Prison: the story on HearLore

Prison

The first prison was not a place of rehabilitation but a sewer system beneath ancient Rome, where prisoners were held in squalid conditions contaminated with human waste. This facility, known as the Mamertine Prison, was established around 640 B.C. by Ancus Marcius and served as a grim example of early detention methods. Before the rise of the state as a form of social organization, imprisonment was rarely used as a punishment in its own right. Instead, it was primarily a holding state for those awaiting trial or punishment. The Romans were among the first to use prisons as a form of punishment rather than simply for detention, utilizing existing structures such as metal cages, basements of public buildings, and quarries. In many cases, citizens were sentenced to slavery, often in ergastula, a primitive form of prison where unruly slaves were chained to workbenches and performed hard labor. The concept of imprisonment as a penalty was used commonly for those who could not afford to pay their fines, leading to indefinite periods of imprisonment until time limits were set. In ancient Athens, the prison was known as the desmoterion or the place of chains, highlighting the physical nature of early confinement. 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. During the Middle Ages in Europe, castles, fortresses, and the basements of public buildings were often used as makeshift prisons. 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. The use of prisons can be traced back to the rise of the state as a form of social organization, with some Ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato, beginning to develop ideas of using punishment to reform offenders instead of for retribution.

The Birth of the Modern Prison

John Howard was one of the most notable early prison reformers who, after having visited several hundred prisons across Great Britain and Europe, published The State of the Prisons in 1777. He was particularly appalled to discover prisoners who had been acquitted but were still confined because they could not pay the jailer's fees. Howard proposed wide-ranging reforms to the system, including the housing of each prisoner in a separate cell and the requirements that staff should be professional and paid by the government. The prison reform charity, the Howard League for Penal Reform, was established in 1866 by his admirers. Following Howard's agitation, the Penitentiary Act 1799 was passed, which introduced solitary confinement, religious instruction, a labor regime, and proposed two state penitentiaries, one for men and one for women. However, these were never built due to disagreements in the committee and pressures from wars with France, and jails remained a local responsibility. Elizabeth Fry documented the conditions that prevailed at Newgate prison, where the ladies' section was overcrowded with women and children, some of whom had not even received a trial. The inmates did their own cooking and washing in the small cells in which they slept on straw. The section was described like a den of wild beasts; it was filled with women unsexed, fighting, swearing, dancing, gaming, yelling and justly deserved its name of hell above ground. In 1816, Fry founded a prison school for the children who were imprisoned with their parents. She also began a system of supervision and required the women to sew and to read the Bible. In 1817, she helped to found the Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate. The theory of the modern prison system was born in London, influenced by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham's panopticon introduced the principle of observation and control that underpins the design of the modern prison. The notion of prisoners being incarcerated as part of their punishment, and not simply as a holding state until trial or hanging, was at the time revolutionary. His views influenced the establishment of the first prisons used as criminal rehabilitation centers. At a time when the implementation of capital punishment for a variety of relatively trivial offenses was on the decline, the notion of incarceration as a form of punishment and correction held great appeal to reform-minded thinkers and politicians. In the first half of the 19th century, capital punishment came to be regarded as inappropriate for many crimes that it had previously been carried out for, and by the mid-19th century, imprisonment had replaced the death penalty for the most serious offenses except for murder. The first state prison in England was the Millbank Prison, established in 1816 with a capacity for just under 1,000 inmates. By 1824, 54 prisons had adopted the disciplinary system advocated by the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline. By the 1840s, penal transportation to Australia and the use of hulks was on the decline, and the Surveyor-General of convict prisons, Joshua Jebb, set an ambitious program of prison building in the country, with one large prison opening per year. Pentonville prison opened in 1842, beginning a trend of ever increasing incarceration rates and the use of prison as the primary form of crime punishment. Robert Peel's Gaols Act 1823 introduced regular visits to prisoners by chaplains, provided for the payment of jailers and prohibited the use of irons and manacles.

When was the first prison established and who founded it?

The first prison known as the Mamertine Prison was established around 640 B.C. by Ancus Marcius. This facility was a sewer system beneath ancient Rome where prisoners were held in squalid conditions contaminated with human waste.

Who was the early prison reformer who published The State of the Prisons in 1777?

John Howard was the notable early prison reformer who published The State of the Prisons in 1777 after visiting several hundred prisons across Great Britain and Europe. He proposed wide-ranging reforms including housing each prisoner in a separate cell and requiring staff to be professional and paid by the government.

What year did Pentonville prison open and what trend did it begin?

Pentonville prison opened in 1842 and began a trend of ever increasing incarceration rates and the use of prison as the primary form of crime punishment. This development occurred during a period when the use of hulks and penal transportation to Australia was on the decline.

How many people were imprisoned worldwide according to the 2021 World Prison Brief report?

The 2021 World Prison Brief reported that at least 11.5 million people were imprisoned worldwide. The United States of America had the world's largest prison population with over 2 million people in American prisons or jails.

When did Suomenlinna prison in Finland become an open correctional facility?

Suomenlinna prison in Finland has been open since 1971 and allows prisoners to leave the prison grounds daily to work in the corresponding township or commute to the mainland for work or study. As of September 2013 the facility held 95 male prisoners who could earn wages ranging between 4.10 and 7.30 euros per hour.

The Architecture of Control

Modern prison designs have increasingly sought to restrict and control the movement of prisoners throughout the facility and also to allow a smaller prison staff to monitor prisoners directly, often using a decentralized podular layout. Smaller, separate and self-contained housing units known as pods or modules are designed to hold 16 to 50 prisoners and are arranged around exercise yards or support facilities in a decentralized campus pattern. A few prison officers, or sometimes only one, supervise each pod. The pods contain tiers of cells arranged around a central control station or desk from which a single officer can monitor all the cells and the entire pod, control cell doors and communicate with the rest of the prison. Movement in or out of the pod to and from exercise yards, work assignments or medical appointments can be restricted to individual pods at designated times and is generally centrally controlled. Goods and services, such as meals, laundry, commissary, educational materials, religious services and medical care can increasingly be brought to individual pods or cells as well. Some modern prisons may exclude certain inmates from the general population, usually for safety reasons, such as those within solitary confinement, celebrities, political figures, former law enforcement officers, those convicted of sexual crimes and or crimes against children, or those on the medical wing or protective custody. In some countries, prisoners are made to wear a prison uniform and are stripped of nearly all personal possessions, with the exception of approved medical devices like glasses. The levels of security within a prison system are categorized differently around the world, but tend to follow a distinct pattern. At one end of the spectrum are the most secure facilities, maximum security, which typically hold prisoners that are considered dangerous, disruptive or likely to try to escape. Furthermore, in recent times, supermax prisons have been created where the custody level goes beyond maximum security for people such as terrorists or political prisoners deemed a threat to national security, and inmates from other prisons who have a history of violent or other disruptive behavior in prison or are suspected of gang affiliation. These inmates have individual cells and are kept in lockdown, often for more than 23 hours per day. Meals are served through chuck-holes in the cell door, and each inmate is allowed one hour of outdoor exercise per day, alone. They are normally permitted no contact with other inmates and are under constant surveillance via closed-circuit television cameras. On the other end are minimum security prisons which are most often used to house those for whom more stringent security is deemed unnecessary. For example, prisoners convicted of white-collar crime which rarely results in incarceration are almost always sent to minimum-security prisons due to them having committed nonviolent crimes. Lower-security prisons are often designed with less restrictive features, confining prisoners at night in smaller locked dormitories or even cottage or cabin-like housing while permitting them free movement around the grounds to work or partake in activities during the day. Some countries such as Great Britain also have open prisons where prisoners are allowed home-leave or part-time employment outside of the prison. Suomenlinna prison in Finland is an example of one such open correctional facility. The prison has been open since 1971 and, as of September 2013, the facility's 95 male prisoners leave the prison grounds on a daily basis to work in the corresponding township or commute to the mainland for either work or study. Prisoners can rent flat-screen televisions, sound systems, and mini-refrigerators with the prison-labor wages that they can earn, wages range between 4.10 and 7.30 euros per hour. With electronic monitoring, prisoners are also allowed to visit their families in Helsinki and eat together with the prison staff. Prisoners in Scandinavian facilities are permitted to wear their own clothes. There are fundamental differences between the security level of men's prisons and that of women's prisons. Male prisons tend to have higher, or more severe, security levels classifications than female prisons. This is even noticeable when comparing the construction and design of male prisons which tend to have very tall walls and towers, barbed wire and other serious security measures whereas these types of high level security measures are absent at many female prisons. This is due to multiple factors, including females being convicted of less severe offences and being less likely to be convicted of violent offences, in comparison to males, and due to female prisoners being less likely to be violent than male prisoners.

The Human Cost of Confinement

Prisons can be difficult places to live and work in, even in developed countries in the present day. By their very definition, prisons house individuals who may be prone to violence and rule-breaking. It is also typical that a high proportion of inmates have mental health concerns. A 2014 US report found that this included 64% of local jail inmates, 54% of state prisoners and 45% of federal prisoners. The environment may be worsened by overcrowding, poor sanitation and maintenance, violence by prisoners against other prisoners or staff, staff misconduct, prison gangs, self-harm, and the widespread smuggling of illegal drugs and other contraband. The social system within the prison commonly develops an inmate code, an informal set of internal values and rules that govern prison life and relationships, but that may be at odds with the interests of prison management or external society, compromising future rehabilitation and increasing recidivism rates. In some cases, disorder can escalate into a full-scale prison riot, which could lead to serious injury or death en masse. Academic research has found that poor conditions tend to increase the likelihood of violence within prisons. For example according to Gaes and McGuire study, as social density increased by 1% in prisons, violence increased about 0.3%. Prisoners can face difficulty re-integrating back into society upon their release. They often have difficulty finding work, earn less money when they do find work, and experience a wide range of medical and psychological issues. Many countries have a high recidivism rate. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 67.8% of released prisoners in the United States are rearrested within three years and 76.6% are rearrested within five years. If the prisoner has a family, they are likely to suffer socially and economically from the prisoner's absence. If a society has a very high imprisonment rate, these effects become noticeable not just on family units but also on entire poor communities or communities of color. The expensive cost of maintaining a high imprisonment rate also costs money that must come at the expense of either the taxpayer or other government agencies. People with disabilities are overrepresented in the American criminal justice system, with 40% of people in state prisons having disabilities compared to 15% of the general population. Factors that may contribute to this are lack of social support, lack of effective communication with law enforcement or legal representation, poverty, bias and prejudice, and mental health issues, among others. The United States Department of Justice reported that people with disabilities were victims of 26% of nonfatal violent crimes while being accounted for 15% of the population from 2017-2019 in addition to being four times as likely to be a victim of a violent crime 46.2 per 1,000 age 12 or older than those without a disability 12.3 per 1,000. As police are often the first responders to mental health crises, this can increase the chance of conflicts with the mentally ill. In the United States, a million incarcerated people suffer from mental illness without any assistance or treatment for their condition. The tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend, known as the rate of recidivism, is unusually high for those with the most serious disorders. Analysis of data in 2000 from several forensic hospitals in California, New York and Oregon found that with treatment the rate of recidivism was much lower than for untreated mentally ill offenders. Prisoners are at risk of being drawn further into crime, as they may become acquainted with other criminals, trained in further criminal activity, exposed to further abuse both from staff and other prisoners and left with criminal records that make it difficult to find legal employment after release. All of these things can result in a higher likelihood of reoffending upon release. This has resulted in a series of studies that are skeptical towards the idea that prison can rehabilitate offenders. As Morris and Rothman 1995 point out, It's hard to train for freedom in a cage.

The Economics of Incarceration

In the United States alone, more than 74 billion dollars per year is spent on prisons, with over 800,000 people employed in the prison industry. As the prison population grows, revenues increase for a variety of small and large businesses that construct facilities and provide equipment security systems, furniture, clothing and services transportation, communications, healthcare, food for prisons. These parties have a strong interest in the expansion of the prison system since their development and prosperity directly depends on the number of inmates. The prison industry also includes private businesses that benefit from the exploitation of the prison labor. Some scholars, using the term prison-industrial complex, have argued that the trend of hiring out prisoners is a continuation of the slavery tradition, pointing out that the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution freed slaves but allowed forced labor for people convicted of crimes. Prisons are very attractive to employers, because prisoners can be made to perform a great array of jobs under conditions that most free laborers would not accept and would be illegal outside of prisons: sub-minimum wage payments, no insurance, no collective bargaining, lack of alternative options, etc. Prison labor can soon deprive the free labor of jobs in a number of sectors, since the organized labor turns out to be uncompetitive compared to the prison counterpart. Additionally people imprisoned afterward have lower earnings on average. People who have spent time in prison suffer the greatest losses, with their subsequent annual earnings reduced by an average of 52 percent. People convicted of a felony but not imprisoned for it see their annual earnings reduced by an average of 22 percent. People convicted of a misdemeanor see their annual earnings reduced by an average of 16 percent. In 2021, the World Prison Brief reported that at least 11.5 million people were imprisoned worldwide. In 2021, the United States of America had the world's largest prison population, with over 2 million people in American prisons or jails, up from 744,000 in 1985, making 1 in every 200 American adults a prisoner. In 2017, the nonprofit organization Prison Policy Initiative estimated that the United States government spent an estimated 80.7 billion dollars to maintain prisons. CNBC estimated that the cost of maintaining the US prison system was 74 billion dollars per year. This increases government spending on prisons. The rapid rise in the rate of imprisonment in the United States came in response to the declaration of a war on drugs: nearly half of those incarcerated in the United States are sentenced to prison for violating drug prohibition laws. The United States no longer has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with El Salvador now having the highest. Not all countries have experienced a rise in prison population: Sweden closed four prisons in 2013 due to a significant drop in the number of inmates. The head of Sweden's prison and probation services characterized the decrease in the number of Swedish prisoners as out-of-the-ordinary, with prison numbers in Sweden falling by around 1% a year since 2004. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime website hosts data regarding prison populations around the world, including Persons held by sex, by age group, Persons held by status and sex and Prison capacity and overcrowding totals.