NCJ Number
100783
Date Published
1986
Length
64 pages
Annotation
The idea of punishment for personal wrongs evolved with the institution of personal property. Criminal punishment, culminating in imprisonment as a replacement for fines, corporal penalties, and imaginative applications of capital punishment, coincided with the development of vengeance as a personal right.
Abstract
Retribution was, until 200 years ago, the hallmark of Western criminal justice. Seagoing technological developments later provided transport for removing offenders from their native country, selectively eliminating corporal punishments and ushering in a new age of humanitarianism. The European experience with Bridewells, combined with John Howard's report on European prisons and the Quaker influence in Pennsylvania, led to the original penitentiary in Pennsylvania in which offenders were punished by the passage of time while separated from the rest of society. A competing plan, the Auburn system, developed shortly afterwards. It required prisoners to work together under a rule of silence during the day and retire to confinement at night. This plan, because of its economic appeal set the tone for other prisons in America until almost the present day. The reformatory incorporated the indeterminate sentence and supervised early release (probation). However, a re-awakened concern with punishment and economic pressures made the industrial prison the established form of incarceration by 1900. Based on diverse systems of inmate labor, such institutions proved popular with States until labor union objections, culminating in the Ashurst-Sumners Act of 1935, ended their era. Tables, 63 notes, and 12 discussion questions. (Author abstract modified)