Beyond Midnight Express: Prisons and Modernity in the Late Ottoman Empire

The topic of Ottoman or better yet ‘Turkish' prisons usually conjures immediate visceral images of three things: torture, narcotics, and brutal sexual behavior. This ‘Anglo-American Orientalist' image of Turkish prisons has been etched in our minds primarily by Oliver Stone's Midnight Express, but even Lawrence of Arabia and comedies such as Airplane and “The Simpsons” have reinforced and parodied these stereotypes. Even within academia this ‘vintage' Americana colors reactions to an analytical examination of the role prisons and penal institutions played in the process of modernity in the late Ottoman Empire. Based on documents from the Ottoman Imperial Archives, memoirs, foreign diplomatic correspondence, and contemporary periodicals this paper sketches the extensive prison reform programs initiated and implemented during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Ottoman Empire. This paper argues that prisons and penal institutions were intrinsic pieces of Ottoman modernity and modern state formation. It was within the walls of these prisons that many of the pressing questions of Ottoman modernity were worked out. Government officials addressed administrative reform and centralization, the rationalization of Islamic criminal law and punishment, the role of labor in the rehabilitation of prisoners, economic development and industrialization, gender and childhood, the implementation of modern concepts of time and space, social engineering, and the role of the state in caring for its population through public health and hygiene. In other words, the prison was a microcosm of imperial transformation and it reflects and affects the efforts of broader imperial concerns and reforms. Prisons can thus provide an extraordinary lens into the process of Ottoman modernity and the broader socio-economic, political, cultural, and ideological developments of this critical period in late Ottoman history.