Imprisonment began to replace other forms of criminal punishment in the United States just before the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed as early as the first sovereign states. In colonial times, courts and magistrates would impose punishments including fines, forced labor, public restraint, flogging, maiming, and death, with sheriffs detaining some defendants awaiting trial. The use of confinement as a punishment in itself was originally seen as a more humane alternative to capital and corporal punishment, especially among Quakers in Pennsylvania. Prison building efforts in the United States came in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian Era and led to the widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, bringing a number of new mechanisms—such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing—into the mainstream of American penal practice. Finally, since the early 1970s, the United States has engaged in a historically unprecedented expansion of its imprisonment systems at both the federal and state level. Since 1973, the number of incarcerated persons in the United States has increased five-fold. Now, about 2,200,000 people, or 3.2 percent of the adult population, are imprisoned in the United States,Gottschalk, 1–2. and about 7,000,000 are under supervision of some form in the correctional system, including parole and probation. Periods of prison construction and reform produced major changes in the structure of prison systems and their missions, the responsibilities of federal and state agencies for administering and supervising them, as well as the legal and political status of prisoners themselves.
Intellectual origins of United States prisons Incarceration as a form of criminal punishment is "a comparatively recent episode in Anglo-American jurisprudence," according to historian Adam J. Hirsch.Hirsch, xi. Before the nineteenth century, sentences of penal confinement were rare in the criminal courts of British North America. But penal incarceration had been utilized in England as early as the reign of the Tudors, if not before.Hirsch, 13. When post-revolutionary prisons emerged in the United States, they were, in Hirsch's words, not a "fundamental departure" from the former American colonies' intellectual past.Hirsch, 31. Early American prisons systems like Massachusetts' Castle Island Penitentiary, built in 1780, essentially imitated the model of the 1500s English workhouse.
Prisons in America
Although early colonization of prisons were influenced by the England law and Sovereignty and their reactions to criminal offenses, it also had a mix of religious aptitude toward the punishment of the crime. Because of the low population in the eastern states it was hard to follow the criminal codes in place and which led to law changes in America. It was the population boom in the eastern states that led to the reformation of the prison system in the U.S. According to the Oxford History of the Prison, in order to function prisons "keep prisoners in custody, maintain order, control discipline and a safe environment, provide decent conditions for prisoners and meet their needs, including health care, provide positive regimes which help prisoners address their offending behavior and allow them as full responsible a life as possible and help prisoners prepare for their return to their community"
Incarcerating prisoners has long been an idea in the history of man. U.S prisons adopted some ideas from history when it came to confining criminals. According to Bruce Johnston, "of course the notion of forcibly confining people is ancient, and there is extensive evidence that the Romans had a well developed system for imprisoning different types of offenders" It wasn't until 1789 when reform started taking place in America. David J. Rothman suggests that it was the freedom of our independence that helped along the reformation of the law. Laws were changed in New York because they were too "barbarous and had Monarchial principles," according to Rothman. Pennsylvania laws had changed, excluding the act of robbery and burglary from crimes punishable by death, leaving only first degree murder. New York, New Jersey, and Virginia updated and reduced their capital crime lists. This reduction of capital crimes created a need for other forms of punishment, which led to incarceration of longer periods of time. The oldest prison was built in York, Maine in 1720. The very first jail that turned into a state prison was the Walnut Street Jail. This led to uprisings of state prisons across the eastern border states of America. Newgate State Prison in Greenwich Village was built in 1796, New Jersey added its prison facility in 1797, Virginia and Kentucky in 1800, and Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maryland followed soon after.
Americans were in favour of reform in the early 1800s. They had ideas that rehabilitating prisoners to become law-abiding citizens was the next step. They needed to change the prison system's functions. Jacksonian American reformers hoped that changing the way they developed the institutions would give the inmates the tools needed to change. Auburn state prison became the first prison to implement the rehabilitative idea. The function of the prison was to isolate, teach obedience, and use labor for the means of production through the inmates. According to Rothman, "Reform, not deterrence, was now the aim of incarceration." Soon a rivalry plan stepped into place through the Pennsylvania model which functioned almost the same as the Auburn model except for eliminating human contact. This meant that inmates were incarcerated in cells alone, ate alone, and could only see approved visitors.
The development of prisons changed from the 1800s to the modern day era. As of 1990 there were over 750,000 people held in state prison or county jails. Prisons hadn't been designed to house such a high number of incarcerated individuals. With the development of new material and ideas, prisons changed physically to accommodate the rising population. Although the prison maintained the high wall method, it added new modern technology such as surveillance and electronically monitored perimeters, and changed the way prisons are operated. The change of prison operating system has led to branching prisons off into multiple factors to meet the needs of the incarcerated population. Norval Morris in The Contemporary Prison writes "there are 'open prisons'... 'weekend prisons' and 'day prisons'." This is not to say the change of punishment has completely changed in redevelopment of the early prison system. It still maintains social order and is moved by politics and ever changing matters.
The English workhouse
The English workhouse, an intellectual forerunner of early United States penitentiaries, was first developed as a "cure" for the idleness of the poor. Over time English officials and reformers came to see the workhouse as a more general system for rehabilitating criminals of all kinds.
Common wisdom in the England of the 1500s attributed property crime to idleness. "Idleness" had been a status crime since Parliament enacted the Statute of Laborers in the mid-fourteenth century. By 1530, English subjects convicted of leading a "Rogishe or Vagabonds Trade or Lyfe" were subject to whipping and mutilation, and recidivists could face the death penalty.
In 1557, many in England perceived that vagrancy was on the rise.Hirsch, 14; McKelvey, 3. That same year, the City of London reopened the Bridewell as a warehouse for vagrants arrested within the city limits. By order of any two of the Bridewell's governors, a person could be committed to the prison for a term of custody ranging from several weeks to several years.Hirsch, 14. In the decades that followed, "houses of correction" or "workhouses" like the Bridewell became a fixture of towns across England—a change made permanent when Parliament began requiring every county in the realm to build a workhouse in 1576.
The workhouse was not just a custodial institution. At least some of its proponents hoped that the experience of incarceration would rehabilitate workhouse residents through hard labor. Supporters expressed the belief that forced abstinence from "idleness" would make vagrants into productive citizens. Other supporters argued that the threat of the workhouse would deter vagrancy, and that inmate labor could provide a means of support for the workhouse itself. Governance of these institutions was controlled by written regulations promulgated by local authorities, and local justices of the peace monitored compliance.Hirsch, 15.
Although "vagrants" were the first inhabitants of the workhouse—not felons or other criminals—expansion of its use to criminals was discussed. Sir Thomas More described in Utopia (1516) how an ideal government should punish citizens with slavery, not death, and expressly recommended use of penal enslavement in England.See Hirsch, 16. Thomas Starkey, chaplain to Henry VIII, suggested that convicted felons "be put in some commyn work . . . so by theyr life yet the commyn welth schold take some profit." Edward Hext, justice of the peace in Somersetshire in the 1500s, recommended that criminals be put to labor in the workhouse after receiving the traditional punishments of the day.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several programs experimented with sentencing various petty criminals to the workhouse. Many petty criminals were sentenced to the workhouse by way of the vagrancy laws even before these efforts.Hirsch, 17. A commission appointed by King James I in 1622 to reprieve felons condemned to death with banishment to the American colonies was also given authority to sentence offenders "to toyle in some such heavie and painful manuall workes and labors here at home and be kept in chains in the house of correction or other places," until the King or his ministers decided otherwise. Within three years, a growing body of laws authorized incarceration in the workhouse for specifically enumerated petty crimes.
Throughout the 1700s, even as England's "Bloody Code" took shape, incarceration at hard labor was held out as an acceptable punishment for criminals of various kinds—e.g., those who received a suspended death sentence via the benefit of clergy or a pardon, those who were not transported to the colonies, or those convicted of petty larceny.Hirsch, 17–18. In 1779—at a time when the American Revolution had made convict transportation to North America impracticable—the English Parliament passed the Penitentiary Act, mandating the construction of two London prisons with internal regulations modeled on the Dutch workhouse—i.e., prisoners would labor more or less constantly during the day, with their diet, clothing, and communication strictly controlled.Meranze, 141; Hirsch, 19. Although the Penitentiary Act promised to make penal incarceration the focal point of English criminal law,Meranze, 141. a series of the penitentiaries it prescribed were never constructed.Hirsch, 18.
Despite the ultimate failure of the Penitentiary Act, however, the legislation marked the culmination of a series of legislative efforts that "disclose[] the . . . antiquity, continuity, and durability" of rehabilitative incarceration ideology in Anglo-American criminal law, according to historian Adam J. Hirsch. The first United States penitentiaries involved elements of the early English workhouses—hard labor by day and strict supervision of inmates.
English philanthropist penology