History of Prisons
| Author | John Roberts |
| Pages | 74-86 |
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Prisons, as places of confinement for lawbreakers, debtors, enemy combatants, political dissidents, religious heretics, and others, came into existence thousands of years before the common era. The modern concept of prisons, however, as places where offenders would be confined for specified periods of time as punishment for criminal offenses, did not emerge fully until the eighteenth century. Before then, states and societies seldom used imprisonment as a punishment. Rather, prisons functioned merely as detention areas to house offenders until the state could mete out the actual sentences—usually some form of capital or corporal punishment.
A landmark in humanitarian reform when it first appeared in the late 1700s, the concept of imprisonment as punishment continued to evolve during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prisons and prison systems throughout the world experimented with different programs, purposes, methodologies, and models. Far from the somewhat monolithic image of prisons in the popular imagination, prison facilities have ranged from halfway houses and minimum-security work camps to fortresslike maximum-security penitentiaries. Prison programs have varied from an emphasis on prisoner reform and the establishment of "normalized" environments, to a reliance on harsh discipline and long sentences. Prison administrators have struggled continually as the principal advocates for making prisons more effective, more responsible, and more humane—often in the face of hostile public reaction. Finally, prison systems have changed as legal structures, social standards, and public attitudes have changed. Like any other institution, prisons have reflected the cultures, societies, governments, and eras to which they have belonged.
There was widespread use of prisons in the ancient world. During the Middle Kingdom era in Egypt (ca. 2000 B.C.E.), the pharaohs imprisoned non-Egyptian criminals at hard labor in granaries and other available areas. From about 3000 B.C.E. to 400 B.C.E., the Babylonian Empire maintained prisons for petty offenders and debtors, and for noncitizens who broke the law. Babylonian citizens who committed crimes, however, were more likely to suffer banishment, mutilation, or execution. And many accounts of ancient prisons appear in the Christian Bible, both in the Old Testament (which cites imprisonment imposed by the Egyptians, Philistines, Israelites, and Assyrians) and the New Testament (which describes how the Romans confined early Christians in chambers beneath the floor of the Coliseum, before throwing them to the beasts).
There were also prisons in ancient Greece. As early as the fifth century B.C.E., Athens maintained a system of prisons—although criminals faced incarceration less frequently than fines, exile, stoning, crucifixion, and "precipitation" (being thrown from a high cliff). After witnessing his mentor, Socrates (ca. 470–399 B.C.E.), drink poisonous hemlock to satisfy a death sentence imposed against him for teaching philosophies that diverted his students from worshiping the traditional Athenian deities, Plato (ca. 427–347 B.C.E.) described in his Laws what he considered to be an ideal system of prisons. Minor offenders would serve short sentences in a public building near the marketplace; serious but redeemable offenders serving longer sentences would be sent to a nearby reform center; and the most incorrigible would be locked away in a secure prison far from the city.
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Plato's blueprint was never adopted by the ancient Greeks, but it anticipated with remarkable accuracy the corrections-oriented prison systems of many centuries later, with their graduated levels of security.
Exile and a variety of capital punishments were the primary sanctions in Rome. In the fifth century B.C.E., however, Rome introduced imprisonment for debtors, and permitted the heads of families to discipline slaves or other members of their households by confining them in domestic prison cells. In the third century B.C.E. Rome built an underground prison, called the Tullianum, in an old rock quarry, and in the first century B.C.E. Rome established a series of dungeons known as the Mamertine beneath the streets of the city. Rome built subterranean dungeons throughout the empire, often for captured enemy soldiers awaiting execution.
In 428 C.E., toward the end of the Roman Empire, Emperor Theodosius II (401–450) issued the Theodosian Code. A wide-reaching codification of Roman imperial legislation and decrees, it featured one of the first attempts to establish a systematic legal basis for prison operations. The code outlined minimum standards for the humane treatment of prisoners awaiting trial and provided for a rudimentary form of prisoner classification by requiring offenders who had committed the most heinous crimes to be incarcerated under harsher conditions than less serious offenders. It also sought to eliminate staff corruption and ensure proper treatment of inmates by requiring judges to inspect prisons regularly, and by holding prison wardens, or "registrars," responsible for escapes or mistreatment of prisoners.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Middle Ages in Europe, the Roman Catholic Church expanded the jurisdiction of its legal system, and provided for monastic or ecclesiastical prisons to confine both clergy and laypeople who violated canon law. During the papacy of Saint Siricius (ca. 334–399), prison cells (ergastulum) were established in monasteries, abbeys, and convents to confine miscreant priests, monks, and nuns at hard labor. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the church was using ecclesiastical prisons to punish clergy and nonclergy alike for behavior deemed sinful. And during the Inquisition of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the church imprisoned thousands of religious heretics.
Conditions in ecclesiastical prisons of the Middle Ages could be harsh, with restricted diets, beatings, and other forms of physical abuse. In the 1300s, the monks of Toulouse, France, protested prison conditions, and, even hundreds of years later, stories about cruelty in the ecclesiastical prisons were a staple of the lurid anti- Catholic screeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the ecclesiastical prisons represented an important advance. The purpose of the ecclesiastical prisons was not to serve simply as places of confinement for offenders awaiting capital or corporal punishment. Rather, they were intended as places of correction, where offenders could redeem themselves through prayer and penance.
By about 1100, nation-states and kingdoms were coalescing in Europe—giving rise to civil government, public law, and secular prisons. In 1166 Henry II (1133–1189) of England ordered county sheriffs throughout his domain to build jails (or gaols) to hold defendants awaiting trial. Sheriffs in northern Europe, including Scandinavia and Iceland, confined inmates in their own homes until they could be tried or until sentences could be imposed.
Many of the secular prisons during the Middle Ages were located in castles and fortresses. During the last half of the eleventh century in England, William I (ca. 1028–1087) started a royal tradition of imprisoning political enemies in the Tower of London. French monarchs began sending prisoners to the Chalet, a fortress on the right bank of the Seine, around 1200, and by the 1370s were housing offenders in the dungeons and towers of the Bastille. In the second half of the 1400s, Louis XI (1423–1483) used the fortress at Loches, near Tours, as a prison. City-states in Germany also incarcerated offenders in dungeons, chambers, and holes in castles, fortifications, and ruins.
By the end of the Middle Ages, the most prevalent forms of punishment continued to be forfeiture of property, torture, mutilation, and execution. Most offenders were confined in the secular prisons only until they could be tried and their sentences carried out. Gradually, however, incarceration became the punishment for a growing body of minor crimes—mainly misdemeanors, morals offenses, and vagrancy. Blasphemy and theft, for example, were imprisonable offenses in thirteenth-century France. And by the early 1500s, English common law specified no fewer than 180 offenses that were punishable by incarceration.
Until at least the eighteenth century, jailers who operated prisons received little or no funding from their governments. Instead, they collected fees from the inmates to pay for food and other necessities. Nobles and others who could pay higher fees were able to obtain better accommodations, and often were incarcerated in comparative comfort and privacy. Most inmates, however, were crowded into large rooms, without regard to sex, age, severity of offense, or mental stability, and were often subjected to the most squalid conditions. Corruption was widespread, as jailers frequently demanded exorbitant fees for the meager rations they dispensed, and discipline was enforced with beatings and other harsh measures.
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There were a few notable early attempts to classify and segregate inmates, particularly by sex. Le Stinche prison, built in the 1290s in Florence, Italy, housed male inmates separately from female inmates, and also segregated inmates by age group, degree of sanity, and severity of offense. The Maison de Force in Ghent, Belgium, and the Amsterdam House of Correction both separated men from women and felons from misdemeanants. Rome's Hospice of San Michele included special facilities and programs for juvenile offenders, and in 1645 Holland established the Spinuis in Amsterdam—a...
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