| A BRIEF HISTORY OF IMPRISONMENT BACKGROUND IN EUROPE Prisons were very rare before the industrial revolution (and resulting urbanization) starting in the 1600s and 1700s. Exceptions included the Roman Empire and churches in the middle ages. Most pre-agriculture societies (hunter-gatherers, pastoral, horticultural) had traditions of family restitution for harms (not individual guilt, etc.). In agricultural societies, law and crime were class-based, and punishments for offenses against the powerful ranged from fines, to mutilation and/or banishment, to torture/executions. Dungeons were not really prisons in the modern sense but were holding cells until disposition of cases (usually release or execution). In "late agricultural" societies (the periods preceding industrialization in each country), rising agricultural productivity produced large surplus populations of "useless people" and the enclosure of public lands (public lands became private property of the rich) drove these surplus pops into towns to work in factories. Since factories required capital, they were only able to absorb the growing surplus pops slowly, and this led to mass executions, poorhouses and workhouses, and eventually massive out-migration (e.g., to North America) like the "transportation" of "criminals" in England (most of those transported were not really criminals, but were surplus peasants. With continuing industrialization and out-migration, the surplus pop problem gradually abated but workhouses for the poor and "criminals" were common across Europe until the 1800s when they began to be modernized into the warehouse prisons of today. UNITED STATES The states were colonies until the late 1700s and were an agricultural society sharing much of the culture of more developed Europe. The colonies had no history of landlord/peasant conflict, mutilation or torture/execution, and didn't need workhouses/poorhouses (westward migration for surplus populations). In the early 1800's, the Quakers established the "Pennsylvania System" of long solitary confinement to tiny cells (the "penitentiary"), and the "Auburn System" was started in New York (workhouse located away from population centers and surrounded by a wall). The Auburn System became the model for prisons (built by states) across most of the US: 1850-1900, 40 prisons built 1900-1930 20 prisons built 1930-1960 15 prisons built Prisons last a long time so the total number of prisons increased even as fewer were being built over the decades. Note: in the South "prison farms" modeled after the old slave plantations emerged as the main type of prison after the Civil War. In the 1900s, the Auburn System prisons were increasingly replaced by "warehouse" type prisons (Jackson Prison in Michigan in 1929, Attica Prison in NY in 1931; etc.). These prisons are larger and usually include several modern features: "classification systems" based on characteristics of prisoners; educational and vocational training; counseling; medium and minimum security areas; etc. After World War 2, studies by social scientists and government commissions indicated that the classification systems and counseling/education programs didn't work (partly because they were resisted by the prisoners and inmate cultures) and many experts were beginning to advocate a "college campus" approach with a more normalized lifestyle for prisoners. The old maximum security warehouse prisons would be retained for violent offenders but new medium and minimum security campuses would be built for others. By the mid-1970s many experts were predicting the "end of prisons" in US. Then the "conservative turn" began and the imprisonment binge began escalating in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has continued since. US historical imprisonment rates (IR): 1930 110 (per 100,000 population) 1960 100 1990 350 2008 750 + (note: European IRs range from about 40-50 up to a high of about 140) |