Architecture(s) of Correction: Confining Girls and Boys in 19th-Century Europe

The fate of formerly incarcerated adolescents preoccupied modern Europe. A pressing subject in local and national spheres, the reintegration of prisoners became an international question. It engaged representatives of states, philanthropists, priests, nuns, and social investigators in a dialogue. My dissertation research studies this question by concentrating on the trajectories of juvenile prisoners in nineteenth-century Europe. With a focus on architecture, I trace institutional systems and individual experiences across correctional spaces—within prisons, “outside” surveillance states, to the colonies. While this analysis reflects on the local circumstances of facilities, it considers the international dimension of debates about the reintegration of former criminals. I propose to share visual material from this transnational research during the poster session of the AHA annual meeting.

My research insists on the diversity that marked the experiences of juvenile offenders before and after their release from prison. A reflection on normality continues to arise, as I set out to demonstrate how anomalies framed seemingly stable norms and how this unstable relationship influenced “correctional architecture”. Through my poster presentation, I propose to visualize this instability in three ways: statistical material, architectural drawings, and maps of individual trajectories.

The statistical material is a result of my quantitative and qualitative analysis of archival documents. With a view to illustrate the wide system that surrounded formerly incarcerated individuals, my research comprises past and future consultation of archives in France, Germany, England, and Italy. I hope to share extracts of a comprehensive dataset of adolescent offenders in the second half of the nineteenth century.

My research on different spaces necessitates careful attention to the architecture of correctional facilities. The debate of state representatives about the rehabilitation of boys and girls materialized in a variety of institutions: public prisons, religious refuges, asylums, workhouses, farming houses, and agricultural colonies. In stressing the multi-faceted nature of this architecture of confinement, I propose to show architectural plans and drawings of individual institutions. These focus my work by providing case studies, as I make connections between spaces and temporalities.

The trajectories of individuals after their detention will be a third component of my poster presentation. My reading of the primary source material bridges different temporal episodes of inmates’ lives--the “before,” “during,” and “after” prison. In my aim to connect these distinct episodes, I map out the movements of formerly incarcerated adolescents. I propose to share some of these maps to illustrate the fragmented nature of the lives that mark my research.

Tracing the experiences of formerly incarcerated adolescents broadens our understanding of modern Europe in ways that reach beyond spaces of confinement. I hope to have the opportunity to present parts of this research—maps, statistical data, architectural drawings—in the 2024 meeting of the American Historical Association.