Visitors to the International Penitentiary Congress

A Transnational Platform Dealing with Penitentiary Care

Abstract

This contribution looks at foreign visitors and organisers of a selection of penitentiary congress sessions between 1880 and 1910. Using lists of members from the congress proceedings, it seeks to assess the relative importance of civil society and governmental visitors at the penitentiary congress sessions, seen as an emerging expert plat- form of private and public stakeholders in social welfare. Several empirical approaches towards a clear division between public and private stakeholders are presented, experimentally using networking-, named entity recognition- and visualisation techniques. The article argues that in the historical context of the penitentiary congress a clear antithetical division of public and private stakeholders is difficult to sustain. Instead it proposes a more dynamic characterisation of the penitentiary congress visitors where, gradually by the turn of the century, elements of the philanthropic and governmental merge into the hybrid type of the all-round penitentiary expert, well connected to governmental circles and well-versed in philanthropic considerations.