Modern Containment – Key Vocabulary

A set of vocabulary flashcards summarizing the key terms, figures, institutions, and concepts related to the history and features of modern containment discussed in the lecture.

Containment

The practice of confining or limiting something or someone within prescribed limits.

Modern Containment

Ideas, institutions, and practices of confinement that have developed since the 1700s and now shape social management.

Coercion

The forced, non-voluntary nature of containment, often backed by law or authority.

Isolation (in containment)

Physical removal and separation of people from wider society as a core element of modern containment.

Institutional Regime

A system of rules, routines, and treatments governing life inside a containment facility.

Targeted Populations

Groups disproportionately subjected to containment—e.g., the poor, racial/ethnic minorities, asylum seekers, the ‘abnormal.’

Embeddedness

How containment is woven into social practice, culture, policy, and collective memory.

Age of the Great Incarceration

Michel Foucault’s phrase describing the last 300 years of expanding confinement.

Michel Foucault

Scholar who framed modern history as an era dominated by widespread incarceration.

David Garland

Sociologist who argues containment is now so common we struggle to imagine society without it.

House of Correction

Early‐1600s British institution designed to confine and employ petty offenders, vagrants, and the poor.

Workhouse

18th- and 19th-century British facility where the destitute were confined and forced to labor under harsh conditions.

Panopticon

Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 circular prison design enabling constant surveillance from a central point.

Jeremy Bentham

English philosopher who proposed the Panopticon and laid foundations for the modern prison.

Pentonville Prison

1842 North London prison exemplifying early modern prison architecture and regimes.

Millbank Prison

1816 London prison; one of the first large-scale modern penitentiaries.

Eastern State Penitentiary

1829 Philadelphia prison noted for its radial design and solitary confinement model.

Lunatic Asylum

19th-century institution created to contain and ‘treat’ those deemed mentally disordered.

Reformatory

Facility established to confine, educate, and train wayward or neglected children.

Quarantine Station

Containment site used to isolate people (or goods) to prevent the spread of disease.

Internment Camp

Facility for mass confinement of groups, often during wars or political crises.

Missions and Reserves

Sites where Indigenous peoples were confined and controlled by colonial authorities.

Detention Center

Contemporary institution used to confine asylum seekers or migrants pending legal outcomes.

Involuntary Containment

Confinement imposed without the individual’s consent, e.g., under mental health laws.

Containment as Social Management

The use of confinement to handle perceived social problems and the people associated with them.