History & Development of Prisons

History & Development of Prisons Introduction to Corrections: CJA234: Wk 1

Objectives • Identify the forms of punishment most often used in societies throughout the 1700’s. • Compare and contrast prisons during and after World War II. • Examine the penitentiary ideal. • Examine the move toward separate prisons for women and juveniles. • Compare the two contrasting models of American Prisons. • Describe the rise and fall of labor in prison.

History and development of corrections • Early punishments • Social and legal context • Age of enlightenment • Scholars and reformers • Early correctional institutions

Corporal Punishments

Early Punishments • When we think of the punishments that pre-date the prison, we tend to imagine the abundant use of physical punishments, particularly corporal punishments and capital punishment. • Corporal punishment: anypunishment that involves infliction of pain on the human body. A variety of such punishments come to mind—whipping, beating, branding, mutilation, and burning among the most common forms. • Whipping: emerged as the most prevalent method of physically punishing criminals in early Western societies. Whipping offered several advantages. It required no special equipment other than the whip. It could be done anywhere. Most corporal punishments were done at a central location where the entire community could turn out to watch. Whippings were also measured punishment in the sense that they could be counted—ten, twenty, or fifty lashes.

Early Punishments • Corporal Punishments (cont.) • Branding of criminals with a hot iron became a more common practice by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. • Capital punishment in many forms was also common in early societies. The killing of a human being is the supreme penalty for a crime. • Though the definition of a “capital offense” has changed considerably over time, the death penalty remains on the books in most countries today, including thirty-eight states of the United States and the federal government. Before the 1800s, the death penalty was generally available not only as a punishment for the most serious degree of homicide (as it is in the United States today) but also for any serious crime if the judge believed the offender deserved it. Torture before death was also commonplace.

Early Punishments • Capital Punishment (cont.) • The Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, from about 1750 B.C., provided the death penalty for twenty-five different crimes. • including cursing one’s mother or father, sorcery, adultery, having sex with animals, homosexuality, and allowing one’s own animals to cause the death of another person. • The Death Penalty Information Center reports that by the early 1800s, 222 separate criminal offenses were punishable by death in England, including many forms of theft and property crimes (such as poaching game) that we would expect to be punished with a fine and suspended sentence today.

The History of Executions

Early Punishments • Exile (banishment): many early societies (and a few more recent ones) avoided executing some deserving criminals by casting them out of society—sending them to some distant place and forbidding them to return home. • Outlawry: The British used the term to indicate a status outside the law. An outlaw was originally said to have a wolf’s head. To declare a person an outlaw was to declare him a nonperson; his property was forfeited, he lost all civil rights, and anyone who killed him would not be charged with a crime since he no longer existed as a person. • Transportation:From the 1600s through the mid–1800s, England practiced transportation of convicted felons to its colonies—first to America and later (after the independent United States was no longer available as the dumping ground for the wretched refuse of England’s teeming shore) to Australia. The labor of these felons was sold to businessmen who were responsible for transporting them to their new colonial homes; the felons, men and women, generally owed seven years of labor to their masters or fourteen years if they had been pardoned from death sentences.

Early Punishments • Other Sanctions: • economic sanctions were commonly available for imposition on both property and violent criminals at the court’s discretion. • Economic sanctions as being of two types—fines and restitution. A fine is paid to the government, while restitution is paid to the victim. In earlier societies, the compensation went directly to the victim or the victim’s family and not to the government. The problem that often arose was that, then as now, criminals were often lacking in economic means. When they (or their families) did not have the resources to repay their victims, they were sold as slaves.

Early Punishments • Other Sanctions (cont.) • Public humiliation: Minor offenders, such as drunks, lazy workers, or people who had violated religious laws, might be placed in a pillory, standing up with head and hands locked in a wooden frame, or the stocks, where a seated criminal would have both feet and hands locked in a frame. Displayed in a public place, offenders would be subject to the ridicule of people who knew them well; passersby felt free to insult the embarrassed offenders or pelt them with rotten vegetables. Women who nagged their spouses or gossiped might find themselves in a ducking stool, which was a chair on the end of a rope or the end of a seesaw in which they would be dunked in a creek a few times and given salutary warnings, such as “Don’t nag” and “Don’t gossip.” • In Puritan communities, it was common practice to “brand” criminals with a cloth letter indicating their crime: “T” for thief, “D” for drunk, “F” for fighter. • Nathaniel Hawthorne employed this device in The Scarlet Letter, telling the story of Hester Prynne, punished by having to wear a red “A” on her clothing for the crime of adultery.

Social and Legal Context • What determined the punishment practices of these societies? • It is always easier to punish transients or strangers whom we do not know; it is not so easy to punish our family members, close friends, and neighbors. Indeed, one of the major determinants influencing public attitudes toward punishing criminals today is the homogeneity of the national population within which the crime occurs. The more homogeneous the people—the more alike they are in ethnicity, religion, and class and cultural values—the more lenient the punishment practices are likely to be. • Conversely, the more heterogeneous a country’s citizens and the more diverse their ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds, the more punitive people are toward criminals (because they perceive that criminals are “different” from them, and indeed they often are). Russia and the United States come to mind here.

Social and Legal Context • Behavior was directed by social customs, called folkways and mores, more than by laws or formal rules. When someone violated these customs, by an act of illicit sex, violence, or sorcery, it was up to a community leader, typically a tribal or later a village elder, to decide the appropriate penalty, perhaps in consultation with other advisers. • There was no reference book of sanctions. None of this was written down, and there was no appeal process. Execution of sentence was immediate. Even after some of the larger and more complex cultures began to write down their laws and apply some kind of uniformity to the process by which members were judged and punished, most other people on earth continued to live in cultures where justice was much more informal, personal, and spontaneous.

Age of Enlightenment • The eighteenth century was a time of important change in the West, a time of intellectual inquiry articulating new perspectives on government, law, and society. • the traditional methods of punishing criminals would be among many social institutions undergoing dramatic transformation.

Scholars and Reformers • CesareBeccaria (1738–1794): emphasized the need for law to be in conformity with the rationality and free will of humanity. • Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832): claimed that all laws, ancient or modern, should be evaluated according to the single ethical principle of ‘utility.’ A law is good or bad depending upon whether or not it increased general happiness of the population. • John Howard (1726–1790): a Christian activist, it was his appointment as high sheriff of Bedforshire in 1773 that gave his life focus and earned him historical recognition as the “father of prison reform.” Howard devoted the rest of his life to inspecting jails and prisons throughout Great Britain and on the European continent.

Scholars and Reformers • William Penn (1644–1718). Penn adopted a legal code, referred to as the Great Law, that was very different from other legal codes of its time. Penn’s code substituted imprisonment at hard labor for physical punishments. It first abolished the death penalty entirely, then reinstated it only for premeditated murder (similar to the capital offense of first-degree murder today).

Early Correctional Institutions • Gaol: From medieval times to the modern era, the basic English correctional institution (though critics might point out that it had no correctional purpose whatsoever). • The jail was a small-town facility (or in a large city, such as London, a neighborhood facility) whose purpose was detention, or holding people for court. • Gaolscould range in size from one room to something the size of an old castle. Most colonial American jails were simply one-room wooden or stone structures that could be locked up. • Conditions of confinement varied according to the ability of the inmates to pay. Gaols operated on the fee system, which charged prisoners daily fees to make money for the sheriffs and businessmen who operated the institutions. Prisoners with money were typically able to get much nicer accommodations than would the poor.

Early Corrections Institutions • Workhouses: From the 1500s through the 1800s, England developed a system of local workhouses to keep transient laborers (and the women and children who followed after them) from disrupting city life. • Bridewell: known as a particular type of this institution for the poor. • Houses of Correction were created by statute in England in 1574 to house “rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars. • monastery long played an important dual social role quite apart from its role as the center of religious teaching and learning. When church officials were guilty of criminal or grossly inappropriate conduct, they were rarely punished in the secular courts; if they needed to be removed from their positions, many were sent to monasteries where they could be isolated and punished—doing the same kind of penance later associated with the penitentiary.

Early Correctional Institutions • Prisons:in their early days were often no more than caves or holes that could be secured in some fashion. • MamertinePrison: was a dungeon under the sewers of Rome, is often identified as the first known ancient prison. • Hospice of San Michele: It held delinquent youths and young men, like a modern reformatory. Inmates slept in separate cells and worked together in silence; rule violations were punished with flogging. • Maison de Force: Opening as a workhouse in 1773, this institution for beggars and vagrants was widely admired for its humane, reformative approach. It maintained a system of strict discipline but avoided the excessive cruelty of that era. Inmates were classified by gender and crime severity. They slept in separate cells and worked in silence. • Hulks: old ships at anchor in the harbor. They were called prison shipsasin rotting hulks, unseaworthy and sometimes sinking. It was not uncommon for prisoners held on the lower decks to drown in their chains—and they may have been the lucky ones, with the survivors facing conditions of filth, bad food, disease, and brutality that sometimes wiped out virtually the entire complement of prisoners on a given ship. This, of course, made space for another batch.

Learning Activity • Objective of activity • Analyze prisons, prison life, and parole in the 1800s. • Description of activity • Break the class up into small groups. Give the groups 15 minutes to discuss prison life in the 1800s. Have each group discuss and analyze and the development of probation, parole and separate institutions during this time period, and then compare how this may have or may have not contributed to the way probation, parole, and institutional standards of today’s criminal justice system.

Penitentiary- ideal and models • Prison rules and discipline • Separate institutions • Southern prisons and convict leasing • Reform

Prison Rules and Discipline • Nineteenth-century prisons employed strict controls and severe disciplinary practices, commonly based on physical punishment. • The most important restriction was the rule of silence. • silence was believed necessary to prevent the moral contamination that authorities feared would spread in prison. Prisons worked out elaborate systems of signaling, using whistles, bells, horns, and other sounds to structure the daily routine and hand signals to indicate requests and acknowledgments. • Prisons then and now had lots of rules—rules regarding conduct, contraband, labor, sanitation, and sexual behavior. (Masturbation in particular was very strongly disapproved of, as it was believed to lead to blindness, insanity, tuberculosis, and other common prison ailments.) Guards were expected to be alert to any rule violation.

Prison Rules and Discipline • Prisoners were allowed fewer personal possessions than they are today, and they were far more isolated from the outside world. Some prisons had very specific lists of what possessions prisoners were allowed to have, but the whole matter was completely arbitrary. • Prisoners in custody had no legal rights and no access to courts. • What prisoners were allowed and how they were treated depended entirely on the administrators of their prison—in particular, the personality and beliefs of the warden, who created the custodial atmosphere.

Prison Rules and Discipline • Elam Lynds: who was warden of Auburn prison and then built the new, improved Sing Singin the 1820s. Lynds’s view was that convicts were cowards and dogs and ought to be treated accordingly. Lynds invented two of the control devices associated with early prisons—prison stripes andthe lockstep. He put inmates in striped uniforms to make them more visible and also to humiliate them

Tent City-Arizona

Separate Institutions • Women’s Prisons • One of the perplexing problems of early jails and prisons was what to do with women prisoners. Rates of incarceration were much lower in those days than they are today, and the numbers of women in custody were very small—often just a handful among a much larger number of male prisoners. Jails before the 1800s had often treated women exactly as they treated men. Women were punished as men were, with the exception that pregnant women were often spared punishment until after they had given birth. Women were generally mixed with male prisoners and supervised by male jailers, which made the women doubly subject to abuse and exploitation. Since most women in custody were prostitutes or habitual thieves (and in America typically immigrants or minorities as well), no one worried much about their predicament. • This began to change in the early 1800s. Elizabeth Gurney Fry was an English Quaker and mother of eleven children. After a visit to Newgate prison in 1813, Fry began a ministry for the women of Newgate and eventually other London jails and prisons.

Separate Institutions • Juvenile Prisons • As some nineteenth-century reformers worked to improve the plight of women in prison, others focused on children. • English and American legal systems had traditionally made no distinction in punishment based on age. Juveniles were locked up in jails right along with adults. Criminals as young as seven were given adult punishments if they were found to know the difference between right and wrong, and all youngsters became legal adults at fourteen. Several children under this age were executed in colonial times. • By the time of the Enlightenment, it was more common for judges to deal leniently with young offenders—particularly because so many of them had sad stories to tell, such as tales of abandonment and falling under the influence of adult criminals.

Separate Institutions • Juvenile Prisons • three basic arguments: 1. The penitentiary regimen was too hard on tender youth. 2. Juveniles would learn bad habits from older criminals and be embittered by the experience of confinement. 3. Adolescents could be reformed if they were diverted early enough into institutions designed specifically for people their age. • In the 1820s and 1830s, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia set up houses of refuge to keep juveniles out of jail. • By the 1850s, Massachusetts had opened separate training schools for boys and girls.

Southern Prisons & Convict Leasing • As northern states developed the punitive institutions and alternatives that would bring them into the twentieth century, southern states followed a different track. In its approach to corrections, the South was different from the North in several key aspects: 1. Aside from its coastal cities, the South was much more rural than urban; local governments were much more influential than state governments. 2. Although individual reformers, often relocated from the North, made names for themselves in the South, reform movements never had the same effect on public policies in the South as they did in the North. Reforms tended to be discussed rather than acted on or, if put into effect, quickly abandoned. 3. Between one-third and one-half the population of southern states were blacks held in slavery, for the most part outside the civil and criminal legal system. It was difficult to be “progressive” when so much time and attention was devoted to maintaining an inherently regressive institution.

Reform • Penitentiary • Where previous societies had emphasized the infliction of pain (through physical punishments) or banishment, fines, or indentured servitude, the penitentiary emphasized a combination of time and a very restricted environment as criminal penalties.

20th century correctional systems • In 1954, the American Prison Association voted to change its name to the American Correctional Association. • The name change reflected the growing role of probation, parole, and other non-institutional methods of supervising and helping criminals. But symbolically it gave prisons a new mission: rehabilitation. • Prisons were intended to provide the opportunity for reform—to improve what is wrong, corrupt, or unsatisfactory. • The road to prison today is much longer and considerably more cut with side roads—diversion, probation, community corrections, and boot camp.

History & Development of Prisons