Prison
A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where people are imprisoned under the authority of the state, usually as punishment for various crimes. They may also be used to house those awaiting trial. Prisons serve two primary functions within the criminal-justice system: holding people charged with crimes while they await trial, and confining those who have pleaded guilty or been convicted to serve out their sentences.
Prisons can also be used as a tool for political repression by authoritarian regimes who detain perceived opponents for political crimes, often without a fair trial or due process; this use is illegal under most forms of international law governing fair administration of justice. In times of war, belligerents or neutral countries may detain prisoners of war or detainees in military prisons or in prisoner-of-war camps. At any time, states may imprison civilians – sometimes large groups of civilians – in internment camps.
Terminology
The terminology used to describe or distinguish between prisons and other correctional facilities can vary between nations and jurisdictions.Australia
In Australia, the words "gaol", "jail" and "prison" are commonly used. The spelling "gaol" was in official use in the past, and many historical gaols are now tourist attractions, such as the Maitland Gaol. Officially, the term "correctional centre" is used for almost all prisons in New South Wales and Queensland, while other states and territories use a variety of names. "Prison" is officially used for some facilities in South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia. Youth prisons in Australia are referred to as "youth correctional facilities" or "youth detention centres" among other names, depending on the jurisdiction.Canada
In Canada, while the terms "jail" and "prison" are commonly used in speech, officially named facilities use "facility", "correctional centre", "penitentiary", or "institution". A number of facilities retain their historical designation as a "jail".New Zealand
In New Zealand, the terms "jail" and "prison" are commonly used, although the term "correctional facility", among others, are in official usage.Papua New Guinea
In Papua New Guinea, "prison" is officially used, although "jail" is widely understood and more common in use.UK and Ireland
The official modern term is "prison". The spelling "gaol" is obsolete in modern speech but is still found in older texts, and in historical and legal contexts.The Gaols Act 1823 describes two types of prison: gaols and houses of correction.
Houses of correction were first established by the Poor Relief Act 1601 in England and Wales, as a place to send the "idle poor" and vagrants for hard labor. Later laws added the functions of punishment for minor crimes after summary jurisdiction, and pre-trial detention. The function of dealing with the poor was replaced by workhouses and then general public assistance.
United States
In American English, the terms "prison" and "jail" have separate uses, though this is not always adhered to in casual speech and the manner in which correctional facilities are officially described varies by state.- A "jail" holds people for shorter periods of time or for pre-trial detention and is usually operated by a local government, typically the county sheriff.
- A "prison" or "penitentiary" holds people for longer periods of time, such as many years, and is operated by a state or federal government. After a conviction, a sentenced person is typically sent to prison.
History
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. 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, 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.File:Abbey of Clairvaux.jpg|left|thumb|In the modern era, many fortified buildings, such as abbeys and fortresses, were converted to use as prisons. Pictured is the cloister of Clairvaux Abbey, converted to a prison exercise yard after secularization.
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.
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, branding, and non-physical punishments, such as public shaming rituals. 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
England used penal transportation of convicted criminals 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 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.File:Discovery at Deptford.jpg|thumb|left|The beached convict ship 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. 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.