C O N T E X T 1 0 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 9 17 GRAHAM TITE ‘We are in misery’: buildings of captivity Dungeons, houses of correction, the world of Porridge, radial prisons, panopticons and penitentiaries are just some of the responses to the need to house prisoners. My title is the translation of a line (‘siamo in calamità’) written by a prisoner in Siena in 1439. He was a certain Burchiello, locked up for unpaid fines and contempt of court. These lines join other poems by Italian convicts collected as part of The Medieval Prison by Guy Geltner1. The book follows Geltner’s dissertation of 2006, Medieval Prisons: marginality at the city centre, 1250–1400. Although a social documentary history, Geltner’s work is also architecturally illuminating. Prisons were similar in layout to asylums for the poor. Work-houses, leper-hospitals and mental institutions were not architecturally distinct from other hospitals, barracks, large orphanages, schools, monasteries or colleges. At first glance, Stow’s 1720 engraving of London’s Bridewell Prison could easily be mistaken for a view of an Oxbridge college. This similarity is one of Geltner’s main points. Until it was the subject of enlightenment reform and industrial revolution rationalising, a European prison was similar in design to any other place where large numbers of people lived communally. The prisoners of whom Geltner writes were kept in wards that could easily be visited. They would usually be allowed to beg for alms either through the bars (that often gave directly on to the streets of the city centre) or by going outside and doing so in the streets themselves. An income was necessary since prison rations and clothing were yet to be invented and the warders had to be paid by their own inmates. By today’s standards, this seems bizarre. The Medieval Prison presents a case, however, in favour of these institutions by showing how they saw few suicides and had a rate of mortality similar to that of the general population. Being released alive was distinctly possible, especially as the festivals of the church included ‘offerings’ through which prisoners could be pardoned and released into freedom. The majority of inmates in the middle ages were given custodial sentences for debt or the non-payment of fines. Violent crimes and offences against the state would result in torture, disfigurement and execution and there was little time allowed for imprisonment between arrest, trial and these ultimate punishments. For lesser, non-capital felons, prison was regarded as a way of life, although different and rather less comfortable than life outside. The remarkable Doge’s Palace inVenice still provides plenty of evidence of how prisons were operated by powerful states. A walk in the square could once have brought you into earshot and even hand contact with the prisoners, then lodged in several parts of the palace’s ground floor. Outside the walls, you were asked to make a contribution to the support of inmates. Eventually, during a prolonged construction period from 1563 to 1614, the new Prigioni were added outside the original palace walls and linked-up with the adjacent criminal courts by the Bridge of Sighs, which crossed a waterway skirting one side of the palace. Their position removed this group of inmates from public access.These prisons in the heart ofVenice Mendicanti: the new 17th century poorhouse ofVenice
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