The Reflection Of The Traditional Chinese Jail Culture From The Book The Jail For Reference

With the developemnt of the social civilization,the history of the jail can be traced to thousands of years ago.However,it was in Qing dynasty,when fedual Chinese jails would change its managing system to modern ones,that the first monograph-the jail for reference-about the jail administation was published.This book was compiled by the top judicial official,zhaoshuqiao,in penalty ministry, including the laws,ordiances,rules and the living state of the prisoners and administrative staff in the jails since the foundation of Qing dynasty.With the help of this book,this paper attempts to understand the real conditions in such fields as managing thoughts,funishments,supervising and managing measures,etc,which will enrich the traditional law study and offer some beneficial references for the construction of the modern jail civilization.Except for the intrduction and conclusion part,the body part will be expounded from three aspects.The first is about the author of the monograph and its main contents.In the paper,the author briefly introduces zhaoshuqiao and the law study of shan school,and expoundes the specific value in the history of the Chines jails and traditional jail civilization to help the readers to have a basic understanding of this book.The second aspect is the feudal Chinese jail system.By means of detailed analysis and reading,the paper presents a clear frame of the feudal China jails,its contents including the organizational system and establishment,surveillance system, the ordianary administrations to the prisoners and supervisions to the administrative staff.The third aspect is the connotation of the feudal China jail civilization, analyzing the evolvement of the jail names,generalizing the culture characteristics of jails and the jail-managing thoughts.The study of the book will help us understand the feudal Chinese jail system based on the agricultural society,patriarchal clan system,autarchy politics,was founded on the Confucius doctrine,forming specific culture tradition with Chinese character.It shows its specific characters from the forms,contents,procedures of the penalty to security of the supervision,the treatment of the prisoners,the jail affairs,even to the penalty thoughts,administrative thoughts,cultural developments.The book the jail for reference reflects the basic connotation of the traditional Chinese jail civilization.The first one is from the evolvement of the jail names.The concept of the jail gradually developed into its definite forms,showing the functional choice in imprisonment and civilizing of the jail in different times.The second one is the administrative thoughts in the jails.These thoughts are the basic guidance ideology when dealing with the jail affairs.The third one is that the traditional Chinese jail culture embodies clearly the characteristics of Chinese agricultural civilization.These characteristics are:the penal thoughts in the society conformity and the operation of the jail penalty runs through the process of the development of the society;the tenet of the punishing and civilizing rendered the purpose of the penalty clear-maintaining legitimacy,eradicating deviationism;the mediation principle of the penalty conciliates the forces to a reasonable degree;the ethical and moral thoughts of the administration will enforce the effects to the people's manners to keep the order in the society;the employing tradition,administrating the jails with Confucius doctrine became a very universal phenomenon.The thought of combining penalty and civilizing,the administrative thought of combining sympathy and severity,the system of clearing injustice,etc are worth to be taken as references thoughts.From this we can conclude that the relation of traditional jail system and modern jail system is not a simple annal evolution,not even serve as a foil to the modern jail system.The traditioanl jail culture is a very important branch of the law civilization and traditioanl Chinese culture.The path of exploration and development of modern jail civilization will be much more open and massive through summarizing and absorbing the reasonable ingredients and inheriting excellent culture of the traditional jail civilization.