The Labour party is preparing to get weak on crime and release one batch of criminals to bang up another. What a difference that will make to the safety of our streets! The Roman emperor Augustus did things differently: when the system got blocked up, he released all those whom he considered to be held on vexatious charges.
What blocked the system, however, was not imprisonment but the number of people detained while awaiting trial on charges relating to the civil war which brought Augustus to power. Those involved were the elites (for whom detainment was shameful) being ‘held on charges for the pleasure of their enemies’. It was all part of a legal system that went back a long way.
Rome’s XII Tables (c. 450 bc) decreed that the plaintiff was permitted to ‘lay hands’ on the defendant to bring him to court. When it came to low-level crime, that remained the rule: self-help and local judgments were the order of the day. The authorities would intervene only if called in. Violent criminals and ringleaders of serious political and social disorder, however, would be seized and held safely somewhere before trial. Or not. Cicero was exiled for executing, without trial, five of the conspirators involved in Catiline’s revolt of 63 bc. They were taken to Rome’s one designated prison, the Tullianum – ‘squalid, dark, and stinking, it was a revolting and terrifying sight’ – 12ft underground and strangled.
The normal holding sites for the lower orders in cities were e.g. barracks housing (chained) gladiators overnight and, across Italy, in slave quarters in private homes and large estates, amphitheatres and military detention centres (as seen in the New Testament). The elites, however, were allowed to be housed by their chums in more civilised surroundings.
What is most interesting about all this is that imprisonment as a punishment simply did not exist in the ancient world (they preferred physical punishments, exile and execution). It was introduced in medieval times to reform people. We are still waiting.
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