How Jails Came To Be In America

The Long and Winding Road: How Jails Came to Be in America

[The guards here believe that] the tougher, colder, and more cruel and inhuman a place is, the less chance a person will return. This is not true. The more negative experiences a person goes through, the more he turns into a violent, cruel, mean, heartless individual, I know this to be a fact

- Annonymous Prisoner, "The Trauma of Prison Rape" (Manner 130)

The prisoner described the truth of jails as he is experiencing them now, while the original Quaker intentions had something much different in mind. The Quakers, who were led under William Penn, were the first group to set up an institutionalized system in the United States that dealt with punishment. Since the original plans were developed for the prison system, the goal and intentions have been reformed time and time again. Although jails are supposed to be a place of rehabilitation, the reality is that they are actually a hotbed for spurring criminals more violent then when they were first admitted.

Before jails were even implemented in America, the colonists had quite a different approach to punishment that led to how jails came to be. The original outlook of criminals came from the Colonists religious belief that criminals were sinners who were workers of the devil. The Colonists felt they had to be protected from devil's workforce and therefore criminals must have their name run into the ground, be cast out of the town, or in the most extreme cases be hung. Before the Colonists accepted institutions, they looked to public humiliation as a means of correcting the lesser criminals. The harsher punishments, such as death, were given to people who were believed to be beyond redemption. But, with growing populations due to industrialization of cities townspeople grew less and less known to one another. With less recognition between citizens the thought of public humiliation as a punishment was weakening as a threat. On top of that, people were beginning to grow weary that capital punishment may have been too barbaric and overall ineffective. Yet, the colonists were still not completely convinced to utilize jails. The hesitation was a result of the community feeling that most men were not salvageable and institutionalizing them would only be rewarding. Although, this conception began to unravel in the late 1600's when the Pennsylvania Quakers came up with a plan that would eventually be accepted.

William Penn was rumored to have based his correctional model after the prison facility Bridewell that was located near London. Regardless of whether he replicated or not, he was still part of the first group to suggest using correctional facilities for punishment regarding larger crimes. The Quakers began using this system in Pennsylvania and West Jersey for all serious crimes except for 1st degree murder. But, the rules set forth by William Penn began to change after he was removed from power and his great law was replaced by Anglican code. Colonists preferred to take on harsher penal sanctions (Clare 38). But it was during the years of 1790 to 1830 that the population shift took too much of a toll on the Colonists. As the Colonists struggled to maintain a model code of punishment, the emergence of Italian mathematician and legal scholar Casare Beccaria came to really influence the Colonists conception of punishment.

As a result of Beccaria's insights, convinced Americans were more then ready to apply his theories. Beccaria had written an essay titled "On Crimes and Punishments" that challenged many to forgo their barbaric approaches of punishment. Beccaria emphasized the point that a potential offender would refrain from engaging in criminal activity if he believed the possibility of getting caught existed. He considered the most important aspect of crime prevention to be the certainty of punishment. Although, he stressed heavily the fact that incredibly harsh punishment only makes matters worse because it brutalizes the individual causing him to become even more involved in crime. Beccaria even suggested that those governments that impose the harshest punishments are in fact the same places, which are experiencing the worst acts of crime (Clare 39). In 1790, Americans put Beccaria's words into action when a majority of the states either abolished the death penalty completely or significantly decreased its usage. During the same time period the Colonists wanted to make state prisons and looked to European models for influence. After the completion of the first few state models, the trend of infiltrating rehabilitation programs in prisons came forth.

The general rehabilitation models for prisons have gone through many phases. In the beginning, "the Custodial Model" was the most adherent and derived from the Quakers outlook on humanitarianism as means of reforming. The notion was that if the criminal were kept in complete solitude then contemplation on their bad deeds would ensue. There was absolutely no integration between inmates. In the mid nineteenth century the model began to change again with the emergence of both probation and parole programs. Although these practices took almost a century to really evolve, a new mentality towards the field of corrections was born. The application of medicine as a means to cure prisoners of their mental illnesses became fervent. At this time many programs were introduced that are still present today such as Alcoholics Anonymous.