Akademik Düşünce Dergisi

Öz

In the classical Ottoman period, people who committed crimes were given certain punishments as prescribed by Islamic sharia. In addition, customary law rules were also used to the extent permitted by Islamic law. It is also known that people were imprisoned within certain limits for some crimes during this period. When the Ottoman modernization period came, the reforms that were initially made in the military field spread to the field of law as a result of some impositions from the West, and the crime and punishment principles of the modern world were reflected in Ottoman texts and practices. The prison institution is one of these. The aim of this study is to determine how the prison institution that emerged during the Ottoman modernization period changed and transformed the Çermik prison by examining the various dimensions of the developments in Ottoman prisons during the reform process and how these were reflected in the Çermik prison locally.
For this purpose, firstly, the introduction of the Ottoman state to the institution of prison in the western sense, the evolution of the understanding of crime and punishment from Islamic law to western norms, and the changes in the implementation of prison as a widespread punishment were examined. Secondly, the physical structure of the prison opened in Çermik district with the reform process, the conditions of the convicts and detainees, the hygiene and measures taken against diseases in the prison building, the need to open a new prison, the situation of the personnel there, the number of convicts and detainees in the prison over time and the crimes attributed to them were investigated.