Photography in the Great War: The Ethics of Emerging Medical Collections from the Great War

Abstract

century prison education may not be entirely surprising, but the findings presented here will make it all the more frustrating that many of the problems found in the nineteenth century continue to persist in present-day prisons, from the control of reading material and prison library stock, to the demands of ‘the regime’, which hinder meaningful educational provision and result in a competition between education and other scheduled activities. Crone herself gestures towards these contemporary contexts by acknowledging the impact of conversations with the Prisoners’ Education Trust (PET) – including former prisoners – on her thinking, and by articulating the importance of uncovering the ‘historical roots’ (p. 340) of educational provision in prisons today. Michel Foucault ends Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by declaring his study ‘a historical background to various studies of the power of normalisation and the formation of knowledge in modern society’ (Penguin, 1991: p. 308). Similarly, Crone’s magnum opus not only brings new depth and direction to nineteenth-century penal and educational history but it equally reinforces a need to look to the past to understand, and ultimately change, the present.