Civilisatie en emancipatie, maar van wie precies?

Civilization and emancipation, but whose exactly? Twee eeuwen gevangen revisited after thirty years In 1990, criminologist Herman Franke published a seminal book on 200 years detention in the Netherlands. For the occasion of the reissue of this book in 2020, the question is posed to what extent Franke’s vision of a gradual ‘emancipation’ of prisoners, in the realm of a societal ‘civilization process’, as it is put forward by Norbert Elias, still holds today. The author confronts the civilization perspective with the three main competing paradigms in penology, derived from the work of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Michel Foucault. After describing some recent developments in penal practices, he concludes that despite the fact that sanctioning is increasingly taking place within society, which can well be analyzed from an eliasian perspective, there is little reason to still adhere to the progress optimism, implicit in Franke’s book, and that today we rather witness an emancipation of the ‘angry citizen’, in which vulnerable groups in society, such as prisoners, are despised rather than ‘emancipated’.