Prior to the emergence of the penitentiary and thus of the notion of punishment as “doing time,” the use of confinement to control beggars, thieves, and the insane did not necessarily distinguish among these categories of deviancy. At this phase in the history of punishment—prior to the American and French Revolutions—the classification process through which criminality is differentiated from poverty and mental illness had not yet developed. As the discourse on criminality and the corresponding institutions to control it distinguished the “criminal” from the “insane,” the gendered distinction
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