Ancient and medieval The use of prisons can be traced back to the rise of the state as a form of social organization. Some
Ancient Greek philosophers, such as
Plato, began to develop ideas of using punishment to reform offenders instead of for retribution. Imprisonment as a penalty was used commonly for those who could not afford to pay their fines. Eventually, since impoverished
Athenians could not pay their fines, leading to indefinite periods of imprisonment, time limits were set instead. The prison in ancient Athens was known as the
desmoterion or "the place of chains". The Romans were among the first to use prisons as a form of punishment rather than simply for detention. A variety of existing structures were used to house prisoners, such as metal cages, basements of public buildings, and
quarries. One of the most notable
Roman prisons was the
Mamertine Prison, established around 640 B.C. by
Ancus Marcius. The Mamertine Prison was located within a
sewer system beneath ancient Rome and contained a large network of dungeons where prisoners were held in squalid conditions contaminated with
human waste. Forced labor on public works projects was also a common form of punishment. In many cases, citizens were sentenced to
slavery, often in
ergastula (a primitive form of prison where unruly slaves were chained to workbenches and performed hard labor). There were numerous prisons not only in the capital Rome, but throughout the Roman Empire. However, a regulated prison system did not emerge. In Medieval
Songhai, results of a
trial could have led to confiscation of merchandise or imprisonment as a form of punishment, since various prisons existed in the empire. During the
Middle Ages in Europe, castles, fortresses, and the basements of public buildings were often used as makeshift prisons. The capability to imprison citizens granted an air of legitimacy to officials at all levels of government and served as a signifier of who possessed
power or
authority over others. Another common punishment was sentencing people to
galley slavery, which involved chaining prisoners together in the bottoms of ships and forcing them to row on naval or merchant vessels.
Modern era The French philosopher
Michel Foucault, especially his book
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), energized the historical study of prisons and their role in the overall social system. The book analyzed changes in Western
penal systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France. Foucault argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment just because of the
humanitarian concerns of
reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and
power. Prisons use "
disciplines" – new technological powers that can be found, according to Foucault, in diverse institutions such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks. was to be made a
galley slave. The galley pictured here belonged to the Mediterranean fleet of
Louis XIV, .From the late 17th century and during the 18th century, popular resistance to
public execution and
torture became more widespread both in Europe and in the United States. Particularly under the
Bloody Code, with few sentencing alternatives, transportation to the Americas having been suspended following the
Revolution, and imposition of the
death penalty for
petty crimes, such as theft, proving increasingly unpopular with the public; many jurors were refusing to convict defendants of petty crimes when they knew the defendants would be sentenced to death, rulers began looking for means to punish and control their subjects in a way that did not cause people to associate them with spectacles of tyrannical and sadistic violence. They developed systems of
mass incarceration, often with hard labor, as a solution. The prison reform movement that arose at this time was heavily influenced by two somewhat contradictory philosophies. The first was based in Enlightenment ideas of
utilitarianism and
rationalism and suggested that prisons should simply be used as a more effective substitute for public corporal punishments such as whipping, hanging, etc. The
deterrence theory claims that the primary purpose of prisons is to be so harsh and terrifying that they deter people from committing crimes out of fear of going to prison. The second theory, which saw prisons as a form of
rehabilitation or
moral reform, was based on religious ideas that equated crime with sin and saw prisons as a place to instruct prisoners in Christian morality, obedience and proper behavior. These later reformers believed that prisons could be constructed as humane institutions of moral instruction and that prisoners' behavior could be "corrected" so that when they were released, they would be model members of society. of
Clairvaux Abbey, converted to a prison exercise yard after secularization. The concept of the modern prison as a highly regimented
total institution was imported to Europe in the early 19th-century from America. Prior forms of punishment were usually physical, including capital punishment,
mutilation,
flagellation (whipping),
branding, and non-physical punishments, such as
public shaming rituals (like the
stocks). From the Middle Ages up to the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, imprisonment was rarely used as a punishment in its own right, and prisons were mainly to hold those awaiting trial or punishment. However, an important innovation at the time was the Bridewell House of Corrections, located at
Bridewell Palace in London, which resulted in the building of other
houses of correction. These houses held mostly petty offenders, vagrants, and the disorderly local poor. In these facilities, the inmates were given "
prison labor" jobs that were anticipated to shape them into hardworking individuals and prepare them for the real world. By the end of the 17th century, houses of correction were absorbed into local prison facilities under the control of the local justice of the peace.
Transportation, prison ships and penal colonies (1792) England used
penal transportation of
convicted criminals (and others generally young and poor) for a term of
indentured servitude within the general population of
British America between the 1610s and 1776. The
Transportation Act 1717 made this option available for lesser crimes, or offered it by discretion as a longer-term alternative to the death penalty, which could theoretically be imposed for the growing number of offenses in Britain. The substantial expansion of transportation was the first major innovation in eighteenth-century British penal practice. Transportation to America was abruptly suspended by the
Criminal Law Act 1776 (
16 Geo. 3. c. 43) with the start of the
American Revolutionary War. While sentencing to transportation continued, the act instituted a punishment policy of
hard labor instead. The suspension of transport also prompted the use of prisons for punishment and the initial start of a prison building program. Britain would resume transportation to specifically planned
penal colonies in Australia between 1788 and 1868.
HMS Discovery at
Deptford served as a convict hulk between 1818 and 1834. Jails at the time were run as business ventures and contained both felons and debtors; the latter were often housed with their wives and younger children. The jailers made their money by charging the inmates for food, drink, and other services, and the system was generally corruptible. One reform of the seventeenth century was the establishment of the
London Bridewell as a house of correction for women and children. It was the first facility to make any medical services available to prisoners. With the widely used alternative of penal transportation halted in the 1770s, the immediate need for additional penal accommodations emerged. Given the undeveloped institutional facilities, old
sailing vessels, termed
hulks, were the most readily available and expandable choice to be used as
places of temporary confinement. While conditions on these ships were generally appalling, their use and the labor thus provided set a precedent which persuaded many people that mass incarceration and labor were viable methods of crime prevention and punishment. The turn of the 19th century would see the first movement toward
prison reform, and by the 1810s, the first state prisons and correctional facilities were built, thereby inaugurating the modern prison facilities available today. France also sent criminals to overseas penal colonies, including
Louisiana, in the early 18th century. Penal colonies in
French Guiana operated until 1952, such as the notable
Devil's Island (
Île du Diable).
Katorga prisons were harsh work camps established in the 17th century in
Russia, in remote underpopulated areas of
Siberia and the
Russian Far East, that had few towns or food sources. Siberia quickly gained its fearful connotation of punishment.
Prison reform movement 's "
panopticon" prison introduced many of the principles of
surveillance and
social control that underpin the design of the modern prison. In the panopticon model, prisoners were housed in one-person cells arranged in a circular pattern, all facing towards a central observation tower in such a way that the guards could see into all of the cells from the observation tower, while the prisoners were unable to see the guards. (architectural drawing by
Willey Reveley, 1791)
John Howard was one of the most notable early prison reformers. After having visited several hundred prisons across
Great Britain and Europe, in his capacity as high sheriff of
Bedfordshire, he published
The State of the Prisons in 1777. He was particularly appalled to discover prisoners who had been acquitted but were still confined because they could not pay the jailer's fees. He proposed wide-ranging reforms to the system, including the housing of each prisoner in a separate cell and the requirements that staff should be professional and paid by the government, that outside inspection of prisons should be imposed, and that prisoners should be provided with a healthy diet and reasonable living conditions. The prison reform charity, the
Howard League for Penal Reform, was established in 1866 by his admirers. Following Howard's agitation, the
Penitentiary Act 1799 was passed. This introduced
solitary confinement, religious instruction, a labor regime, and proposed two state penitentiaries (one for men and one for women). However, these were never built due to disagreements in the committee and pressures from
wars with France, and jails remained a local responsibility. But other measures passed in the next few years provided magistrates with the powers to implement many of these reforms, and eventually, in 1815, jail fees were abolished.
Quakers were prominent in campaigning against and publicizing the dire state of the prisons at the time.
Elizabeth Fry documented the conditions that prevailed at
Newgate prison, where the ladies' section was overcrowded with women and children, some of whom had not even received a trial. The inmates did their own cooking and washing in the small cells in which they slept on straw. The section was described "like a den of wild beasts; it was filled with women unsexed, fighting, swearing, dancing, gaming, yelling and justly deserved its name of 'hell above ground'." In 1816, Fry founded a
prison school for the children who were imprisoned with their parents. She also began a system of supervision and required the women to sew and to read the Bible. In 1817, she helped to found the Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate.
Development of the modern prison The theory of the modern prison system was born in London, influenced by the utilitarianism of
Jeremy Bentham. Bentham's
panopticon introduced the principle of observation and control that underpins the design of the modern prison. The notion of prisoners being incarcerated as part of their punishment, and not simply as a holding state until trial or hanging, was at the time revolutionary. His views influenced the establishment of the first prisons used as criminal rehabilitation centers. At a time when the implementation of capital punishment for a variety of relatively trivial offenses was on the decline, the notion of incarceration as a form of punishment and correction held great appeal to reform-minded thinkers and politicians. In the first half of the 19th century, capital punishment came to be regarded as inappropriate for many crimes that it had previously been carried out for, and by the mid-19th century, imprisonment had replaced the death penalty for the most serious offenses except for murder. By the 1840s, penal transportation to Australia and the use of hulks was on the decline, and the
Surveyor-General of convict prisons,
Joshua Jebb, set an ambitious program of prison building in the country, with one large prison opening per year.
Pentonville prison opened in 1842, beginning a trend of ever increasing incarceration rates and the use of prison as the primary form of crime punishment. Robert Peel's
Gaols Act 1823 introduced regular visits to prisoners by chaplains, provided for the payment of jailers and prohibited the use of irons and manacles. of New York's
Sing Sing Penitentiary, which also followed the
"Auburn (or Congregate) System", where prison cells were placed inside of rectangular buildings that lent themselves more to large-scale
penal labor In 1786, the state of
Pennsylvania passed a law that mandated that all convicts who had not been sentenced to death would be placed in penal servitude to do public works projects such as building
roads,
forts, and mines. Besides the economic benefits of providing a free source of hard labor, the proponents of the new penal code also thought that this would deter criminal activity by making a conspicuous public example of consequences of breaking the law. However, what actually ended up happening was frequent spectacles of disorderly conduct by the convict work crews, and the generation of sympathetic feelings from the citizens who witnessed the mistreatment of the convicts. The laws quickly drew criticism from a humanitarian perspective (as cruel, exploitative and degrading) and from a utilitarian perspective (as failing to deter crime and delegitimizing the state in the eyes of the public). Reformers such as
Benjamin Rush came up with a solution that would enable the continued use of forced labor while keeping disorderly conduct and abuse out of the eyes of the public. They suggested that prisoners be sent to secluded "houses of repentance" where they would be subjected (out of the view of the public) to "bodily pain, labor, watchfulness, solitude, and silence ... joined with cleanliness and a simple diet". Pennsylvania soon put this theory into practice and turned its old jail at
Walnut Street in
Philadelphia into a state prison in 1790. This prison was modeled on what became known as the "Pennsylvania system" (or "separate system") and placed all prisoners into solitary cells with nothing other than religious literature, made them wear
prison uniforms, and forced them to be completely silent to reflect on their wrongs.
New York soon built the Newgate state prison in Greenwich Village, which was modeled on the Pennsylvania system, and other states followed. in London, But, by 1820, faith in the efficacy of legal reform had declined, as statutory changes had no discernible effect on the level of crime, and the prisons, where prisoners shared large rooms and booty including alcohol, had become riotous and prone to escapes. In response, New York developed the
Auburn system in which prisoners were confined in separate cells and prohibited from talking when eating and working together, implementing it at
Auburn State Prison and
Sing Sing at
Ossining. The aim of this was
rehabilitative: the reformers talked about the penitentiary serving as a model for the family and the school and almost all the states adopted the plan (though Pennsylvania went even further in separating prisoners). The system's fame spread, and visitors to the U.S. to see the prisons included
de Tocqueville who wrote
Democracy in America as a result of his visit. in 1944 The use of prisons in
Continental Europe was never as popular as it became in the
English-speaking world, although state prison systems were largely in place by the end of the 19th century in most European countries. After the unification of Italy in 1861, the government reformed the repressive and arbitrary prison system they inherited, and modernized and secularized criminal punishment by emphasizing discipline and deterrence. Italy developed an advanced penology under the leadership of
Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909). Another prominent prison reformer who made important contributions was
Alexander Paterson who advocated for the necessity of humanizing and socializing methods within the prison system in Great Britain and America. ==Staff==