In The Prison before the Panopticon, Jacob Abolafia gives us a clearly written, wide-ranging, and carefully argued study that unearths a robust discourse about prisons and incarceration in works of political theory that long pre-date the modern prison and its emergence as the central institution of state punishment. While Abolafia is mining a very different intellectual terrain, his wonderful book reminds one of Giorgio Agamben’s claim in his 1998 book, Homo Sacer, to have “completed” Michel Foucault’s project by, in part, revealing the biopolitics of bare life in Ancient Greece and Rome. Abolafia, similarly, finds arguments for prison and incarceration in political theory texts written well before the erection of the Walnut Street prison of 1790, which Foucault did so much to spectacularize in his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish.

In the introduction, the author sets out a framework for understanding the logic of justification for pre-panoptic prisons. These justifications cluster within two strands — the “popular authorization approach” and the “Platonic correctional (or reformative) approach” (p.6). Abolafia traces the more familiar reformist/rehabilitation strand back to Plato’s Laws. Particularly intriguing is his reconstruction of a less familiar “popular authorization” strand of prison justification that he argues stretches from the Athenian polis to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651. Theorists within this orientation grapple with the paradoxes of a citizenry (or covenanting subjects) who embrace punishments that, in turn, undermine their political status. There is a fascinating discussion of the complex political debates about the place of imprisonment (of citizens) in democratic Athens. Where incarceration was most justified, he writes, is with respect to the “vertical” relationship between the citizenry and elites, whose incarceration for crimes against the public is consistent with democratic equality and respectful treatment. Incarceration remained deeply contested and even paradoxical for democratic Athens. It was simultaneously justified by the citizenry and its juries as a means to hold elites in check and viewed as a degrading assault on the citizen’s body. In this respect, incarceration offered an uncomfortable reminder of the slavery upon which they relied and of the tyrannical rule from which they recently emerged.

Significantly, Abolafia argues that Athenian democracy did not justify the prison in terms of its capacity to rehabilitate the offender – that line of argumentation begins not in the trials of the Athenian city-state but in the work of their critic, Plato. In chapter 2, the author describes how Plato “kicked away the democratic ladder” (p.46). In the Laws, Plato defends reformist imprisonment as the corrective for crimes of impiety that were rooted in ignorance of the truth, both for “instructing the weak-minded and refuting the strong-minded” (p.61). Plato then constructs a prison in speech focused on the project of soulcraft, a version of the disciplinary power of the prison that Foucault sees as distinctively modern. Chapter 3 on Thomas More delves further into the rehabilitative approach and shows how hard labor became central to corrective punishment in More’s utopia.

The democratic justification for prisons (or something similar) returns with the early moderns in chapter 4. While Hobbes may be no democrat, his covenant instituting the sovereign brings us back to the democratic paradoxes of incarceration. And like the Athenians, Hobbes “identifies elite political crime” (p.160) as the proper target of imprisonment.

Bentham’s prison takes center stage in Abolafia’s final substantive chapter (chapter 5), and here the author masterfully reconstructs the educative logic of punishment for Bentham. As he saw it, the prison should operate according to the principle of frugality in two ways: Bentham’s panopticons “use the least resources while maximizing production, but they are also devoted to producing frugal behavior in their inmates” (p.145).

The Hobbes chapter is one of the highlights of the book, though it begins oddly, with references to “the social contract between sovereign and subject” (p.103). This misunderstands Hobbes’s account of “commonwealth by institution” which is a covenant between subjects producing the sovereign. The idea of a contract between sovereign and subject does prefigure the significance of “commonwealth by acquisition” (where the subjects covenant with a conquering sovereign), which figures importantly later in the argument. However, none of this is clear at the chapter’s onset. Once the author turns to the language of authorization, the analysis gets on firmer ground. Indeed, a great contribution of this book is to use the specific discussion of incarceration to offer an improved understanding of some of the very vexing tensions and contradictions in Hobbes’s theory concerning the relationship between individual rights to resistance and authorized sovereign power. Why would subjects authorize the sovereign to mete out punishments up to and including death when the purpose of covenanting was to stay alive?

Hobbes acknowledges this problem with his inclusion of rights to resist the sovereign. This is where Abolafia argues that incarceration steps in to, as it were, soften the contradiction: “Prison is violent enough to release an inmate from her obligations, but at the same time does not let her actually leave or resist the sovereign.” (pp.123-124) The moment the sovereign decides to release the subject from incarceration (after observing the effects of incarceration and judging the trustworthiness of the offender) becomes analogous to the moment of contracting, at least in the commonwealth by acquisition form, when conquest transitions into political incorporation (p.124). This analysis is intriguing and insightful, and it points to ideas around political obligation that might be further developed. The Hobbes example also gestures towards the fact that Abolafia’s two ways of justifying punishment in general and incarceration specifically – democratic authorization and rehabilitation – were often not so distinct but instead were intermingled within particular theories and texts.

Abolafia ends the book with a short conclusion that embraces the democratic authorization tradition, particularly in its insistence on using prison sparingly and as a restraint against the powerful. He argues too that, when measured against the popular authorization framework, the contemporary carceral system of the U.S. is almost entirely unjust. However, unlike prison abolitionists, he would maintain imprisonment for “serious violent crime” and “the crimes of the most powerful” (p.161). The conclusion is suggestive, but this reader wished for more here. Completely reorienting the criminal justice system away from the control of the most impoverished and vulnerable members of the community and towards the vigorous pursuit of elite crime may be as unlikely an outcome as abolition, given the prevailing organization of power and privilege. Just as prison abolitionists identify and pursue “non-reformist reforms” that can be viewed as steps along the path to a world without prisons, it would have been useful if Abolafia had identified specific measures and reforms that would promote “the aim of democratic incarceration” (p.161).

In the final analysis, The Prison before the Panopticon succeeds in complicating and enriching the story we tell about prisons as a distinctively modern institution without displacing that history. The soulcraft of the high modern penitentiary is different from Platonic soulcraft. Abolafia himself acknowledges that, for instance, “Bentham and the modern prison really do represent a turning point in the history of reformative reason” (p.155). The point is not to establish a line of unbroken continuity, but to show instead how “the prison is both thoroughly modern and deeply rooted in European political thought” (p.3). The depth of those roots, however, is sometimes called into question, especially when the institution of the prison and incarceration recede from view in Abolafia’s analysis. (At points, he discusses theoretical treatments of punishment more generally in which imprisonment only figures as one among several possible penalties.) Still, this excellent, well-crafted book shows how “the era of the prison before the Panopticon” (p.157) contains a rich set of reflections on incarceration’s relation to the boundaries of the political community and to the formation of subjectivity. It is an important and valuable addition to the political theory of police, prisons, and punishment.