A historical speculative fiction, this particular excerpt fictionalizes he story of a person from North Holland’s criminal archival record, a real person Pieter Jacobs, otherwise called Goeluck, born in Haerlem, who was put in one of the first institutional prisons in the world in Haarlem 1609 without committing a crime. This house of corrections, the “Tuchthuis” was a fixture of Haarlem from the early 1600’s until the early 1900’s.

 

The door of the original Tuchthuis building is preserved at the Frans Hals Museum.Transversal Scepters is a story about the transformation of social control. It is a narrative that asks- what is the future of justice beyond prisons? And what would justice be beyond the confines of capitalism? 17th century Holland criminalized the body that was not economically productive. Vagrancy was criminal. Begging was criminal. The Tuchthuis was seen as an innovation of social reform by disciplining criminals into civilized citizens through work. It however quickly became a site of forced labor. Prisoners paid for their confinement through weaving textiles and rasping wood to be made into pigment that fed the booming Haarlem textile industry. Goeluck later became a leader in one of the first documented prison uprisings worldwide.