New Books Network Imperial Depths: Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen on the Roman Prison system (JP)
Mar 12, 2026
Matthew Larsen, scholar of early Christianity and material culture, and Mark Letteney, archaeologist of incarceration and military history, trace ancient Roman carceral networks. They map prisons' centrality, visibility, separation, labor roles, and legal management. The conversation challenges Foucault-style origin stories and considers what a prison-free future might require.
49:37
Prisons Have No Single Origin
- The prison has no single birthday and appears across many ancient Mediterranean societies in varied forms.
- Mark Letteney argues origins-seeking is the wrong question and that prisons are durable institutions appearing independently from 300 BCE to 600 CE.
Ancient Jails And Prisons Often Overlapped
- The modern jail/prison distinction (pretrial vs punitive) is largely recent; ancient facilities often held both awaiting-trial and convicted people together.
- Mark Letteney notes purpose-built punitive carceral spaces exist in the ancient record, with separate pretrial-only facilities rare until the 6th century CE.
Five Recurring Features Of Roman Carceral Spaces
- Roman carceral spaces commonly combined five recurring features: centrality, surveillance, separation, depth, and punitive variability.
- Matthew Larsen stresses Roman civic prisons were often central, underground, and designed to enable watching and differential treatment.
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Intro
00:00 • 2min
Book overview and aims
01:36 • 2min
Scope and period of study
04:00 • 1min
Prison origins and the 'birthday' argument
05:25 • 2min
Jails vs prisons in antiquity
07:39 • 3min
Five features of ancient carceral spaces
10:10 • 1min
Centrality and architectural logic
11:20 • 1min
Prisons as public displays of control
12:36 • 5min
Ad break
17:18 • 12sec
Carceral infrastructure as societal backbone
17:30 • 7min
Prison and settler-colonial control
24:23 • 4min
Mines, idle bodies, and prison labor
28:20 • 6min
Who runs prisons and who is confined
33:51 • 4min
Literary perspectives on deviance
37:53 • 2min
Implications for abolitionist thinking
39:25 • 5min
Recommended readings by the guests
43:56 • 3min
Outro
47:06 • 60sec
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Who Would Believe a Prisoner?
Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920
Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson (editors)
Edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson, this collection uses prison archives and writings by incarcerated women to tell the history of the first women's prison in Indiana from 1848 to 1920.
The volume centers incarcerated voices, revealing knowledge and perspectives often excluded from official histories and reforms.
It exposes how inmate-authored records disrupt institutional narratives and illuminate everyday realities of confinement, labor, and reform.
The book is praised for highlighting marginalized epistemologies and for its methodological value in prison studies and public history.
Mark Letteney recommended it as a model for taking prisoners' knowledge seriously.
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The Rules of Ulpian
Ulpian
Ulpian's legal writings, compiled in collections such as the Digest, were highly influential in shaping Roman law and later legal traditions.
His aphorisms and systematic expositions addressed private law, criminal law, and procedural matters, informing juristic debates about punishment and custody.
Though not a single authored modern book, references to 'The Rules of Ulpian' denote these juristic principles used by scholars to understand legal theory in antiquity.
The podcast description cites Ulpian among juridical sources relevant to incarceration practices.
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Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
Paperback edition details not explicitly separated; see page for full details
Matthew D.C. Larsen and Mark Letteney
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.
#
Tales of Nevèrÿon
Samuel R Delany
Samuel R. Delany's Tales of Nevèrÿon is a linked series of stories set in a richly imagined pre-modern world that interrogates slavery, desire, language, and social orders.
Combining mythic storytelling with sharp social critique, Delany examines how power and bondage operate in intimate and institutional forms, often focusing on mining and forced labor.
The series uses speculative fiction to unsettle normative histories and highlight alternative moral economies.
John Plotz recommended it for its evocative parallels to ancient practices of imprisonment and mine labor discussed in the episode.
The Neveryon tales remain influential for blending literary experimentation with political inquiry.
#17343
• Mentioned in 3 episodes
The House of the Dead
Notes from a Dead House
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, published between 1860 and 1862.
It is based on Dostoevsky's own experiences in a Siberian prison camp, where he spent four years following his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle.
The novel follows the narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, as he navigates the harsh realities of prison life, undergoing a spiritual transformation amidst the brutality and monotony of the camp.
Through vivid descriptions and philosophical discussions, Dostoevsky critiques the prison system while highlighting the resilience and humanity of the convicts.
#1985
• Mentioned in 22 episodes
Discipline and Punish
The Birth of the Prison
Simon Prebble
mechil foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" is a seminal work in social theory that examines the evolution of punishment and its relationship to power.
Foucault traces the shift from public executions to more subtle forms of disciplinary control in modern societies.
He argues that power operates not only through repression but also through the normalization of behavior.
The book's analysis of surveillance, discipline, and the creation of docile bodies has had a profound impact on various fields, including criminology, sociology, and literary studies.
It remains a crucial text for understanding the workings of power in contemporary society.
#47086
Stigma
The Machinery of Inequality
Imogen Tyler
Imogen Tyler's "Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality" examines the mechanisms through which social inequalities are produced and maintained.
The book focuses on the role of stigma in creating and reinforcing social hierarchies, exploring how stigmatized groups are marginalized and excluded from society.
Tyler's analysis draws on various theoretical perspectives, including critical theory and social psychology, to understand the complex interplay of power, identity, and social control.
The book provides a critical examination of the ways in which stigma operates in different social contexts, highlighting the need for social justice and equality.
"Stigma" offers a powerful critique of social inequalities and provides valuable insights into the challenges of overcoming stigma and promoting social inclusion.
#419
• Mentioned in 69 episodes
The Dawn of Everything
A New History of Humanity
David Wengrow
David Graeber
This book offers a dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging fundamental assumptions about social evolution, the development of agriculture, cities, the state, democracy, and inequality.
Graeber and Wengrow argue that traditional theories of human history, such as those posited by Hobbes and Rousseau, are not supported by anthropological or archaeological evidence.
Instead, they show that humans have lived in large, complex, but decentralized societies for millennia, often without ruling elites or hierarchical systems.
The authors draw on extensive research in archaeology and anthropology to reveal a history that is more varied and hopeful than previously assumed, emphasizing human experimentation with different social arrangements and the potential for new forms of freedom and societal organization.
#68266
Asylums
Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates
Erving Goffman
This book is an analysis of life in 'total institutions' – closed worlds such as prisons, army training camps, naval vessels, boarding schools, monasteries, nursing homes, and mental hospitals.
Goffman describes what these institutions make of the inmate and what the inmate can make of life inside them.
Special attention is given to mental hospitals, drawing on the author's year of field work at St. Elizabeth's in Washington, D.C.
The book argues that the most important factor in forming a mental-hospital patient is the institution itself, rather than the illness, and that the patient's reactions and adjustments are similar to those of inmates in other types of institutions.
The notion of abolishing prisons strikes some as an impossible dream: could we could reasonably conceive of a society that responded to harm without the possibility of long-term confinement in purpose-built institutions? To others, we already have a template. Didn’t Michel Foucault long ago show us that prisons as they exist now–in all their horror, in all their commitment not just to jail people before trial but also to imprison them afterwards–come about only in the modern episteme, concomitant with capitalism and all sorts of attendant evils?
Actually, nope. Prisons are as old as the Romans and very likely much older than that. In Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (California, 2025). Mark Letteney (a U Washington historian who wrote The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity)directs excavations in a legionary amphitheater) and Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen, author of Gospels before the Book) document an ancient and durable prison system system with five key features: Centrality, surveillance, separation depth, and punitive variability.
Their RTB conversation explores key aspects of that system and its present-day legacy or parallels. Yet it ends on a note of cautious optimism from Letteney: just because we don’t find a prison-free world in ancient Rome is no reason to give up the struggle. Whatever better solution to societal safety and rehabilitation awaits us in the future, it must be something we ourselves set out to build anew.
Mentioned
Michel Foucault’s foundational Discipline and Punish (1975)
Adam Gopknik reviews Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration in The New Yorker
The Rules of Ulpian (3rd century jurist)
Wengrow and Graeber’s foundational and heavily debated The Dawn of Everything (2021)
Spencer Weinreich’s work on solitary confinement)
Erving Goffman Stigma (1963) and Asylums (1961)
Livy (eg in his History of Rome on prisons and prisoners
Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson
Libanius (on the abuse of Prisoners)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The House of the Dead
Samuel Delany Tales of Neveryon
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