Imperial Depths: Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen on the Roman Prison System (JP)
About this episode
The episode discusses the historical context of the Roman prison system and its implications for modern incarceration and rehabilitation efforts.
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…
More episodes of New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
- David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)
- Stuart Schrader, "Blue Power: How Police Organized to Serve and Protect Themselves" (Basic Books, 2026)
- Steven W. Thrasher, "The Overseer Class: A Manifesto" (Amistad, 2026)
- The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence
- Lee Ann S. Wang, "The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women" (Duke UP, 2026)
- The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America
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