History of Prisons in US Essay

Submitted By Nova86
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The history of prisons in the United States is a long and sorted one dating back to this country’s inception. The American colonies were originally used as penal colonies for the British Empire, much the way Australia was. Since then, correctional institutions in America have taken on many forms. In the paper, I will explain the history of prisons, and compare and contrast the various prison systems this country has seen over the centuries. Imprisonment as a form of criminal punishment became a common practice in the United States shortly before the American Revolutionary war. Before the advent of prisons, people convicted of crimes were subject to public humiliation, hard labor, and other cruel and unusual punishments; or forced into indentured servitude as punishment for their crimes. Actually, convicts played a crucial role in British settlement of North America. According to social historian Marie Gottschalk, convicts were "indispensable" to English settlement efforts in what is now the United States. [sic] Convicts were made to build roads, work on plantations, and any and all other hard labor, including sailing on colonial ships to work as deck hands or oarsmen. Although jails were an early fixture of colonial North American communities, they generally did not serve as places of incarceration as a form of criminal punishment. Instead, the main role of the colonial American jail was as a non-punitive detention facility for pre-trial and pre-sentence criminal defendants, as well as imprisoned debtors. [sic] However, jailhouses for the purpose of corrections did exist in colonial America. The 1629 colonial charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, granted the shareholders behind the venture the right to establish laws for their settlement "not contrarie to the lawes of our realm in England" and to administer "lawfull correction" to violators, and Massachusetts established a house of correction for punishing criminals by 1635. Colonial Pennsylvania built two houses of correction starting in 1682, and Connecticut established one in 1727. By the eighteenth century, every county in the North American colonies had a jail [sic] The birth of “modern” prisons can be traced back to the early 1830’s. Prisons took on two major forms, the Pennsylvania system, in Pennsylvania, and the Auburn System in New York. Unlike most correctional institutions at the time, the Pennsylvania System sought to achieve rehabilitation through solitary confinement as opposed to hard labor. Prisoners entered the institution with a black hood over their head, so they would never know who their fellow convicts were, before being led to the cell where they would serve the remainder of their sentence in
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