Territorialisation and Incarceration: The Nexus between Solitary Confinement, Religious Praxis and Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Poland and Lithuania

Abstract

Modern prisons are viewed in this paper as highly specific configurations, providing a critical infrastructure for the forging of a new relationship between subjects and the imperial state. The comparison of three rather different temporal and spatial practices of territorial incorporation makes it possible to describe the introduction of modern statehood in nineteenth century Poland and Lithuania as a long-term process, including a radically changed legal framework. It was accompanied by the ongoing codification of penal law by all three partitioning powers, which is outlined in the first part of this paper. The article offers a deep analysis of the establishment of new practices of incarceration in remote places (vis-à-vis the imperial capitals) as an inherent part of a changing relationship between centre and periphery within the Prussian, Russian and Habsburg Empires. They were among a broad range of new bureaucratic practices fostering the territorialisation of statehood. By enlarging the presence of selected actors in remote parts of the Central European Empires, they established a direct and bidirectional relationship between the representatives of the state and its subjects. By analysing the way in which the partitioning powers re-used monasteries as infrastructures for the introduction of new penal practices in the early nineteenth century, this article offers a better understanding of the long-term structural changes. A two-step argumentation follows the functional logic of the relationship between religious spaces designed for introspection and spaces for solitary confinement. As a consequence of the reform discourse, new prison complexes were erected in the second half of the nineteenth century. They produced a highly institutionalized and structured space for the reconfiguration of the relationship between the subject and the state. An ideal version of this relationship was described in normative documents, such as prison instructions. In analysing them, this article focuses on the state-led implementation of religious practices, as they played a major role in the redesign of this relationship following the establishment of new prison complexes.