Michel Foucault's provocative critique of the modern prison system, first published in 1975, raises important questions about the evolution of justice in the West.

Foucault argues that European justice, hitherto dominated by gruesome acts of torture and public execution, evolved rapidly at the end of the eighteenth century into one in which most lawbreakers were impri­soned, a shift that he argues created a permanently depoliticised criminal class.

Recent research has turned this assumption on its head by revealing that pre-modern European justice was less draconian and more flexible than previously assumed. Judicial violence peaked in western and central Europe between 1400 and 1600 and declined rapidly thereafter. Its intensification occurred with the birth of stronger states at the end of the medieval period. Increasing reliance on judicial torture as an interrogation tool and execution as a form of punishment resulted from the convergence of three phenomena: the reintegration of Roman law into criminal procedure, a Christian convic­tion that pain could purge sin, and the expansion of secular courts dispensing criminal justice. Even during the 200 years in which both secular and ecclesiastical courts regularly practised torture and execution, however, most criminals were not subjected to either. Our focus on sensational execution rituals has exaggerated the prevalence of capital punishment and underplayed the importance of more commonplace punitive techniques, including fines, prison sentences, honour punishments and banishment. In fact, justice in the West was not inherently violent before 1750 and then suddenly transformed by the Enlightenment, modern democracy, liberal ideals and capitalism. Rather, both torture and rates of execution were already declining in Europe during the seventeenth century, a period during which the utility of corporal punishment began to be called into question and states developed other, more effective, forms of social control.