The 1850s constitute a very important transitional period for prison reform in the Ottoman Empire. As discussed in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, the convergence of British inspections of Ottoman prisons, the Islahat Fermanı, and the promulgation of the Imperial Ottoman Penal Code (IOPC) drew attention to many criminal justice related issues and prepared the ground for extensive prison reform efforts. First, the inspections revealed the dire state of the incarcerated and the need for state intervention to improve conditions. Second, the Islahat Fermanı announced an aggressive agenda to create, expand, and overhaul the Ottoman criminal justice system, including prisons. Finally, the promulgation of the 1858 IOPC transformed the empire's criminal justice practices by extensively delineating criminal behaviour and their associated punishments and outlawing corporal punishments including torture. This effectively circumscribed the discretionary punitive powers of local Islamic court judges and administrative officials. In so doing, the IOPC mandated incarceration as the primary punishment for criminal behaviour, thus making prisons the principal site for this newly standardised penalty.

Practical reasons for prison reform aside, Ottoman rulers and administrators also engaged in it for ideological purposes. Over the course of the nineteenth century the notion that prisons and punishment demonstrate a particular society's level of civilisation was adopted worldwide. In fact, this association between civilisation and punishment dates back to the second half of the eighteenth century with Jeremy Bentham, Cesare Beccaria, and others. By the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman bureaucrats firmly linked nation-building and civilisation with criminal justice and prisons. The mutual association of these concepts entered the Ottoman intelligentsia’s mentalité from both internal and Western European sources. One of the most influential was the long-serving British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Sir Stratford Canning.