How to Be(come) the Perfect Inmate? Working the System in the Prison Workhouse at Christianshavn, 1769–1789

ABSTRACT

Between 1769 and 1789, the warden of the prison workhouse at Christianshavn wrote around 300 statements to accompany petitions made for inmates’ release. Drawing on the theories of Arlie Russell Hochschild, this article argues that the statements detail the feeling rules of the prison workhouse and provide evidence that the inmates ‘worked the system’ by performing emotional labour in accordance with said feeling rules. Thus, the article uncovers and connects practices and tactics of coercion and autonomy in the prison workhouse, examining how inmates navigated the authorities’ expectations as a tactic of escape from imprisonment and labour coercion.

KEYWORDS:

• Prison workhouse
• feeling rules
• emotional labour
• petitioning
• labour
• coercion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This article builds on the author’s PhD dissertation, which explores the development of the prison workhouse at Christianshavn in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Valentin, “Feelings of Imprisonment”.

2. The prison workhouse at Christianshavn consisted of two wards – the spin house and the rasp house. The rasp house was considered the harshest part of the prison; labour was more intensive than in the spin house.

3. The introduction of the Danish Code in 1683 had given the people the right to petition the king in all sorts of matters – there were, however, strict rules and conduct connected with such proceedings. Petitioning in eighteenth-century Denmark is explored in Bregnsbo, Folk skriver. For more on early modern petitions, see Voss, Petitions in Social History; Munck, “Petitions and ‘Legitimate’ Engagement”; Almbjär, “The Problem with Early-Modern Petitions”; Berggren, “Capital Crime”.

4. Bregnsbo, Folk skriver, 38.

5. While early modern petitions have garnered much scholarly attention, the statements connected to the petition have received almost none. As far as I can see, the statements have only been used as secondary information in connection to studies of petitions. Consequently, there are no larger studies of the statements nor their influence on the success of petitions. The lack of research on these statements might stem from difficulties finding them in larger concentrations, as they would have to be requested from many different authorities.

6. The statements are found in a series of letter books from the prison workhouse’s archives at The Danish National Archives. See the unprinted sources section of the bibliography.

7. Such information on the inmates stems from a database containing the digitalized register of the prison workhouse from 1772 onwards. This database is part of the larger research project entitled ‘Enslaved by the State’ led by Johan Heinsen.

8. Letter book 1781–89, 311. All translations are my own, with some modifications to the original for readability.

9. Although a sociologist, Hochschild’s insights have often been considered by historians and have influenced several theories in the history of emotions. Many others have drawn inspiration from Hochschild’s work: for example, anthropologist James C. Scott drew on Hochschild’s theory of emotional labour in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) when describing what he calls public and hidden transcripts. These terms have appeared more widely in historical works than Hochschild’s theories have.

10. Hochschild, Managed Heart, 29.

11. Ibid., 106.

12. Hochschild notes this process as two kinds of acts – surface acting and deep acting. Ibid., 38–49.

13. Ibid., 29; Hochschild, “Emotion Work,” 552, 561–6.

14. Michel Foucault’s concept of surveillance and the training of ‘docile bodies’ in the nineteenth-century panoptic prison system portrays a somewhat similar mechanism regarding the disciplinary logics of the prison – even if it does focus on a completely different system to the one dealt with here. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. Still, Foucault’s concept of power is unidirectional and often neglects individual agency (as argued by Spierenburg, “Punishment, Power, and History,” 625–31 and Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 21); as such, in the context of exploring inmate agency, I have not found his theory useful to think with. Moreover, within the historiography of early modern punishment, Foucault have received heavy criticism both in his disregard of the early modern prison institutions and in his flawed timeline of the development of the ‘modern’ prison. See Sherman, “Tensions of Colonial Punishment”; De Vito and Lichtenstein, “Writing a Global History”; Heinsen, “Historicizing Extramural Convict Labour”.

15. Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 7.

16. Ibid., 111–2.

17. For this article, it was not possible to study the original petitions penned by the inmates themselves. Bregnsbo explains that only a small quantity of the original petitions exists today and are often scattered across different archives. His own study is of the protocols of the petitions, which only contain summaries of the petitions and thus do not allow us direct access to the petitioners’ narrative tactics. Bregnsbo, Folk skriver, 60–1.

18. Valentin, “Feelings of Imprisonment,” chap. 2.

19. The last part of the eighteenth century is often characterized by the changing penal practice of the period. Crimes that otherwise would have been punished with death sentences were increasingly mitigated and reduced to life imprisonment. For instance, the crime of clandestine childbirth (the act of giving birth in secret with the loss of the child) was, according to law, supposed to be punished with beheading; however, from the 1750s, most of these women were instead sentenced to life imprisonment in prison workhouses. See Nielsen, Letfærdige qvindfolk, 76. Another example is the punishment of property crimes, which underwent several legislative changes in the period. In 1771 it was decided that grand larceny, night burglary, and third-time petty theft offences should be punished with dishonourable flogging and life imprisonment instead of the death penalty; in 1789 it was first decided to lower the punishment of petty theft from life to time-limited imprisonment. See Krogh, Staten og de besiddelsesløse.

20. The institution known as the slaveries is described by Johan Heinsen in this volume.

21. The dataset is available on the data platform Carceral Copenhagen; see DOI: https://doi.org/10.5278/4fed7097-53f4-4a10-8dd7-e2965dc21935.

22. Letter book 1769–76, 306.

23. Such incidents of conflict have been explored in Valentin, “Feelings of Imprisonment,” chaps 7 and 8.

24. Letter book 1777–80, 358.

25. Having the stigma of dishonesty connected to oneself effectively separated the punished from the rest of society. The stigma was passed from the executioner to the punished as part of their punishment – for instance, by public flogging, a common punishment for theft. See Krogh, “Bødlen og Natmandens”.

26. Letter book 1769–76, 159.

27. Letter book 1769–76, 222.

28. Letter book 1777–80, 109–10.

29. Letter book 1781–89, 116.

30. For example, in the cases of theft, begging, and vagrancy, repeat offenders would receive a more severe punishment contingent on how many times they had repeated the crime.

31. Letter book 1769–76, 446.

32. Letter book 1769–76, 63.

33. Letter book 1781–89, 63.

34. Such a purpose is evident in the very naming of the institution. From 1790, the prison workhouse was entitled the Tugt-, Rasp- og Forbedringshuset (forbedring meaning improvement). For more on the improvement qualities of the prison workhouse, see Larner, “Good Household”; and Koefoed, “Negotiating Memory.

35. Letter book 1769–76, 104.

36. Letter book 1781–89, 45–6.

37. Letter book 1769–76, 172–3.

38. Letter book 1777–80, 361–2.

39. Letter book 1769–76, 252–3.

40. Letter book 1769–76, 230–1.

41. Letter book 1777–80, 45.

42. For more on the perception of the idealistic citizen in the last part of the eighteenth century, see Koefoed, “Den gode kristne,” esp. 223–7, in which Koefoed examines the confessional perspective on good behaviour. See also Engelhardt, Borgerskab og fællesskab, esp. 245–7, in which Engelhardt discusses the social aims of patriotic societies.

43. Letter book 1777–80, 263–4.

44. The work requirements of the inmates are explored in Valentin, “Feelings of Imprisonment,” chaps 3 and 4.

45. Letter book 1769–76, 269.

46. Letter book 1769–76, 295.

47. Letter book 1769–76, 172–3.

48. Letter book 1769–76, 176–7.

49. Letter book 1769–76, 428.

50. Letter book 1781–9, 124.

51. Letter book 1777–80, 51.

52. Letter book 1769–76, 143.

53. Letter book 1769–76, 186.

54. Letter book 1769–76, 158.

55. Letter book 1769–76, 375.

56. Letter book 1769–76, 159.

57. Letter book 1769–76, 390–1.

58. Letter book 1777–80, 23, 329–30, 374; Letter book 1781–89, 380.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emilie Luther Valentin

Emilie luther Valentin (b. 1993) is a cultural and social historian. She has a doctoral degree from Aalborg University with the dissertation Feelings of Imprisonment. Experiences from the prison workhouse at Christianshavn, 1769-1800 (2022). Her main research interests are crime and punishment in the early modern period, history of emotions, and history of experience.