Explaining and examining the forms of imprisonment and the internal mechanism of prisons in the history of Iran in the fifth and sixth centuries AH based on Foucault's genealogical method

Prison is one of the oldest forms of punishment and the most prominent place of exclusion in the history of human societies that its external organization and internal mechanism have changed from a society to another society and from a period to another. The various forms of prison, its prominent position in the physical structure of Iranian-Islamic cities and also the frequent use of imprisonment for convicts in the history of Iran in the fifth and sixth centuries AH raises the question that where the position of prison in the legal-judicial system was located and how its internal mechanism was worked. The present paper attempts to investigate the prison and imprisonment system with a descriptive-analytical approach inspired by the studies of Michel Foucault. In the end, it was concluded that the prison as a place of exclusion lied at the heart of an accurate partitioning of urban and territorial space that through accomodating the prisoners, represented in the best way the binary division and discriminatory branding of (dangerous/harmless; guilty/guiltless) prisoners; and coercive assignment and differential distribution. The Prisoners of judicial-legal tribunals depending on their crime, the type and the rate of conviction, sexuality, age, organizational status and so on, were allowed to return to the society only by serving their sentences or using other tools provided by Islamic jurisprudence. Nevertheless, the political-security prisoners that were imprisoned by the will of political power, if they wouldn’t remain in the prison until their death, they could be released only through forgiveness or the death of the ruler and sultan.