Evangelicalism, penal theory and the politics of criminal law reform in England, 1808–30,

There was a time, in the 19th century, when self-described penal reformers employed a highly charged history of an earlier period as part of their campaign for change. They drew a sharp contrast between what they characterized as the barbaric practices of the past and their own enlightened measures. Confident that the angel of history smiled upon their efforts, they struggled mightily to create the penal system with which we still live. For many years professional historians celebrated reformers as heroes of a narrative these advocates of change had helped to produce. By the 20th century, however, scholars offered an alternative interpretation of reform, one that criticizes in equal measure both its successes and failures. Competing versions of this complaint have become more numerous and sophisticated with the passage of time. Some identified reform as a mechanism for defending and reproducing a particu-lar economic order. Others focused more closely on the schemes for controlling the lower classes. Michel Foucault went so far as to identify the rise of contemporary penality with the very existence of modernity itself. In all of these cases history has been turned against reform, exposing not so much its short-comings as its thoroughly compromised natur