The Labor-based prisons in Turkey 1933-1953

Abstract

This work scrutinizes special prisons which were founded under the name of "the Labor-based Prisons" in the mid-1930s and encapsulated in time one-third of the convicts although the number of them was under twenty. The increasing intervention of the state in the economic realm in the 1930s provided the base to use convict labor productively. With efforts of the technocratic class, the penal system was transformed as labor-oriented and restructured legally in a company-logic. The Second World War reinforced this system as an independent variable. With the end of the 1940s, the basic economic context disappeared, and finally in the first half of the 1950s the penal system in general and the prison system in particular were transformed from a labor-oriented structure to a system regardless of labor. It can be claimed that in this period the penal system began to be more interested in the political criminals. Accordingly, the labor-based prisons lost the period in which they were held precious, and in the 1960s they were renamed as "the Open Prisons." Working in prisons has continued, also the number of open prisons and the work-dorms has ascended to date. But, for a profitable production, neither the economic context nor the legal/administrative structure is appropriate. This thesis finds the justification of the existence of productive convict labor only in the focused period, in the economic priorities of the period and in the structure of state apparatus and its relation with the economic sphere.