THE AFFIRMATION OF THE RENEWING CURRENT OF PRISON REFORM IN 19TH CENTURY ROMANIAN THINKING
THE AFFIRMATION OF THE RENEWING CURRENT OF PRISON REFORM IN 19TH CENTURY ROMANIAN THINKING

Summary/Abstract: In 1882, the work entitled About the Need of Reform in Criminal Prisons, signed by Gregory Gramaticescu, Chief Prosecutor at the Court of Appeal Craiova, was offered to the coroners of the Old Kingdom. Over more than a century, a famous contemporary author, Emilian Stanisor, published The Romanian Prison Reform. The interval between these years suggests, therefore, a perpetual, but never finalized reform. The period before the organization, on modern grounds, of the Romanian State - first half of the nineteenth century - brought to the foreground of concerns of the Romanian lawyers, schooled in the West, in the humanist spirit of the time, the issue of humanizing life in prisons and jails, after, including some enlightened rulers of the Principalities Wallachia and Moldavia, have expressed sympathy for the fate of the unfortunate creatures that inhabited them. The basic idea which guided like a red thread, thinkers and legislators of this century was the transformation of places of detention from exclusively expiator tools - repressive and dehumanizing - in an environment of moral reeducation so that, after serving the sentence, the formerly condemned to be recovered by society in respect of law and honest labour. The fact that after so long, many of the prison problems remained almost unchanged in terms of results is a testimony to complexity. They represent also an urge to those whose mission is to imagine a new penitentiary reform, to reconsider the thinking of those who conceived the Organic Regulations, the Romanian Penal Code of 1865, the law on prison system in 1874 and the afferent Regulations, which have followed.

• Details
• Contents