Excerpt from Oriental Prisons: Prisons and Crime in India, the Andaman Islands, Burmah, China, Japan, Egypt, Turkey Who does not know of the peculiar sufferings and wrongs inflicted for so many generations on the gentle peasant in the proud land of the Pharaohs, of whom it is said that the dust which fills the air about the Pyramids and the ruined temples is that of their remote forefathers, who swarmed over the land, working under the fiery sun and the sharp scourge for successive races of task-masters - the Ethiopian, the Persian, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Arab, the Circassian and the Turk. During the reign of Ismail Pasha we hear of I men, women and children driven forth from their villages with whips to perform work without wages on the Khedive's lands or in his factories. It is a heartrending picture. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"Oriental Prisons: Prisons and Crime in India, the Andaman Islands, Burmah, China, Japan, Egypt, Turkey" by Arthur Griffiths Arthur George Frederick Griffiths was a British military officer and prison administrator. His experience with the prison system cultivated his fascination with prisons around the world. In this book, he delves into the prisons of eastern and middle-eastern countries, their conditions, and the crimes that got most people convicted.

It will hardly be denied after an impartial consideration of all the facts I shall herein set forth, that the British prison system can challenge comparison with any in the world. It may be no more perfect than other human institutions, but its administrators have laboured long and steadfastly to approximate perfection. Many countries have already paid it the compliment of imitation. In most of the British colonies, the prison system so nearly resembles the system of the mother country, that I have not given their institutions any separate and distinct description. No doubt different methods are employed in the great Empire of India; but they also are the outcome of experience, and follow lines most suited to the climate and character of the people for whom they are intended. Cellular imprisonment would be impossible in India. Association is inevitable in the Indian prison system. Again, it is the failure to find suitable European subordinate officers that has brought about the employment of the best-behaved prisoners in the discipline of their comrades: a system, as I have been at some pains to point out, quite abhorrent to modern ideas of prison management. As for the retention of transportation by the Indian government, when so clearly condemned at home, it is defensible on the grounds that the penalty of crossing the sea, the "Black Water," possesses peculiar terrors to the Oriental mind; and the Andaman Islands are, moreover, within such easy distance as to ensure their effective supervision and control. Nearer home, we may see Austria adopting an English method,—the "movable" or temporary prison, by the use of which such works as changing the courses of rivers have been rendered possible and the prison edifices of Lepoglava, Aszod and Kolosvar erected, in imitation of Chattenden, Borstal and Wormwood Scrubs.

This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state's reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty.