Cells in a Hot Climate: Globalizing Solitary Confinement, 1819–1928

This paper examines the globalization of the penitentiary movement, especially the practice of solitary confinement, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seeking to restore the contingency to the worldwide transplantation of European and North American models of punishment. The paper offers a comparative analysis of the abortive projects for penitentiaries in British India with the construction of the Presidio Modelo, a monumental prison in the Republic of Cuba. Reconstructing the deliberations of British colonial officials in London and across the Indian Subcontinent through manuscript letters, official reports, and printed treatises, I reveal how prison architecture and administration became a key site for defining cultural, racial, ethnic, and climatic difference. The possibility of globalizing solitary confinement was never obvious or straightforward, entangling punishment with a sprawling body of knowledge, from anthropology to architecture to meteorology. In envisioning solitary confinement’s transfer to India, the speculations of administrators like Mountstuart Elphinstone, David Scott, and Richard Bourke invert the familiar narrative of the colony as the laboratory of the metropole. The paper interrogates colonialists’ investment in a global regime of punishment, linking the empire to a carceral modernity across continents and legal systems. The second half of the paper investigates the post-colonial reception of that carceral modernity, through the Presidio Modelo, the panopticon prison constructed on the Island of the Pines in the 1920s. I survey Cuban literary, architectural, and political contestations of the Presidio, as solitary confinement became an emblem variously of the nation’s claim to modernity and of the decline of democracy and political freedoms under Gerardo Machado. The paper closes with a reflection on the resonance of prison history with global history, arguing that modern punishment relies upon a rhetoric of universality, even as the practical work of globalizing institutions and philosophies undercuts those very claims.