La cárcel y el control del delito en Navarra entre el Antiguo Régimen y el Estado liberal

Abstract

We hold that a social history of the punitive institutions brings us closer to the development of the control of the disturbance and to the processes of criminalization of a social order (this one, in Navarra, even with the crisis of the Old Regime, discoursed basically integrated). We tackle it from a structural view, stopping at the critical period of the liberal State's building. We reflect on the formation of a "repressive, repressed, penalizing society and, therefore, also punishable". We analyze the coercive function of the procedural prison and its role as a storehouse of poverty, impoverishment agent and source of disease even to the town itself. We observe the meanness of prison spaces and the development of the alcaidías' corruptible system. We investigate in the course of correctionalism, above all, from the control of the marginal poverty, from the specific treatment of women who were punished for sexual offenses and from the development of the para-criminal philanthropinism towards prisoners (undoubtedly, promoted after the visit of John Howard to Pamplona in 1783): these are threads between the long proto-criminal stage and the liberal criminal-justice system. We scrutinize criminal records and found that, during middle decades of the nineteenth century, the prison became "queen" of a penalty "defender of the contractual society" against its "degenerate" elements: it was an absolute imposture -although with future- considering that most of the convicts were peasants and laborers with socially normalized personal characteristics. In the end, we "listen" to the complaints and even the collective protests of incarcerated people.