Contrary to the stereotypical images of torture, narcotics and brutal sexual abuse traditionally associated with Ottoman or 'Turkish' prisons, Kent Schull argues that, during the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918), they played a crucial role in attempts to transform the empire. It was within these prisons' walls that many of the pressing questions of Ottoman modernity were worked out; questions of administrative centralisation, Islamic criminal law and punishment, gender and childhood, prisoner rehabilitation, bureaucracy, identity and social engineering.