Prison

• 1. Introduction

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  A prison is a facility where people are held under the authority of the state, usually as punishment for crimes. The same building goes by many names: jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center. Across the world, the word you use depends on where you stand and what the law calls it. In 2021, the World Prison Brief reported that at least 11.5 million people were imprisoned worldwide. That single number contains an enormous range of human experience. It holds people awaiting trial who have been convicted of nothing. It holds people serving long sentences after pleading guilty. And in some places it holds people detained for their politics, without a fair trial or due process. How did a building become the central instrument of modern justice? Who decided that locking a person away should count as the punishment itself, rather than a wait before something worse? And what actually happens inside, to the inmates, the guards, and the communities they come from? The answers begin with a slow shift in how rulers thought about pain, fear, and the human capacity to change.

• 2. From Chains To Punishment

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  Plato and other Ancient Greek philosophers began to develop the idea that punishment could reform offenders rather than simply repay them with retribution. In ancient Athens, imprisonment was used commonly for those who could not pay their fines. Because impoverished Athenians could not pay, that practice led to indefinite imprisonment, so time limits were set instead. The Athenian prison carried a blunt name: the desmoterion, or the place of chains. The Romans were among the first to use prisons as a form of punishment rather than only for detention. They pressed existing structures into service, including metal cages, the basements of public buildings, and quarries. One of the most notable was the Mamertine Prison, established around 640 B.C. by Ancus Marcius. It sat within a sewer system beneath ancient Rome, a network of dungeons where prisoners were held in squalid conditions contaminated with human waste. Forced labor on public works was common, and many citizens were sentenced to slavery in ergastula, where unruly slaves were chained to workbenches. Despite prisons throughout the empire, no regulated prison system emerged. In Medieval Songhai, a trial could end in confiscation of merchandise or imprisonment, since various prisons existed in the empire. In medieval Europe, castles, fortresses, and basements served as makeshift prisons, and the power to imprison gave officials an air of legitimacy. Another punishment was galley slavery, chaining prisoners in the bottoms of ships and forcing them to row on naval or merchant vessels.

• 3. The Reformers

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  John Howard was one of the most notable early prison reformers. As high sheriff of Bedfordshire he visited several hundred prisons across Great Britain and Europe, and in 1777 he published The State of the Prisons. He was particularly appalled to find prisoners who had been acquitted yet remained confined because they could not pay the jailer's fees. He called for housing each prisoner in a separate cell, professional staff paid by the government, outside inspection, and a healthy diet with reasonable living conditions. His admirers established the Howard League for Penal Reform in 1866. After Howard's agitation, the Penitentiary Act 1799 introduced solitary confinement, religious instruction, and a labor regime, and proposed two state penitentiaries, one for men and one for women. Those penitentiaries were never built, undone by disagreements in the committee and the pressures of wars with France. In 1815, jail fees were finally abolished. Quakers were prominent in publicizing the dire state of the prisons. Elizabeth Fry documented Newgate prison, where the ladies' section was overcrowded with women and children, some of whom had never received a trial. Inmates did their own cooking and washing in small cells where they slept on straw. The section was described as like a den of wild beasts, filled with women fighting, swearing, dancing, gaming, and yelling, and justly deserving its name of hell above ground. In 1816, Fry founded a prison school for children imprisoned with their parents. In 1817, she helped found the Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate.

• 4. The Birth Of The Modern Prison

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  Jeremy Bentham's panopticon introduced the principle of observation and control that underpins the design of the modern prison. His theory was born in London, and the notion of prisoners being incarcerated as part of their punishment, rather than as a holding state until trial or hanging, was at the time revolutionary. As capital punishment for trivial offenses declined, incarceration as correction held great appeal to reform-minded thinkers. The first state prison in England was Millbank Prison, established in 1816 with capacity for just under 1,000 inmates. By 1824-54 prisons had adopted the system advocated by the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline. The Surveyor-General of convict prisons, Joshua Jebb, set an ambitious building program with one large prison opening per year. Pentonville prison opened in 1842, beginning a trend of ever increasing incarceration rates. Robert Peel's Gaols Act 1823 introduced regular visits by chaplains, provided for the payment of jailers, and prohibited irons and manacles. In 1786, Pennsylvania mandated that convicts not sentenced to death be placed in penal servitude on public works such as roads, forts, and mines. The result was frequent disorderly conduct and public sympathy for mistreated convicts, drawing criticism as cruel and as a failure to deter crime. Benjamin Rush and others proposed sending prisoners to secluded houses of repentance, subjected out of public view to bodily pain, labor, watchfulness, solitude, and silence joined with cleanliness and a simple diet. In 1790, Pennsylvania turned its Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia into a state prison. This Pennsylvania system, or separate system, placed prisoners in solitary cells with only religious literature and forced total silence. New York built the Newgate state prison in Greenwich Village on the same model. By 1820, faith in legal reform had declined, and shared rooms had become riotous and prone to escape. New York answered with the Auburn system, confining prisoners in separate cells and forbidding talk while they ate and worked together, used at Auburn State Prison and at Sing Sing in Ossining. The system's fame spread, and visitors included de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America as a result of his visit.

• 5. Foucault And The Logic Of Discipline

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  Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, energized the historical study of prisons with his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Drawing on historical documents from France, he analyzed how Western penal systems changed during the modern age. Foucault argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment simply because of the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to its dominance through the body and through power. The prison, in his account, relies on disciplines, new technological powers he finds not only in cells but in schools, hospitals, and military barracks. That argument has a backstory in the late 17th and 18th centuries, when popular resistance to public execution and torture spread in Europe and the United States. Under the Bloody Code, the death penalty for petty crimes such as theft grew unpopular, and jurors began refusing to convict when conviction meant death. Rulers wanted to punish without staging spectacles of tyrannical and sadistic violence, so they developed systems of mass incarceration, often with hard labor. The reform movement drew on two contradictory philosophies. One came from Enlightenment utilitarianism and rationalism, treating prison as a more effective substitute for whipping and hanging, and gave rise to deterrence theory. The other, rooted in religious ideas that equated crime with sin, saw prison as moral reform, a place to instruct prisoners in Christian morality, obedience, and proper behavior.

• 6. Transportation And Penal Colonies

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  England shipped convicted criminals across the Atlantic for a term of indentured servitude within the population of British America between the 1610s and 1776. The Transportation Act 1717 extended this option to lesser crimes and offered it as a longer-term alternative to the death penalty. This was the first major innovation in eighteenth-century British penal practice. The Criminal Law Act 1776 abruptly suspended transportation to America with the start of the American Revolutionary War, instituting hard labor instead and prompting the first prison building program. Britain resumed transportation to planned penal colonies in Australia between 1788 and 1868. With transportation halted in the 1770s, old sailing vessels called hulks became the most readily available places of temporary confinement. Conditions aboard were generally appalling, yet the labor they provided persuaded many that mass incarceration was a viable method of crime prevention. By the 1810s, the first state prisons and correctional facilities were built. France also sent criminals to overseas penal colonies, including Louisiana in the early 18th century, and its penal colonies in French Guiana operated until 1952, among them the notable Devil's Island. Katorga prisons were harsh work camps established in the 17th century in remote, underpopulated areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East, places with few towns or food sources. Siberia quickly gained its fearful connotation of punishment. Italy took a different path. After unification in 1861, the government reformed the repressive and arbitrary system it inherited, emphasizing discipline and deterrence, and developed an advanced penology under the leadership of Cesare Lombroso, who lived from 1835 to 1909.

• 7. Inside The Walls

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  Prisons are normally surrounded by fencing, walls, earthworks, or geographical features to prevent escape. Depending on security level, there may be concertina wire, electrified fencing, armed guard towers, security lighting, motion sensors, dogs, and roving patrols, with CCTV, alarms, cages, and restraints inside. Modern designs increasingly use a decentralized podular layout, where self-contained units called pods or modules hold 16 to 50 prisoners and let a few officers, sometimes only one, monitor every cell from a central control station. By comparison, 19th-century prisons had large landings that permitted only intermittent observation. When an inmate arrives, they go through a security classification screening and risk assessment that determines their placement. At the secure end sit maximum security facilities, and beyond them supermax prisons hold terrorists, political prisoners, and disruptive inmates in lockdown for more than 23 hours per day. Meals reach them through chuck-holes in the cell door, and each inmate gets one hour of outdoor exercise alone, under constant closed-circuit television surveillance. At the other end are minimum security prisons, often holding people convicted of white-collar crime. Some countries, such as Great Britain, run open prisons that allow home-leave or part-time outside employment. Suomenlinna prison in Finland has been open since 1971. As of September 2013, its 95 male prisoners left the grounds daily to work in the township or commute to the mainland, earning prison-labor wages between 4.10 and 7.30 euros per hour and renting flat-screen televisions, sound systems, and mini-refrigerators. Male prisons tend to carry higher security classifications than female prisons, with taller walls and barbed wire, partly because women are convicted of less severe offences and are less likely to be violent. Prisons employ a Warden, also called a Governor, who heads all staff, alongside security officers, teachers, case managers, counselors, medical workers, and religious workers who also conduct weddings when inmates marry someone outside. In 2024, the American Library Association published Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated or Detained.

• 8. The Reach Of The System

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  In 2021, the United States had the world's largest prison population, with over 2 million people in prisons or jails, up from 744,000 in 1985, making 1 in every 200 American adults a prisoner. The Prison Policy Initiative estimated the government spent about US$80.7 billion to maintain prisons in 2017, while CNBC put the figure at US$74 billion per year, with over 800,000 people employed in the prison industry. The country no longer has the highest incarceration rate in the world, a position now held by El Salvador. Not every country has grown its system. Sweden closed four prisons in 2013 after a significant drop in inmates, with prison numbers falling around 1% a year since 2004. The human cost lands unevenly. Black people, who make up 13% of the United States population, make up 37% of the prison population. People with disabilities account for 40% of those in state prisons compared with 15% of the general population. The National registry of exonerations found that 70% of people who falsely confessed and were later exonerated had intellectual disabilities and mental illness. After release, people who have spent time in prison see their subsequent annual earnings reduced by an average of 52 percent. The chance of returning runs high. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 67.8% of released prisoners in the United States are rearrested within three years and 76.6% within five years. Debate over what prison is for continues across four familiar justifications: rehabilitation, deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution. Reformers push alternatives such as fines, community service, suspended sentences, house arrest, and restorative justice, which arranges mediation between offender and victim so the offender can repair the harm by apologizing, returning stolen money, or community service. Further still stands the prison abolition movement, which seeks to eliminate prisons altogether out of a belief that they are inherently ineffective and discriminatory. As Morris and Rothman put it in 1995, it is hard to train for freedom in a cage.