Prison Systems

The Origins of the Prison

Imprisonment was rarely used as a punishment in its own right before the late eighteenth century. Instead, prisons simply held offenders awaiting trial or their real penalty. Before the birth of the prison, offenders were sentenced to a range of corporal or capital punishments that included fines, hard labor, banishment, flogging, and execution. These days, a term of imprisonment has replaced most of these options with the result that, other than the death penalty (which most countries other than the United States have abolished), punishment is rarely inflicted on the body. Instead, offenders are housed for varying periods of time in penal institutions that must adhere to certain minimum standards of care set down by prison rules and the courts.

The origins of the prison can be found in their earliest form in religious houses, like monasteries and convents, where unwanted wives and daughters or unemployable and otherwise wayward sons could be forcibly enclosed. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a series of European nations began to establish secular institutions to house their growing numbers of poor, homeless, and otherwise marginal or displaced citizens. Despite subtle differences among them, these early correctional establishments were united in their attempts to confine the poor and teach them the moral value of industry and work.

The English are generally understood to have been the innovators in this new field of incarceration. From the mid-sixteenth century, they locked up their poor in institutions known as “workhouses” and held their criminals in Bridewells. The “sturdy vagabonds and prostitutes” housed in such facilities were assigned to a range of tasks from baking to the treadmill (Sellin 1976: 71). In the last years of the 1500s, the Dutch followed suit and established the rasphuis for men and the spinhuis for women in Amsterdam. Designed to chastise “all vagabonds, malefactors, rogues, and the like,” these institutions put their inmates to work at rasping wood and spinning flax (Spierenburg 1991: 42). Finally, in 1656, the French created the largest and most complex web of incarcerating institutions when Louis XIV established the Hôpital Général. Soon, every major town in France had at least one hospital-prison complex, with Paris boasting a large number of them. Each institution held a specific population, as women and men were segregated, and the young were kept separate from the old. Within these establishments, the classifications of inmates continued, as the sick and the criminal were held in different buildings and assigned specific tasks to help them reform.

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