NCJ Number
167512
Date Published
1995
Length
31 pages
Annotation
During the period between 1780 and 1865, confinement in England was given a more uniform and exacting shape, and ideals of reformers often played a decisive role in defining this shape.
Abstract
The classification of prisoners resulted from a desire to limit the spread of moral contagion and represented a way of organizing the progression of prisoners through their sentences. Strategies intended to reform prisoners found acceptance because they increased the severity of confinement or facilitated prisoner management. The most enduring accomplishment of the period was the creation of the prison as a place apart from the world. The prison was a realm defined by complete loss of freedom. Prisoners suffered few physical punishments but they were denied any control over their days and were permitted almost no visitors. Even as prisoners were more closely controlled and observed, punishment disappeared from the scope of most citizens. The general public became less familiar with the inside of prisons, and society came to rely on the wide dissemination of literary and journalistic reports about prisons. Also, the general public never accepted the claim that the prison was supposed to individualize treatment and rehabilitate offenders. The prison regime of 1865 was the product of reformer ideals, prison administrator practices, local initiatives, and government intervention but was also the outcome of an institution that had created its own logic and powerful necessity. References and photographs