Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
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Book • 2025
Larsen and Letteney compile archaeological, documentary, and literary evidence to map incarceration across the ancient Mediterranean from c.
300 BCE to c.
600 CE. They identify five recurring attributes—centrality, surveillance, separation, depth, and punitive variability—and argue prisons were integrated into social, economic, and political infrastructures.
The book challenges narratives that treat imprisonment as a modern invention, offering historical comparanda for contemporary debates about incarceration and abolition.
It draws on papyri, legal texts, mosaics, and built remains to reconstruct both practices and spaces of confinement.
The authors conclude that if a prison-free future is possible it will have to be intentionally created rather than recovered from an idyllic past.
300 BCE to c.
600 CE. They identify five recurring attributes—centrality, surveillance, separation, depth, and punitive variability—and argue prisons were integrated into social, economic, and political infrastructures.
The book challenges narratives that treat imprisonment as a modern invention, offering historical comparanda for contemporary debates about incarceration and abolition.
It draws on papyri, legal texts, mosaics, and built remains to reconstruct both practices and spaces of confinement.
The authors conclude that if a prison-free future is possible it will have to be intentionally created rather than recovered from an idyllic past.
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Imperial Depths: Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen on the Roman Prison system (JP)
