to the development of modernity in political (and hence in constitutional) principles. It observes that each character can help us as well to see better not only the tormented soul of the author but also “the soul” of that modernity which has spawned the characters relied upon by the author. It opines that the New World, dramatized by the Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, may be said to be grounded in fundamental reconsiderations of the proper relationship between the individual and the community.

Jones chose to train as a barrister as a career in which intellectual merit might rival aristocratic privilege, facilitating independence. This chapter illustrates work and leisure as he rode the Oxford and Carmarthen circuits Lessons learned in the principality prepared him for his role as an imperial administrator. In Carmarthen, Haverfordwest and Cardigan he championed the rights of a peasantry oppressed by the arbitrary power exercised by Anglicized landlords, rack-renting squirearchy, and English-speaking monoglot magistrates and judges His letters provide a vivid picture of crime, punishment, and widely divergent social conditions within the principality. In his leisure hours ‘clubbable’ Jones initiated the society of the ‘Druids of the Tivy’ for the off-duty barristers whose fêtes champêtre, by the picturesque Teifi, rang to the extempore Romantic lyrics of pencerdd (chief Bard) Jones. Details of the causes argued by the celebrity barrister are interspersed with the lyrics composed by the ‘druidical ‘poet.

This chapter first looks at the novel as the epic, noting differences between the two concepts such as: the novel fundamentally “shows” a story rather than “tells” it. Unlike the literature of the past, the novel also is not dependent upon a well-known story such as those found in myth, legend, or the Bible. Although allusions to them surface, the main purpose and reality of the novel is what the five senses disclose about reality. This chapter looks at two novels that illustrate various aspects about the novel, and how these particular novels explore the concepts behind John Locke's theory of knowledge. It studies Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

This chapter discusses Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment (2007) and Petition (2009) as penetrating observations of state-society relations in contemporary China. Together, they render visible those who are un(der)represented, critique the deception of mass media images, and show the various complex ways in which power is connected to surveillance and visibility. Thus the filmmaker, his camera, and the spectators are implicated in power relationships as we cast voyeuristic, panoptic, activist, empathetic, or critical gazes upon the representatives of state power and upon the disenfranchised.

One of Allen’s most ringing assertions in his twenty-first-century interviews is that “magic is, really, I think, the only way out of the mess that we’re in. If we don’t get a magical solution, we’re not going to get any kind of solution.” This chapter cites numerous magicians in Allen’s films to argue that he has no faith at all in the magic that human beings pretend to accomplish on stages or in séancelike settings, and that the two forms of magic he does affirm are romance (the giddily happy ending of Magic in the Moonlight) and luck. The chapter focuses on luck because it comes closest to a transcendent value—a form of intercessional magic—in his vision of things. So convinced is Allen of the efficacy of luck that he attributes positive audience reactions to his films to luck rather than to screenwriting or directorial or acting proficiency, which means that for him filmmaking is a thoroughgoing crapshoot. Chris Wilton in Match Point is lucky that the ring he hurls toward the Thames bounces off the balustrade and prevents his arrest for murder; Allen is fortunate that his movie about luck, Match Point, got lucky.

This chapter provides an overview of the buildings in the spaces exterior to the cathedral and their uses, with an emphasis on behaviour ‘out of place’, including vagrancy and violence. It focuses on the area of the north churchyard, in particular the bookshops and the College of Minor Canons, as revealed in the 1598 bishop’s visitation documents. Shopping for books is described, along with how it evolved to include browsing or loitering. The College of Minor Canons, built as a site for the clergy associated with the cathedral choir, operated much as did other London neighbourhoods. However, the permission of clerical marriage, the alteration of structures in the college, the practice of taking on lodgers, and the presence of women, transformed the meaning of the space. The individuals who lived there are considered, many of whom regularly transgressed social and religious norms and tore the fabric of community.