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Pioneering in Penology and Slavery and T
Pioneering in Penology and Slavery and T
Pioneering in Penology and Slavery and T
THORSTEN SELLIN
Pioneering in Penology and Slavery and the Penal System
By Gregory Shank
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/29766049.pdf?seq=7#metadatainfotabcontents
Título original:
The Amsterdam Houses of Correction in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944.
Slavery and the Penal System. New York: Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company Inc. 1976 (La
esclavitud y el Sistema penal)
Reviewer: Gregory Shank
I.
The literature on punishment is enormous, but few works have focused upon a
theoretical analysis of the changes in punishment and penal discipline in Western
civilization. With the exception of Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s Punishment
and Social Structure, and a sparse number of articles by other authors, the most
interesting works have been written by Thorsten Sellin. Some of Sellin’s best pieces
are the scattered introductions to books authored by others, such as his introduction
to Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville’s On the Penitentiary System in the
United States and Its Application in France (1964), and articles published in such
diverse sources as Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, the
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Prison
II
Born in 1896, Thorsten Sellin has emerged as one of the preeminent scholars in the
field of criminology and penology. In contrast to the often trivial, barren and
management-oriented literature which characterizes the field, all of Sellin’s work
deserves chose attention. Taken as a whole, his historical studies of the prison are
criminological classics.
Sellin’s interest in the history of the Amsterdam workhouses dates from 1924, when
he was a student at the Institute of Criminology of the Law School of the University of
Paris. While in Paris, he read von Hippel’s 1898 study of the workhouses in Europe,
and became interested in these early institutions. He began go gather information on
the institutions, but did not complete a first draft of Pioneering until the summer of
1942.
Sellin must have been influenced by the political crisis in Europe. From 1924 to 1929,
the capitalist world-economy was characterized by revolution and counter-revolution
throughout the world, which was to end in crisis-world depression and war. Sellin
directly witnessed this intense class struggle as the conjuncture of these events
manifested themselves in Europe. He spent the second half of 1925 in Florence and
Rome. In Florence, he witnessed a riot by the fascists which he wrote up for the
Nation. He also wrote an article on the new syndicalist laws of the fascist government
in Italy, but it was never published.
During this same period, Georg Rusche was completing his studies at the University of
Cologne, and Otto Kirch-
heimer was an active militant in the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party
(see Melossi, 1978). The power of the workers movement, in Germany by the Social
Democratic leadership, which had armed the monarchist and reactionary officers
against them. They shot the imprisoned revolutionary leaders, Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg, and drowned the revolution in blood. The bourgeois democratic
Weimar Republic served as an interim measure to deal with the intensified social,
economic and political conflict. It was a façade behind which was being built up the
armed power of the reactionary forces against the workers, a force which in time was
to overthrow the democratic forms and the Social Democrats themselves. What Sellin
had first witnessed in Italy, the recourse to the extraordinary measures of fascist
dictatorship to maintain the existing system of class rule, was later to be repeated in
Germany.
1
La República de Weimar (en alemán, Weimarer Republik) fue el régimen político y, por extensión, el
período de la historia de Alemania comprendido entre 1918 y 1933, tras la derrota del país en la Primera
Guerra Mundial. El nombre de República de Weimar es un término aplicado por la historiografía posterior,
puesto que el país conservó su nombre de Deutsches Reich (‘Imperio alemán’). La denominación procede de
la ciudad alemana de Weimar, donde se reunió la Asamblea Nacional constituyente y se proclamó la nueva
constitución, que fue aprobada el 31 de julio y entró en vigor el 11 de agosto de 1919.
fascista para mantener el sistema existente de gobierno de clase, se
repetiría más tarde en Alemania.
With the collapse of the capitalist world-economy between 1929 and 1933, the
Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, which published Rusche’s research proposal for
Punishment and Social Structure, was impelled to uproot itself and take refuge at
Columbia University in New York. Renamed the International Institute of Social
Research, one of its first major projects was the publication of Rusche and
kerchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure (1939). Thorsten Sellin both edited the
book and wrote a foreword to it for the Institute. He was even familiar with Rusche’s
1933 article entitled “Arbeitsmarkt und Strafvollzug” (which articulated all of the
theoretical milestones of Punishment and Social Structure).
Between 1935 and 1918, Sellin worked on a monograph entitled Culture Conflict and
Crime. In it, he introduced the concept of conduct norm, which presupposed the
relativity of culture that was gaining support in anthropological circles. Sellin,
however, was not proposing a new definition of crime, but thought that “it should be
studied only as a form of conduct, which should fit into a theoretically sounder
framework of deviance” (correspondence of Sellin with P. Takagi, May 3, 1978).
Herman and Julia Schwendinger (1970) discuss Sellin’s 1938 monograph in some
detail. They contend that Sellin’s woke generated on ongoing controversy surrounding
the definition of crime. According to the positivist, reformist and traditionalist,
represented respectively by Sellin (1938), Edwin Sutherland (1945) and Paul Tappan
(1947).
Historically, criminology in the United States had developed under the aegis of
sociology rather than law, as was the case in Europe. In the process, the analysis of the
etiology of crime came to be denominated by biological and psychological
interpretations, and the definition of crime was narrowly construed within a legalistic
framework. This meant that crime and criminal came to be defined “by specific or
abstract references to definitions and/or sanctions administered by the State”
(Schwendingers, 1970:128). In effect, legal standards (the criminal law) preempted
scientific standards in the formation of concepts utilized by criminologists, and
definitional statements
became restricted to criteria that could not exceed those legitimated by agents of the
state.
While all of the participants in the controversy ultimately failed or refused to move
beyond legalistic constraints, Sellin, the Schwendingers argue, not only did not
advocate the elimination of the legal definition, but also proposed that the concept of
“conduct norm” be used instead of the legal definition simply to advise sociologists of
the limits imposed by it on the elaboration of corporate liberal theoretical positions
useful to the maintenance of stability and order. The Schwendingers further assert
that Sellin’s strategy for explaining crime, and that his criticism of the legal definition
represented an unsuccessful and incomplete attempt to question this definition on the
bases of the autonomy of science, a stance which both implies ideological neutrality
and lacks moral content.
The Schwendingers contend, moreover, that Sellin’s approach was derived from the
same corporate liberal and technocratic doctrines articulated by the founders of North
American sociology between 1883 and 1922. The view of the world they promoted
served the new corporate liberal state and justified the maintenance of established
institutions. Part of that vision of the world entailed a society managed not by the
working class, but by experts or enlightened leaders informed by expert advisors; in
short, by the ranks of the university-trained strata of the new petty bourgeois class.
The Schwendingers conclude their examination of Sellin’s role with the following
remarks:
Guided by the metatheory of social control, many American
criminologists functioned as Technocratic “consultants” who
spent their lives gathering information which would be of use
to the men managed existing institutions, whether they were
aware of this or not. The profession of ideological neutrality on
their part was by no means a guarantee of this neutrality.
Instead, it was one of the great myths which prevented
principled scholars from being aware of the ideological
character of their basic assumptions (ibid. 142).
Sellin did not claim to introduce a new definition of crime. Indeed, the findings and
analysis in the two books being reviewed here reveal that the definition of crime had
nothing to do with “conduct norms”, but rather with the mode of production and
existing class antagonisms (conflict). In Pioneering in Penology, completed after the
publication of Culture Conflict and Crime, one finds an analytic approach which
explains the rise of a new penal institution in relation to the role of capital
accumulation and the reproduction of class relationships. Such an approach was not in
vogue with corporate liberal scholars.
The sometimes uncertain and hesitant quality in Sellin’s writings is explicable in terms
of the varied influences on his intellectual development. As previously mentioned, he
was familiar with Rusche’s 1933 paper, he wrote the foreword to “Punishment and
Social Structure”, and he
recognized early on the futility of a science based upon official crime statistics. At the
same time, his first-hand observations of the class struggles in Europe and the fascist
takeover in Italy and Germany in a sense determined the ideological outcomes, by
locating the Marxian tendency in the bastion of corporate liberal ideology, Columbia
University. Lacking a strong workers’ movement, independent leftist intellectuals
invariably come under the influence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois class positions;
they embrace the position as their own since it serves them to do so.
We do not call into question the general validity of the Schwendingers’ conclusion
quoted above, but with regard to Sellin, it is an overstatement and does not provide
an objective assessment of his role in the field. Thorsten Sellin emerged as a major
figure in criminology in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and attained stature as a scientist and
scholar who raised the standards in the field of criminology while refusing to engage
himself as technocratic intellectual serving to justify prevailing penal policy. His
historical writings represent his best work and provide useful, descriptive accounts.
They contain the most progressive aspects of his thinking, for in the two books under
consideration in this review, he does attempt to reveal the mechanisms of class
exploitation, repression and domination, although in a partial fashion. It is to this
equivocation that Paul Takagi (1976:60) alluded when in reference to Sellin, among
others, he noted: “Some American criminologists whiting in the first half of the 20 th
century were aware of the importance of Marx’s sociology and introduced in the
beginning a class analysis. Perhaps because of the “political climate” they did not fully
develop the thesis in their writings. To have done so, as Luis Althusser (1970) has
stated, would have required that these intellectuals revolutionize their essentially
petty bourgeois positions and instinet a radical revolution in their ideas which requires
a long, difficult and painful reeducation, an endless external and internal class
struggle.
One purpose of this review is to indicate how Sellin’s works can be used to advance
our knowledge though a reexamination and reinterpretation of the penal reforms that
came to be adopted. We are interested in ascertaining how penal reforms result from
transformations in the political economy, specifically focusing upon changes in the
mode and relations of productions as well as developments in the class struggle.
Ownership, the simplest legal relation, is the starting point; but ownership
presupposes that within society the family or the relations of master and servant have
already evolved. To this must be added the recognition that at a particular stage of
social development, the production of surplus has given rise to the subjugation and
command of the labor power of others. The forms of property discussed here, ancient,
feudal and bourgeois, are all systems of producing and appropriating the products of
society based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
The power to maintain these conditions and to moderate the conflicts of classes with
antagonistic economic interests is itself the product of society, but places itself above
Pág. 38b Crime and Social Justice
Society in the form of a special apparatus, the state. This special machine for the
suppression of one class by another of the majority by the minority, has called for
“seas of blood through which mankind has to wade in slavery serfdom and wage-
labor” (Lenin, 1976: 109). Hand in hand with the movement of property, which has
historically led to the progressive emiseration of larger and larger segments of the
populace either through debt or chronic unemployment, the penal system has played
its part in the reproduction of class character, and reforms in it to date have served to
strengthen the state, to bolster existing class hegemony and to funnel the economic
role of the offender to satisfy the needs of the dominant class, be they slave owners,
feudal lords or capitalists. An examination of Sellin’s writings should give us a better
idea of the mechanisms used to accomplish these ends.
III.
2
Miseración: Compasión de los trabajos y miserias ajenos.
Pioneering in Penology is a well written and modest monograph which relies mainly on
the analyses and insights of other authors, but which shapes their theses into a fresh
and original totality. It is a meticulously documented work, consisting of a preface,
eleven chapters, an extensive bibliography (with sources in at least seven languages)
and an index, as well as eight illustrations which give it life. It should serve as a model
for the as yet unwritten histories of the British houses of correction (the Bridewell), for
those which sprang up all over continental Europe, and for the early American
counterpart, the Walnut Street Jail.
Sellin wrote this monograph mainly because the penal innovations of the latter 16 th
and early 17th centuries, the Tuchthuis (Rasphaus) and Spinhaus of Amsterdam, hold a
significant place in the story of punishment, and yet “their role in shaping the history
of prisons has not hitherto been explored by any American or English historians of
institutions” (Sellin, 1944). From the time this monograph was published in 1944,
nearly 20 years had elapsed since Sellin had first encountered an article written by
Robert von Hippel in 1898, which “rediscovered” the Amsterdam houses of correction
and inspired a number of studies of local German penal institutions. Beyond
presenting the history of the contribution to the rise of correctional imprisonment
made by the Dutch municipalities in a form accessible to the English reader, Sellin also
synthesized new data uncovered in the 40 years since von Hippel’s investigations.
3
Casa disciplinaria (del neerlandés)
4
Casa del raspador (del neerlandés)
Pág. 39 Crime and Social Justice
Within this perspective, Pionnering in Penology represents a case study of the penal
reforms which resulted from the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism
and the emergence of the modern state in England and Holland between the 12 th and
16th centuries. It is a creative and scholarly attempt to document the historical
function of the house of correction and the impetus it gave to the new mode of
production which Rusche and Kirchheimer only scarcely sketched in their discussion of
the institutions in Amsterdam for correctional imprisonment.
The first prisoners were admitted to the Rasphaus in 1596. The thrifty burghers of
Amsterdam were pioneers in the realm penology, for they sought to introduce labor,
and to a lesser degree religious instruction, as corrective instruments for the first time.
As such, the emergence of the prison as a state apparatus can only be understood in
terms of changes in the nature of productive relations from serfdom to a wage labor
system. Selllin describes the material…
Thus, a partial solution was to compel proletarians to labor as a punishment for crime,
justified by the real problem of vagrancy:
With the characteristic downturns in the business cycle, workers with nothing to sell
but their labor power came to wander, to beg, and to protest. The desperate efforts of
the workers to survive were defined as capital crimes, but as labor shortages occurred
during the upswing of the business cycle, workhouses were established for “sturdy
beggars” (Takagi, 1976:61).
Por lo tanto, una solución parcial era obligar a los proletarios a trabajar
como castigo por el crimen, justificado por el verdadero problema de la
vagancia:
Con las recesiones características en el ciclo económico, los trabajadores
que no tenían para vender más que su fuerza de trabajo llegaron a
deambular, mendigar y protestar. Los esfuerzos desesperados de los
trabajadores por sobrevivir se definieron como delitos capitales, pero a
medida que se produjo la escasez de mano de obra durante el repunte
del ciclo económico, se establecieron centros de trabajo para "mendigos
fuertes".
The Amsterdam houses of correction did not, however, entirely displace the older
punishment (corporal, capital, shaming, banishment, sentences to galley slavery or
public works, and very infrequently, imprisonment), but rather were grafted onto the
system of criminal law. Among the factors which Sellin cites as influencing the
establishment of the houses of correction was fact that high levels of recidivism
attested to the ineffectiveness of public and severe punishments. A questioning of the
methods and assumptions of the criminal law was also a factor. Specifically, judicial
torture came to be opposed, for it could be better, existing methods for extracting the
truth; the deterrent value of the death penalty was being denied, and prevention of
crime through the examination of its origins was being considered. Beyond the
economic changes in the life of Amsterdam itself, Sellin also points to the influence of
Protestant Reformation, which, in supporting the demand to profitably utilize the
labor of dependent or undesirable citizens and the demand for reforms in the
punishment of petty offenders, simply endorsed the ascendency of the capitalist class.
Finally, and first in importance according to Sellin, was the revival of learning which
brought a knowledge of the classics to the leaders of opinion of the country.
As Melossi (1978) has noted, the crude Amsterdam merchants who were the Regents
of the Rasphaus discovered, by first and stars through their practice, the principle that
the punishment meted out should be proportional to the crime –a principle formalized
two centuries later by Cesare Beccaría. That the punishment should be expressed in
terms of the deprivation of liberty for a given quantity of time in advance through the
sentence is uniquely capitalist, for it presupposes a concept of time which is related to
the abstract and general value of commodities, to the reduction of all the forms of
social wealth to the simplest and most abstract for of human toil measured in terms of
time.
At bottom, economic motives and forces permeated both the planning stage of the
institution and its labor program once it was established. The economic value of the
convicts’ labor power was a paramount consideration, and the prisoners were
engaged in the production of commodities for exchange in a system of labor which
would today be called a contract system. Only the sons of the rich confined there did
not have to work, but could pay for their own maintenance. The prisoners who
worked performed a daily task, roughly a production quota, which they were…
It is clear, therefore, that the intention of the institution’s Regents was to discipline
the inmates into accepting a regimen analogous to an “ideal factory” in which the
norms required for capitalist accumulation were ingrained in the code of discipline. In
fact, the original word referring to these facilities, “tuchthuis” meant a house of
discipline. It was a system designed to transform a quality of the human species-labor
as one’s life activity- into a form of compulsion. The Refents were all merchants and
manufacturers whose primary aim was to make the Rasphaus profitable to the city
through the exploitation of the labor power of inmates what amounted to a municipal
factory. The object was not betterment of the convict, but rather submission to
capital’s authority, with the end being a life as a “willing” worker.
Just as today, the institution did not run smoothly and harmoniously, given the
condition of severe discipline, the whip and solitary confinement backing up the
compulsion to work for the glorification of capital. Attempts to escape, repeated
refusal to work (both individual and collective actions), as well as gross
insubordination led straight to the whipping post. Another illustrative disciplinary
punishment, employed to tame the will of those refusing to work under the
conditions, was the water cellar in which the prisoner literally labored for his life by
pumping in order not to drown. This punishment was discontinued after a prisoner
chose drowning over rasping.
In a summary fashion, Sellin states the historical significance of the Amsterdam houses
or correction in the following way: from a modern point of view, he concludes,…
…the tuchthuis regime was not a very suitable one for the rehabilitation of criminals,
but one must always measure reforms in terms of the conditions out of which they
arise. Viewed from this perspective, perhaps “it would not be amiss to add that the old
Amsterdam house of correction, with all its defects, would bear comparison with
many a local prison in our contemporary civilization” (p.75).
To conclude, Pioneering in Penology is very aptly titled in two senses. While he has
documented the pioneering efforts of the Amsterdam houses for correctional
imprisonment, at the same time Sellin has charted the method of study for future
penological research. It is without question a classic work which combines primary and
secondary sources to reconstruct an edifice and relations among people of bygone
days, but upon which those of the present era have been built. Sellin accomplished
this quite difficult task with considerable elegance. In this monograph, not only has he
given us a description of an early penal facility, but he has also provided empirical
verification of the thesis developed by Rusche and Kirchheimer. This work of Sellin’s
both lays the foundation and provides us with the conceptual tools to analyze, for
example, other early penal institutions, such as the Bridewell or the Walnut Street Jail.
We now move on to the second book, which shares a certain continuity with the first,
but which lacks its strength of focus.
El régimen de tuchthuis5 no era muy adecuado para la rehabilitación de
delincuentes, pero siempre se deben medir las reformas en función de las
condiciones de las que surgen. Visto desde esta perspectiva, quizás "no
estaría mal agregar que la antigua casa de corrección de Ámsterdam,
con todos sus defectos, podría compararse con muchas prisiones locales
de nuestra civilización contemporánea"(pág.75).
Para concluir, Pioneros en Penología se titula muy acertadamente en dos
sentidos. Si bien ha documentado los esfuerzos pioneros de las casas de
Ámsterdam para el encarcelamiento correccional, al mismo tiempo, Sellin
ha trazado el método de estudio para futuras investigaciones
penológicas. Es sin duda una obra clásica que combina fuentes primarias
y secundarias para reconstruir un edificio y relaciones entre personas de
antaño, pero sobre las cuales se han construido las de la era actual. Sellin
realizó esta tarea bastante difícil con considerable elegancia. En esta
monografía, no solo nos ha dado una descripción de una instalación
penal temprana, sino que también ha proporcionado una verificación
empírica de la tesis desarrollada por Rusche y Kirchheimer.Este trabajo
de Sellin's sienta las bases y nos proporciona las herramientas
conceptuales para analizar, por ejemplo, otras instituciones penales
tempranas, como Bridewell o Walnut Street Jail. Ahora pasamos al
segundo libro, que comparte una cierta continuidad con el primero, pero
que carece de su concentración.
IV.
A. Introduction
In 1976, the hardcover edition of Slavery and the Penal System appeared in print. This
truly ponderous work, 202 pages long, defies any quick summation. It consist of a
preface, 12 chapters, a postscript and an index, but unfortunately does not include a
bibliography.
The first three chapters in the book detail Sellin’s understanding of slavery and the
penal system in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome and in the middle Ages. The next five
chapters address penal institutions which came to be either “rediscovered” or created
during the rise and maturation of the capitalist epoch. Sellin describes forms of penal
servitude such as galley slavery and sentences to public works, both of which
substituted for capital punishment, as well as the bagne and the houses of correction.
Another chapter deals with the development of the penal system in Russia, and
sketches in from the feudal period through the Bolshevik seizure of power to the
present. The final three chapters attempt to supplement the level of knowledge in
American penology regarding the development of the penal system in the South and
Especially the treatment of black convicts after the Civil War. Sellin discusses slavery
and the penal system in the ante-bellum Southern United States, the convict lease
system, and the chain gangs and prison farm that came into being.
A shortcoming of the book is that it does not hang together as an integrated whole. It
is exceedingly difficult to review because far from being a case study, it covers
5
Del neerlandés “casa disciplinaria”
A. Introducción
En 1976, la edición de tapa dura de Slavery and the Penal System
apareció impresa. Este trabajo verdaderamente pesado, de 202 páginas,
desafía cualquier resumen rápido. Consiste en un prefacio, 12 capítulos,
una posdata y un índice, pero desafortunadamente no incluye una
bibliografía.
Los primeros tres capítulos del libro detallan la comprensión de Sellin
sobre la esclavitud y el sistema penal en la antigua Grecia, en la antigua
Roma y en la Edad Media. Los siguientes cinco capítulos abordan las
instituciones penales que llegaron a ser "redescubiertas" o creadas
durante el surgimiento y la maduración de la época capitalista. Sellin
describe formas de servidumbre penal, como la esclavitud de galeras y
las condenas a obras públicas, que sustituyen la pena capital, así como el
bagne y las casas de corrección.
Otro capítulo trata sobre el desarrollo del sistema penal en Rusia y
esboza desde el período feudal hasta la toma del poder bolchevique
hasta el presente. Los últimos tres capítulos intentan complementar el
nivel de conocimiento en la penología estadounidense con respecto al
desarrollo del sistema penal en el Sur y especialmente el tratamiento de
los convictos negros después de la Guerra Civil. Sellin analiza la esclavitud
y el sistema penal en el sur de los Estados Unidos antes de la guerra, el
sistema de arrendamiento de convictos y las cadenas de pandillas y la
granja de la prisión que surgieron.
Una deficiencia del libro es que no se mantiene unido como un todo
integrado. Es extremadamente difícil de revisar porque, lejos de ser un
caso de estudio, cubre…
Estas secciones del texto deben ser tomadas en su totalidad por el lector.
En pocas palabras, Gustav Radbruch fue el principal defensor de la idea
de que la esclavitud tuvo una influencia crucial en la historia del derecho
penal. De hecho, sostuvo que hasta el día de hoy "el derecho penal tiene
los rasgos de sus orígenes en los castigos de esclavos... Ser castigado
significa ser tratado como un esclavo” (citado en Sellin, 1976: viii). Las
teorías prevalecientes normalmente sostenían que los castigos
introducidos en las leyes penales públicas de los pueblos germánicos
durante la Edad Media eran ramificaciones de antiguos rituales de
sacrificio humano o proscripción. Por el contrario, Radbruch argumentó
que no solo los castigos capitales y corporales que marcaron las leyes
penales de las primeras épocas fueron castigos originalmente aplicados a
los esclavos errantes por sus amos, sino también que a medida que la
estructura de la sociedad germánica cambió a lo largo de los siglos, los
castigos originalmente reservado para aquellos en la esclavitud se
generalizó e infligió a los hombres libres de clase baja por crímenes
cometidos, y en última instancia a los delincuentes, independientemente
de su condición social.
7
Subdivisión de una tribu que tenía sacrificios y ritos propios.
Engels presented a periodization of history following Morgan’s lead, which
denoted there periods (further broken down into stages) of evolution in human
communities. These periods roughly coincide with successive kinship forms and
their corresponding modes of production: savagery (hunting and gathering, the
Paleolithic period), barbarism (slash and burn agriculture, the Neolithic period)
and civilization.
Sellin begins his examination of the Germanic tribes al the point at which they first
came under historical notice at the “Upper Status of barbarism. “In this period,
systematic slavery originates, and is predicated upon the production of a surplus
product, on the acquisition of a knowledge of cattle breeding and land cultivation,
in which methods of increasing the productivity of nature through human activity
were learned. According to Engels (1942; 143), having just progressed to this
stage, Germanic tribes “had not yet reached the stage of fully developed slavery,
neither the labor slavery of the classical world nor the domestic slavery of the
Orient”. We will discuss this point much more fully below, as well as the barbarian
codes”, the laws prescribing the punishment of criminals which came late into
existence in gently society, which Sellin describes. Sellin examines Greco-Roman
antiquity at the point of fully developed slavery, in which the state had already
been articulated, the period of “civilization”, in which was acquired knowledge of
the further working-up of natural products, of industry proper, and of art.
First, however, two points need to be set forth, which Sallin does not discuss in his
attempt to apply Radbruch’s thesis, wherein the traits of the origin of the criminal
law are sought in slave punishments.
According to Engels (1942; 86), capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in
civilized form. The practice of blood revenge had its birthplace in the gens, which
was obliged to avenge the murder of one of its members. The jus gentilicium, the
reciprocal obligations of help, defense and redress of injuries, was made up of the
rights, privileges and obligations conferred and imposed upon the members of
gens.
Also derived from the gentile organization is the obligation to inherit the
enmities as well as the friendships of the father or the relatives; like wise
the wergeld, the fine for killing or injuring, in place of blood revenge. The
wergeld as a specifically German institution, has now been shown to be
general among hundreds of peogles as a milder form of blood revenge
originating out of the gentile constitution (ibid.: 127).
This provides us with the material basis for the evolution of both capital
punishments and fines quite independently of the juridical forms which these
punishments subsequently assumed in written criminal codes. Among the Iroquois
gens of America, who knew nothing of clases or slavery, Morgan (1971:77) has
noted that:
It was, howevere, the futy of the gens of the slayer,…
The domestic punishments meted out to erring slaves which Sellin and Radbruch
describe were predicated upon norms rooted in the subjugation of women, their
degradation and reduction to servitude in the patriarchal family; or the first effect
what Engels (1942:50) has identified as the overthrow of mother right, the “world
historical defeat of the female sex”. In all peoples at an earlier period, the
matriarchal gens preceded the patriarchal gens of civilized people. Mother right
(and “right” here cannot be narrowly construed in the legal sense) denoted the
exclusive recognition of descent through the mother and the relations of
inheritance which in time resulted from it. The emergence of father right during
prehistoric times reversed these arrangements, but in order to ensure the wife’s
fidelity, and thus the paternity of the children, the monogamous family delivered
the wife unconditionally into the power of the husband. If he killed her, he was
only exercising his rights. As Marlene Dixon (1977:2) has pointed out:
Los castigos domésticos impuestos a los esclavos errantes que describen
Sellin y Radbruch se basaban en normas arraigadas en la subyugación de
las mujeres, su degradación y reducción a la servidumbre en la familia
patriarcal; o el primer efecto que Engels (1942: 50) ha identificado como
el derrocamiento del derecho materno, la "derrota histórica mundial del
sexo femenino". En todos los pueblos de un período anterior, las gens
matriarcales precedieron a las gens patriarcales de las personas
civilizadas. El derecho de la madre (y el "derecho" aquí no se puede
interpretar de manera limitada en el sentido legal) denota el
reconocimiento exclusivo de descendencia a través de la madre y las
relaciones de herencia que con el tiempo resultaron de ello. El
surgimiento del derecho del padre durante la prehistoria revirtió estos
arreglos, pero para garantizar la fidelidad de la esposa y, por lo tanto, la
paternidad de los hijos, la familia monógama entregó a la esposa
incondicionalmente al poder del esposo. Si la mataba, solo estaba
ejerciendo sus derechos. Como Marlene Dixon (1977: 2) ha señalado:
As Marx noted, the modern family contains in germ not only slavery, but also
serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains
in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its
state. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually with the increase in
population, the growth in wants, and with the extension of external relations, of
war or trade.
We see the subjugation of women and their punishment reflected in Roman
society. A woman was defined not as a person, but as a thing, just as the slave.
Further, among the Romans, the word “family” referred solely to the total number
of slaves belonging to one man. “the term was
Invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over
wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal
power with rights of life and death over them all” (Engels, 1947:51).
But among the Germans, women were accorded greater respect due to the recent
legacy of mother right. Yet, “the economic unit among them was not originally the
single family in the modern sense, but the “house community”, which consisted of
several generations or several single families, and often enough included unfree
persons as well” (ibid.: 52-53). This form resulted from the weakness of
monogamy, and as slavery became an institution, these households tended to
gradually disappear.
The emphasis put on the family will now become clear with reference to Sellin’s
oversight in omitting it in examining the origins of capital and corporal
punishments. We find in Sellin’s work the following passage summarizing the
remarks of Tacitus from the first century A.D.: “The disciplinary power of the head
of a household was unlimited and of no concern to the tribal state. If his wife
misbehaved sexually, he could cut off her hair, strip her naked and flog her
through the village in the presence of kinsmen” (1976: 32). These are “slave
punishments” particularly the corporal punishment involved in flogging, and the
fact that short hair was the mark of a slave. Other examples are also to be found
which depict specific punishments for women stemming from their subjugation in
the family.
Inventado por los romanos para denotar un nuevo organismo social, cuya
cabeza gobernaba sobre la esposa y los hijos y una serie de esclavos, y
fue investida bajo el poder paterno romano con derechos de vida y
muerte sobre todos ellos (Engels, 1947: 51).
Pero entre los alemanes, a las mujeres se les otorgó un mayor respeto
debido al legado reciente del derecho de la madre. Sin embargo, "la
unidad económica entre ellos no era originalmente la familia unifamiliar
en el sentido moderno, sino la" comunidad de la casa ", que consistía en
varias generaciones o varias familias solteras, y muchas veces también
incluía personas no libres" (ibid: 52 -53). Esta forma resultó de la
debilidad de la monogamia, y a medida que la esclavitud se convirtió en
una institución, estos hogares tendieron a desaparecer gradualmente.
El énfasis puesto en la familia ahora quedará claro con referencia a la
supervisión de Sellin al omitirlo al examinar los orígenes de los castigos
capitales y corporales. Encontramos en el trabajo de Sellin el siguiente
pasaje que resume los comentarios de Tácito del siglo I d. C.:
“El poder disciplinario del jefe de familia era ilimitado y no preocupaba al
estado tribal. Si su esposa se portaba mal sexualmente, él podría cortarle
el pelo, desnudarla y azotarla por la aldea en presencia de parientes”
(1976: 32). Estos son "castigos de esclavos", particularmente el castigo
corporal involucrado en la flagelación, y el hecho de que el pelo corto era
la marca de un esclavo. También se encuentran otros ejemplos que
representan castigos específicos para las mujeres derivadas de su
subyugación en la familia.
Raids for booty. Another process is the enslavement of fellow tribesmen with the
appearance, quite early in history of usurer’s capital, which presupposes
commodity exchange. Either the expropriation of peasants falling into debt occurs,
or the debtor, unable to fulfill a contract, is compelled to sell his children, and
ultimately himself, into slavery. Slavery can result as a form of punishment for
crime and also as a form of penal discipline.
From a criminological point of view, we are interested in the relation of the slave
mode of production to the use of slavery as punishment. The clearest example of
the latter would be that of the black freeman in the ante-bellum U.S. South being
punished into slavery. The example is distinguished from the freeman who loses
his citizenship via indebtedness and becomes a slave, which is a reflection of the
fact that in the Greco-Roman city-states, property was the basis of citizenship, and
consequently, both could be lost. This double relationship makes the property
owner both a citizen in association with others of equal status over against their
slaves, and a member of the community. (The slave was excluded from that
community; hence the development of a private system of punishment in the
domicile). But in a later epoch, the reducing of a free peasant to serfdom due to
an inability to pay taxes or fines in money terms (the spread of serfdom and feudal
economy took place in part on this account) cannot be construed as punishment
into slavery. Indeed, Mandel (1968:101, 02) points out in discussion of a role of
usurious interest rates after after the breakup of the Roman Empire that in the 6 th
century A.D., an ox was worth one to three solidi, but a wergild might amount to
as much as 800. Thus, while the wergeld is employed as one process in sharply
differentiating the class structure, the process of punishment is purely ancillary to
the underlying cause of the degradation in both of the above instances; they are
much more akin to the present phenomenon of the proletarianization of the labor
force than to slave punishments.
Another problem is Sellin’s failure to clearly define and delineate the precise
distinctions between what he terms slave punishments on the one hand, and
penal slavery, penal servitude and convict labor on the other. Sellin (and
Radbruch) amplify this problem by depicting a continuity in forms of punishment
over different historical epochs. It is understood that to labor as a slave is to
perform work under compulsion, under threat of punishment; but as argued
above, chattel slavery is not necessarily the same thing as penal slavery. A close
reading of the text reveals that forced or punitive labor is the common
denominator to these punishments, but they assumed different forms in different
historical epochs. In the Roman Empire, penal slavery was capital punishment, and
presumably so was penal servitude, the lifelong sentence to hard labor with
reduction of the prisoner to the status of a slave.
Sellin refers to the punishment of “lower class” criminals to the imperial mines,
factories and public works (p.178) as penal slavery, which was introduced during
periods of manpower shortages to do work formerly done by slaves. But in an
earlies passage (p.45), Sellin says that
D. Slavery and the Penal System in Ancient Tome And the Emergence of the
Germanic System
D. La esclavitud y el sistema penal en el antiguo tomo y el surgimiento del
sistema germánico
The most informative of the book is the transformation from ancient Rome to the
early feudal period. In ancient Rome, a city-based society Split into clases and
founded on slavery, Sellin tells us that the system of punishment were separated
into two spheres. Chattel slavery, by its “intrinsic nature”, caused the
development of a penal system appropriate to the maintenance of a slave system.
Thus, on the one hand, undisturbed by public authorities, the (male) head of the
family exercised ancient prerogatives in the repression of illicit conduct by slaves
within the domestic establishment. On the other hand, free citizens who engaged
in illicit conduct fell within the jurisdiction of the public power, the state, which
was erected to keep the slaves in check with all its adjuncts, such as
“incarceration” and other coercive institutions (of which gentile society knew
nothing). In general, slaves were punished in their bodies, citizens in their
property.
The “slave punishments” describe by Sellin fall into a number of categories. In a
mode of production in which the masses worked constantly under compulsión,
with treatment increasing in barbarity to the degree that slavery became the basis
for production for the market, obedience was enforced through whipping,
fettering, confinement in stocks, mutilation, branding and by making the slave
carry the furca, a V –shaped yoke around the neck. The offending
10
Del francés “prisión”.
Lo más informativo del libro es la transformación de la antigua Roma al
período feudal temprano. En la antigua Roma, una sociedad basada en la
ciudad, dividida en clases y fundada en la esclavitud, Sellin nos dice que
el sistema de castigo se separó en dos esferas. La esclavitud de Chattel,
por su "naturaleza intrínseca", provocó el desarrollo de un sistema penal
apropiado para el mantenimiento de un sistema esclavo. Por lo tanto,
por un lado, sin ser molestado por las autoridades públicas, el jefe
(masculino) de la familia ejerció prerrogativas antiguas en la represión de
la conducta ilícita por parte de los esclavos dentro del establecimiento
doméstico. Por otro lado, los ciudadanos libres que participaron en
conducta ilícita cayeron dentro de la jurisdicción del poder público, el
estado, que fue erigido para mantener a los esclavos bajo control con
todos sus complementos, como el "encarcelamiento" y otras instituciones
coercitivas (de las cuales la sociedad gentil no sabía nada). En general,
los esclavos fueron castigados en sus cuerpos, los ciudadanos en sus
propiedades.
Los "castigos de esclavos" descritos por Sellin se dividen en varias
categorías. En un modo de producción en el que las masas trabajaban
constantemente bajo compulsión, con un tratamiento que aumentaba en
barbaridad en la medida en que la esclavitud se convirtiera en la base de
la producción para el mercado, la obediencia se imponía mediante
azotes, grilletes, confinamiento de existencias, mutilación, marca y
haciendo que el esclavo lleve la furca, un yugo en forma de V alrededor
del cuello. El ofensor
E. Collapse of the Roman Empire and the Germanic Conquest, 3er to 5th
Centuries AD
The recline of the wetern part of the Roman Empire left Europe whithout a
centralized power to enforce the system of laws created between the 5th century
BC and the 2nd century AD (see Tigar and Levy, 1977:10-22). From he first written
laws drawn up around 450 BC, and based on the gentile constitution, Roman law
progressed through the practices of blood revenge, to composition, bonds and
ultimately to a comprehensive set of civil laws
12
Honestiores y humiliores eran los nombres de las distintas divisiones sociales fundamentales en la
Antigüedad Tardía, tanto en el Bajo Imperio Romano (sobre todo en su parte occidental) como en los reinos
germánicos, especialmente en el reino visigodo, donde estas condiciones definían la posición social de las
personas libres que no ostentaban ningún cargo (véase Maiores visigodos). El origen de esta división social,
que ignoraba la tradicional diferenciación entre patricios y plebeyos, y la dignidad esencial del hombre libre
no sometido a la esclavitud, se produce posteriormente al siglo II. Los humiliores, a pesar de su condición de
ciudadano romano, podían ser objeto de tortura, método de interrogatorio o pena antes limitada a los
esclavos. Incluso los honestiores podían ser objeto de tortura si eran acusados o testigos en algunos casos,
como los de traición.
Como señaló Engels (1942: 135-36), estos fueron los resultados finales de
la dominación mundial romana: el declive del comercio, la artesanía y el
arte; caer en la población; decadencia de los pueblos; y una recaída de la
agricultura a un nivel inferior.
The slavery of classical times had outlived itself. Whether employed on the
land in large-scale agricultura or in manufacture in the towns, it no longer
yielded any satisfactory return –the market for its products was no longer
there. But the small-scale agricultura and the small handicraft production
of the empire in its prosperous days way was now shrunk had no room for
numbers of slaves… But though it was dying out, slavery was still common
enough to make all productive labor appear to be work for slaves,
unworthy of free Romans –and everybody was a free Roman now. Hence,
on the one side, increasing manumissions of the superflous slaves who
were now a burden; on the other hand, a growth in some parts in the
number of coloni, and in other parts of the declassed freemen (like the
“poor whites” in the exslave states of America).
Sellin is not unaware of this develpment, for he notes: “Converting the technically
free coloni into “slaves of the land was easy, because so many of them had
originally been manumitted slaves, whose previous owners derived more profit
from sharecroppers who maintained themselves and their families by their labor
tan from costly slaves maintened at their expense” (1976:25-26). His assertion of
the debasement of formely free workers to a “slavelike” status mese well with the
Radbruch thesis, but this fixation leads him to overlook the internal development
of feudal forms within the collapsing Empire.
Coloni paid a definite yearly amount for their small plots of land cut from the old
slave-run latifundia. They were tied to the soil and could be sold together with it,
but they were not slaves; yet neither were they free. They were the forerunners of
the medieval seris. The latter stood half-way between the slave and the free man
and unlike the slave, his lord did not hold the power of life or death over him. This
reflects a difference in the level of right.
The external force which led to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West was
the Germanic conquest. Between the 3rd and 5th centuries A.D., varous Germanic
peoples began migrations or expansions into Roman territory which left the
Empire helpless, “exhausted and bleeding” by the 5th century. A new geopolitical
reality was creted in which Europe took shape as a society and culture distinct
from the slave societies of antiquity, and indeed the “Germanic system” came into
being which shaped the socioeconomic formation of feudalism in conjunction with
the medieval town (the locus of the emergence of autonomous craft production).
From the time or Caesar, when the Germans were still sttling in permanent
abodes, to the time of Tacitus, when
13
Del latín “lugar”.
They had long been settled, confederacies of tribes had grown up. The Germans
had reached the atage of agriculture and property relations in regard to the land
which exactly corresponded to the gentile constitution, but which was beginning
to break out of its fetters. Th estate was beginning to take form; kings, though not
absolute rulers, had emerged, and freed slaves became the favorites of the kings
since they could not belong to any gens. Whereas they usually occupied a
subordinate position, they then often won rank, riches and honors. Engels (1942:
130-31) states that the same was true after the conquest of the Romen Empire,
and that among the Franks, slaves and freedmen of the King formed the original
stock of a hereditaru nobility.
It is with observations of Tcitus (1 A.D.) that Sellin begins his analusis of the penal
system that corresponded to these ancient Germanic communities which were
highly democratic in contrast to the prevailing norms in the Roman Empire. His
description of the system for the freemen is in accord with the gentile
constitution: the assembly of the people was simultaneously an assembly of
justice, wherein complainta were brought forward, decided upon and sentences of
death passed, the only capital crimes being cowardice, treason and unnatural last.
But slaves, accordin to Sellin, were without any rigts. He describes them as the
chatel of their masters although they were assigned plots of land on which they
cultivated cereal crops and raised livestock, part of wich they had to deliver to
their masters. Engels atates otherwise:
The women appear lo have held unisputed sway in the house. Tacitus says that
they, with the old men and children, had as according to his explicit statement the
slaves only paid dues and performed no compulsory labour, it would appear that
waht little agricultural work required had to be performed by bulk of the adult
men (1970: 561).
What is of extreme interest in Engels’ reading of Tacitus with regard to the slaves
is that their conditions of life were incomparably above those of the Roman slave:
in the most fundamental sense, they did have some level of right, although not
legal, for not only wew they not compelled to work, but they also paid dues and
kept the remainder of the product of their labor. On the other hand, Sellin argues
that the master exercised to power of life or death over the slave:
As for slaves, their masters could deal with them at will. They could be flogged,
fettered, put to hard labor, ore ven killed. These were the domestic punishments
specifically mentioned by Tacitus… (1976:32).
Tacitus’ description of the redress of injuries to members of the Germanic tribes in
the first century A.D. is remarkably similar to that which Morgan provided for the
Iroquis gens de América. Como dice Sellin, los homicidios, las heridas, los
robos, los robos, etc., fueron el hallazgo privado de los grupos de
parentesco. Si un miembro de uno de esos grupos mató o hirió a un
miembro de otro, estalló una especie de guerra y los herederos se vieron
obligados a asumir la enemistad de un padre o un pariente.
En última instancia, se celebraría una fiesta de reconciliación después de
que se llegara a un acuerdo intergrupal, mediante el cual el delincuente
transfiriera un número determinado de ganado y la piel a la víctima o la
piel como compensación por el mal hecho. Si no se puede llegar a un
acuerdo privado, la parte perjudicada puede llevar el asunto ante la
asamblea. Si la causa del demandante se decidiera a su favor, la
asamblea le pediría a su adversario que lo indemnizara a él y a sus
parientes en una cantidad proporcional a la lesión y que consistiera en
caballos y ganado, y de manera similar pagaría a la tribu una cantidad
proporcional a la indemnización (ibid).
La prerrogativa de disputa e indemnización, fundamental para el código
no escrito anterior al derecho penal, era una de las que podían exigir
satisfacción y pagar. La esclavitud aquí nuevamente podría derivarse de
la falta de pago de una deuda. ¡Es interesante notar ya el principio de
Beccaria de que el castigo sea proporcional al crimen!
…origin of the feudal system in the Germanic retinues, private associations forme
don a permanent basis to carry on wars independently under a military leader
who organized it as a hierarchy. This form favored the rise of kingship and
monarchy and manifested the beginnings of the decay of the people’s freedom
during the migrations.
As the Roman Empire cruembled in the west, the barbarian kings established
sovereignty over comquered territory –the Ortrogoths in northem Italy, the
Visigoths in southwest Gaul and the Iberian península, the Burgundians in Eastern
Gaul and western Switzerland, and the Franks in northern Gaul. Accordin to Engels
(1942: 123-37), the Germans seemed to have settled by gentes in the provinces
they conquered from the Romans, and land was distributed according to the
gentile constitution. As they settled over time in villages, the Germans and
Romans merged and the character of the original bond based on kinschip gave
way to territory –the gens was lost in the village (Mark) community, and the
gentile constitution changed into a changed into a local one capable of
incorporation into the state. The feudal or Rank ownership which emerged was a
mixture of broken down Roman and Germanic institutions. Feudalism was an
alternativa evolution out of primitive communalism, and lacked cities due to a
sparse population spread over a large área, prepared for by previous Toman
conquest and the consequent spread of agricultura. In this form of social
organization, "communal “roperty –which in effect turns into the collective
property of the feudal lords as a group, backed by the military organization of the
Germanic tribal conquerers- is its basis (Hobsbawm: 28-29).
The Franks settled on the lower Rhine in two divisions, of which the Salinians
(dwellers by the sea, sal) formed one part. By the end of the 4th century, they had
established themselves as federates of the Roman Empire. They formed no
permanent confederations and did not migrate like other Germanic peoples as a
nation, but expanded. King Clovis emerged as kind of the Frank son both sides of
the Rhine and established the Merovingian Dynasty. Converted to Roman
Catholicism in 496 A.D., he compiled the code of law about 500 A.D, and
conquered the Burgundians, defeated the Visigoths and subjugated most of Gaul
before his death in 511 A.D.
The Merovingian government retained Roman administrative units and grafted
their own structures on them. The source of law was not the King, but rested with
local custom administered by a graf (count) aided by local landowners. The
breakdown of the old gens and tribal organization, lacking an effective state to
replace it, led to personal and economic dependence on private individuals rather
tan on the state, e.g. commendation, beneficium and immunity (Langer, 1948: 147
-49). Concentration of landwnership in a few hands took place: the King of the
Franks transformed the people’s land into Crown lands, and in turn portioned it
out to his court composed of the rutine, slaves and serfs. Thus, at the people’s
expense, the foundation of a new nobility was laid.
Los francos se asentaron en el Bajo Rin en dos divisiones, de las cuales los
salinianos (habitantes del mar, sal) formaron una parte. A finales del
siglo IV, se habían establecido como federados del Imperio Romano. No
formaron confederaciones permanentes y no emigraron como otros
pueblos germánicos como nación, sino que se expandieron. El rey Clovis
surgió como una especie de hijo de Frank a ambos lados del Rin y
estableció la dinastía merovingia. Convertido al catolicismo romano en el
año 496 d. C., compiló el código legal alrededor del año 500 d. C.,
conquistó a los borgoñones, derrotó a los visigodos y subyugó la mayor
parte de la Galia antes de su muerte en el año 511 d. C.
El gobierno merovingio retuvo las unidades administrativas romanas e
injertó sus propias estructuras en ellas. La fuente de la ley no era el Rey,
sino que dependía de la costumbre local administrada por un graf
(conde) ayudado por los terratenientes locales. El desmoronamiento de
los antiguos gens y la organización tribal, al carecer de un estado efectivo
para reemplazarlo, condujo a una dependencia personal y económica de
los individuos en lugar de broncearse en el estado, p. recomendación,
beneficio e inmunidad (Langer, 1948: 147-49). La concentración de la
propiedad londinense en unas pocas manos parece un lugar: el Rey de los
Trnaks transformó la tierra de la gente en tierras de la Corona, y a su vez
la repartió en su corte compuesta por la rutina, los esclavos y los siervos.
Por lo tanto, a expensas de la gente, se sentaron las bases de una nueva
nobleza.
Among the Franks as well as the other Germanic folk, attempts to limit the
practice of private vengeance and feuding led to the emergence of wergeld, the
milder form of blood revenge originating out of the gentile constitution. Accordin
to Sellin (1976:33, 37-38), chief reliance was placed on fixed or agreed indemnities
(composition) imposed or approved by order of a court and paid by an offender to
his victim or his victim’s kin, in default of which he could be delivered to his
adversay for retaliation or enslavement.
Indemnities were of two kinds: specific amounts, called wergeld, for killing,
wounding, or assaulting another person; and others which basically
correspond to the value of property stolen, damaged, or…
After the 6th century, a free Frank could be directly sentenced to be mutilated as
punishment for “offenses disclosing a slavish and base mind” though it was always
redeemable in accord with a detailed table of values. These punishments
increased during the Carolingian period “partly for crimen like theft, which
previously had been capitally punished, and partly for crimes like perjury, which
had been redeemable” (p.37). In early Framkish times, mutilating punishments,
such as blinding or the amputation of a hand, nose or ear, were legally defined as
slave punishments. Sellin summarizes his findinfs on the application of formerly
exclusive slave punishments toward the end of the 9 th century in the following
way:
Después del siglo VI, un Frank libre podría ser condenado directamente a
ser mutilado como castigo por "delitos que revelan una mente servil y de
base", aunque siempre fue redimible de acuerdo con una tabla detallada
de valores. Estos castigos aumentaron durante el período carolingio "en
parte por delitos como el robo, que anteriormente habían sido castigados
con pena capital, y en parte por delitos como el perjurio, que habían sido
canjeables" (p.37). En los primeros tiempos de Framkish, los castigos
mutilantes, como el cegamiento o la amputación de una mano, nariz u
oído, se definían legalmente como castigos de esclavos. Sellin resume sus
hallazgos sobre la aplicación de castigos de esclavos anteriormente
exclusivos hacia fines del siglo IX de la siguiente manera:
Theft indicative of the base and slavish nature of the offender (p.39).
Let us look at the political economic context and the level of development of the
state in which this process took place. The free Frankish peasants were reduced to
seridom as a consequence of Charlemagne’s continuous campaings. Forced service
comparable to the Roman compulsory labor for the state was imposed with
increasing frequency on the lower ranks, as in the services provided by the
members of the German Marks in bridge and road making. Engels (1942: 140)
notes:
Le tus look at the political economic context and the level of development of the
state in which this process took place. The free Frankish peasants were reduced to
seridom as a consequence of Charlemagne’s contiuous campaings. Forced service
comparable to the Roman compulsory labor for the state was imposed with
increasing frequency on the lower ranks, as in the services provided by the
members of the German Marks in bridge and road making. Engels (1942: 140)
notes:
Slavery was strictly subordinate to the political economy as a wholw. In fact, the
free landowning peasants has stood between the Roman colonus and the new
bonds-man. Depite the appearence that the mass of people had after 400 years
returned to where they had started, the Franks and the Germanic tribes in general
had developed and made universal a milder form of servitude, serldom, which
they practiced in their own country and which increasingly displaced slavery
throyghout the old Roman Empire. Under Charlemagne, local administration of
justice was placed in the hands of local landowners appointed as permanent
judiciary officers. As the population as a whole was reduced to servitude, the
material basis for a system based on fines and indemnities was eroded. Why they
selected the sanguinary punishments for the por must be seen in terms of the
options open to them. In an economy still dominated by use values, the economic
role of the convict was minimal.
With the close of the Germanic period, Sellin’s contribution to the literatura on
punishment in the early Middle Ages comes to a close. The Germanic period
precedes the first feudal age (the end of the 9th to the middle of the 11th
centuries), which in turno gives way to the second feudal age (middle of the 11th
to the 13th century). Sellin’s research complements and deepens the work done
by
CONCLUSION
Sellin dealt with two quite distinct socioeconomic formations in which slavery
appeared as a common social relation, dominant in the first and increasingly
subordinate in the second, with regard to the mode of production. Feudalism was
base don a more “progresive” form of property. It was an altenative evolution out
of primitive communalism to a slave economy. Both were agriculturally based, and
social production was geared to the production of use values. The common system
for redress of injuries was initially rooted in the gentile constitution. The
developement of class society, the relation of dominance and subordination and
the articulation of a state apparatus against the people, altered the condition of
equality, and ultimately gave rise to a system of punishment which was class
differentiated and progressively more geared to sanguinaty methods as the
penury of the people as a whole increased while “freedom” decreased. The
polirity of wealth and poverty superseded that of free and non-free as a
determinant in the application of punishment. This is the highest level of
generality that can be applied to these two social formations.
Thus, there exists no real theoretical divergence between Sellin’s findings and
those of Rusche and Kirchherimer.
The breakup of the states at the end of the Germanic period led to the
stabilization of feudalism and an enormous increase in population. By the end of
the 12th century, it was certainly the case thay the system of indemnity was
recreating the class structure for its part, and extending the debasement of the
great bulk of peasants under a law of volleinage, for they could not pay. Capital,
corporal and dishonoring punishments continued to be imposed as a salutory
“deterrent” to crime, but in fact turned the penal law into an instrument for
recruiting the habitual and profesional criminals of that day. It was not until the
18th century, in which capital punishment was invoked less and less as a policy,
that the sanguinary punishments came to be displaced by the use of
imprisonment.
In evaluating Sellin’s work, it becomes clear that punishment in the Greco-Roman
period, in the Middle Ages and in the present epoch has been class diferentiated.
Yet, Sellin and Radbruch assert the merger of two penal systems, one for citizens
and one for noncitizens, beginning with the delining Roman Empire and
concluding in the Germanic period toward the end of the 9th century. The
evidence presented suggests that as part of an evolutionary process, the freeman
and nonfreeman received the same punishment, leaving the reader with the
conclusión that punishment for the masses became endifferentiated. This
approach obscures the much more powerful process at work, that of sharply
differentiating the class structure. In fact, the two systems of punishment based
upon class have never merged. Sellin’s data really confirm this point for each
epoch. In the present epoch, criminologists agree that there are civil laws for the
rich and criminal laws for the por. While criminal laws may well have a slavish
origin, punishments remain class specific. The triumph of the capitalist state,
however, is that the criminal laws presumably apply to all regardless of one’s
station in life.
Por lo tanto, no existe una divergencia teórica real entre los hallazgos de
Sellin y los de Rusche y Kirchherimer.
La ruptura de los estados al final del período germánico condujo a la
estabilización del feudalismo y a un enorme aumento de la población. A
fines del siglo XII, ciertamente era el caso de que el sistema de
indemnización recreara la estructura de clases por su parte y extendiera
la degradación de la gran mayoría de los campesinos bajo una ley de
volleinage, porque no podían pagar. Se siguieron imponiendo castigos
capitales, corporales y deshonestos como un "disuasivo" saludable para
el crimen, pero de hecho convirtió la ley penal en un instrumento para
reclutar a los delincuentes habituales y profesionales de ese día. No fue
sino hasta el siglo XVIII, en que la pena capital se invocó cada vez menos
como política, que los castigos sanguinarios fueron desplazados por el
uso de la prisión.
Al evaluar el trabajo de Sellin, queda claro que el castigo en el período
grecorromano, en la Edad Media y en la época actual ha sido
diferenciado por clases. Sin embargo, Sellin y Radbruch afirman la fusión
de dos sistemas penales, uno para ciudadanos y otro para no
ciudadanos, comenzando con la delimitación del Imperio Romano y
concluyendo en el período germánico hacia fines del siglo IX. La evidencia
presentada sugiere que, como parte de un proceso evolutivo, el hombre
libre y el no libre recibieron el mismo castigo, dejando al lector con la
conclusión de que el castigo para las masas se hizo diferenciado. Este
enfoque oculta el proceso mucho más poderoso en el trabajo, el de
diferenciar bruscamente la estructura de clases. De hecho, los dos
sistemas de castigo basados en la clase nunca se han fusionado. Los
datos de Sellin realmente confirman este punto para cada época. En la
época actual, los criminólogos están de acuerdo en que existen leyes
civiles para los ricos y leyes penales para el pobre. Si bien las leyes
penales pueden tener un origen servil, los castigos siguen siendo
específicos de clase. Sin embargo, el triunfo del estado capitalista es que
las leyes penales se aplican presumiblemente a todos,
independientemente de la posición de uno en la vida.