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Abstract

How did the pre-20th century Chinese justice system deal with the unintentional deaths of prisoners in their jails? Death by jail, the ‘accidental’ death of criminals awaiting punishment, was a common occurrence during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), one that has been dismissed by many scholars of Chinese law and society as an unavoidable aspect of pre-modern holding facilities. Yet, even if the death of a large number of prisoners can be explained by contemporary contagion science, what are scholars to make of the fact that under the Qing, death in prison, even for a capital offense, was considered a miscarriage of justice? By looking at some of the aspects of the institutional and legal structures of late imperial Chinese justice that allowed for these deaths, and how such deaths were dealt with by the imperial bureaucracy, I consider how the Qing was able to construct the justice apparatus as a manifestation of imperial benevolence in the face of repeated, indeed systemic, accidental death of criminals.

About the Speaker

Kathleen Polling is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley.