Banishment

Most simply, criminals have been rendered harmless by getting rid of them, either by death or by banishment, outlawing, deportaВtion, or exile. The Incas made many crimes capital for this reason.

They never fined or confiscated goods since what was the point of allowing a poorer but still dangerous criminal to remain?¹ The etyВmology of the term exterminate suggests a combination of execuВtion and banishmentвЂ”death as the ultimate bringing beyond the boundary: ex terminus. Execution separated the criminal once and for all from society; exile served the same purpose less absolutely. Plato envisioned a form of imprisonment far from human habitation. The Greeks practiced ostracism, a popular vote to banish dangerous citizens for a decade.² Both Greek and Roman law allowed a choice between death and banishment.³ Exile could be temporary, as among the Greeks, who regarded it as a form of purification. Or it could be perpetual, as in ancient Egypt, where an ultimate punishment, debaptism, also eradicated criminals' names, obliterating offenders in both this world and the next.⁴ For serious crimes, such as parricide, the Greeks cast the offender's body out of the city, denying it burial and any postmortem home.⁵ The Chinese both banishedвЂ”physical removalвЂ”and excluded, a kind of internal isolation in shame. With excommunicationвЂ”a form of spiritual banishment in the Middle Ages (вЂњGod's outlawвЂќ)вЂ”exile acquired a new dimension.⁶

Banishment followed a certain topological logic that made it suitable in some times and places but largely useless elsewhere. It worked well in a sparsely populated world with abundant destinaВtions for exilesвЂ”ungoverned spaces.⁷ But as the nation-state, with its territorially defined sense of sovereignty, arose in the early modВern era, most spaces belonged to someone.

Frontiers became borВders, and formerly liminal territories were now apportioned.⁸ In such denser and more clearly delineated circumstances, your neighВbors implicitly had to cooperate in any banishment meted out as punishment and might indeed display their hostility precisely by giving your internal enemies refuge. In small tribal societies, banВishment could mean physical as well as social death. Among the Jews, karet was to be cut off from the people, and so flogging was considered preferable.⁹ Bereft of their property, exiles from ancient Athens lived hard-scrabble lives.¹⁰ At first, exile made a virtue of necessityвЂ”to escape vengeance a killer had to flee. In ancient Greece, atimia was a form of outlawry. Anyone might kill or plunder those so sentenced, thus encouraging distance. In largely unpoliced societies, outlawing offenders was the best that could be done with those who escaped apprehension.¹¹

Nonetheless, in antiquity exile was a well-regulated condition. Rules governed, for example, how shipwrecks cast up on forbidВden shores should conduct themselves. If they kept one foot in the water, they were spared until they could depart again. Recidivists, tried in territories they were banished from, mounted their defense from a boat, with the judges sitting on the beach.¹² In the Old TestaВment, exiles went to one of six designated and signposted cities of refuge, where they were protected from avengers and lived rent free until their case had been resolved.¹³ Cain, though threatened with wandering the earth, was in fact taken under God's protection, as indicated by a mark put upon him (but protected from whom given that the only other humans alive were his parents, Adam and Eve?). He settled in neighboring Nod, east of Eden, where he founded the city of Enoch and a dynasty, including a great-great-great-greatВgreat grandchild Jubal, father of all who play stringed instruments and pipesвЂ”not a bad outcome for the first fratricide.¹⁴

Before modern nations patrolled their borders and transported offenders, outlawing, banishing, or exiling criminals helped keep them from one particular place, without necessarily specifying where they should be.

Outlawing was less precise and possibly less effective than banishment or exile. The ancient Chinese spelled out in sentencing how far defendants had to remove themselves. In medieval Iceland, a small island nation, outlawry in practice meant banishment. Along with fines, it was the most common sanction.¹⁵ Medieval exile could mean having to go live in a certain place, such as a monastery, or being forbidden to linger anywhere for more than a few days and thus sentenced to perpetual wandering.¹⁶ The early modern Spaniards often removed those sentenced to hard labor to Africa. The eighteenth-century Parisian police gave first-time petty offenders the option of returning to their native provincesвЂ” banishment lite.¹⁷ Other than killers, exile was often used to remove political enemies for whom normal penalties seemed inappropriВate. Ovid was banished from Rome, and this function remained well into the Middle Ages.¹⁸ The Bourbon monarchs sent nobles who had fallen out of favor at court abroad or, for lesser offenses, to their provincial estates. The French revolutionaries made clear that old-regime refugees were never welcome back. The Napoleonic penal code banished political criminals, but until midcentury the lack of suitable French territories left this exile a largely theoretiВcal option.¹⁹ The English began transporting ordinary criminals to the colonies in the early seventeenth century. In an era when prisВons were porous and inefficient, banishment was a more reliable incapacitationвЂ”excarceration instead of incarceration. A century later, having tallied up the exorbitant costs of domestic prisons, they started deporting convicts to Australia.²⁰

In medieval England, vastly more convicts were outlawed than hanged. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost all (97 percent) noncapital criminals in Amsterdam were banished. BanishВment from Paris was also far more common than imprisonment.²¹ With the revolution, the French began exiling political prisoners to Guiana in South America, and then after 1848 and the Commune of 1870 they set in motion waves of expulsion to other places as well, such as New Caledonia.

After 1885, they transported hardened crimiВnals to colonial penal settlementsвЂ”the bloodless guillotines, so called because of their high mortality. Having once begun, the French continued this practice long after others had ceased, well into the 1930s.²² Before the American Revolution, three-fifths of all English male convicts were transported. Even in the 1830s, about one-third of convicts went to other colonies.²³ The English convict transports arguably fell victim to their own success. New South Wales became a prosperous colony with a largely free population. As of the 1840s, the residents grew reluctant to admit more transportees.²⁴

On a larger scale, groups defined as enemies, whether religious, ethnic, or political, were banished. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492, followed by Moriscos (descendants of Muslim converts) in 1609. French Protestants, the Huguenots, were forced out of the country after 1685. Native Americans were expelled from their ancestral lands across the nineteenth century, as were other first peoples in the English settler colonies. The Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915 occurred in the guise of forced popВulation transfers. Greeks and Turks expelled each other in mutual population transfers in 1923. The Madagascar Plan, proposed in June 1940 by the Nazis as a means of ridding Europe of Jews, was a last delusional fantasy of large-scale banishment. The mass killing of Jews in death camps began in mid-1942 when it became clear, as the German advance into the Soviet Union bogged down after StalВingrad, that merely pushing them eastward out of Europe was no longer an option.²⁵ Such вЂњexcisionary violence,вЂќ with banishment and extermination the endpoints on a continuum, has arguably characterized not only totalitarian regimes but also the colonial policies of otherwise modern liberal states. In the relatively moderВate guise of ethnic cleansing, where deportation but not death was the aim, excisionary violence has been practiced over the past two centuries in most European nations, in the partition of India, and in British-ruled Palestine.²⁶

Internal exile was used instead of prison.

In the sixteenth cenВtury, the Florentines sent convicts to malarial areas around Pisa and Livorno. CorfuвЂ”now the playground of yacht ownersвЂ”was a VeneВtian penal colony. More generally, confino was a form of internal exile to remote locales.²⁷ Carlo Levi wrote memorably of his time in exile to a small village in Lucania under Mussolini in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945). The Russians put Siberia to use. Because the tsars exiled political prisoners, a stint in Siberia became a Communist badge of honor, Vladimir Lenin taking his nom de plume from the Lena River. The Soviets, in turn, adopted both internal and exterВnal exile, using domestic passports to eliminate freedom of moveВment. Large swaths of the country were turned into de facto penal colonies, with harsh terrain hampering escape as surely as barbed wire.²⁸ In imperial China, exiles from one province were always sent to a particular twinned province. Only in the early twentieth cenВtury did internal exile begin to be dismantled here.²⁹

However common in the past, banishment has largely ended today. Pursued too vigorously, it created its own problems, as when the Chinese discovered in the nineteenth century that they had banВished so many prisoners to Ili in Xinjiang that the local governor worВried they would ally with вЂњoutside barbariansвЂќ to foment rebellion.³⁰ Prison and camps took over the incapacitation that banishment had once achieved. Exile today is a polite fiction, allowing peaceВful regime change in autocracies. Former dictators flee prosecution, taking themselves off on last-minute flights to friendly neighbors, trailing mistresses, wardrobes, and suitcases of cash. The Ugandan dicВtator Idi Amin was emblematic of modern exileвЂ”a well-upholstered pariah, holed up as guest of the Saudis on the top floors of the Jeddah Novotel.³¹ Exiles today tend to be ideological refugees, given shelter in sympathetic nationsвЂ”such as the Allende Chileans, the Tanzanian socialists, and the Kurdish independence fighters in Sweden during the 1970s.

Today's sanctuary cities in America protect undocumented immigrants, who are viewed sympathetically as victims of circumВstance and harsh federal immigration legislation. Embassies, too, at times give sanctuary to prominent dissidents abroad, and churches continue their role as places beyond secular law.

But in other respects exile has become morally impossible. BanВishment assumes that transgression in one place is inconsequential elsewhere, that no common legal and moral standards hold everyВwhere. Though having committed serious offenses, criminal exiles were tolerated abroad. That is no longer possible. Though Socrates drew the opposite conclusion, he put his finger on the problem when he refused an offer of exile, preferring compulsory suicide: Why would foreigners put up with his ideas if his fellow AtheВnians did not?³² Real criminals can no longer be banished. Far from accepting exported miscreants, a vigilant abroad requires they be kept at home. Australia has recently drawn the logical consequence, preventing pedophiles from traveling abroad by refusing them pass- ports.³³ A universal moral codex by and large holds globally, and a violator of it in one place would only exceptionally be tolerated elsewhere. The banished have vanished.

That shift in turn has led to a revival of domestic exile. The resiВdence of sex offenders in the US, for example, is regulated much like the Soviet system of internal banishment. They are required to register, and their neighbors are notified, free to draw their own conВclusions. The restrictions on their housing (proximity to schools, parks, and the like) are often so expansive that nowhere suitable remains.³⁴ In New York City, only 14 of 270 homeless shelters can receive released sex offenders. Those who cannot find a bed in these overcrowded facilities often remain in prison.³⁵ Thanks to GPS monitoring, not just residence but movement too can be restricted.³⁶ Domestic banishment also continues in another sense, at least in the United States and Britain. With the increased use of true life sentences, either multiple or without parole, prison has become a means to remove offenders permanently from society, with no expectation of rehabilitation. In 2012, a third of all AmeriВcans serving life sentences had no prospect of parole.³⁷ Sentences in the United States also sometimes explicitly remove defendants from their local communities, as in the aptly named Project Exile.³⁸ In addition, European countries are increasingly deporting foreign criminals after they serve their sentences, back to homelands they often never or only long ago lived in.³⁹

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Source: Baldwin Peter. Command And Persuade: Crime, Law, And The State Across History. MIT Press,2021. вЂ” 475 p.. 2021

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Banishment

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