History of Prisons

Early Europe

In early medieval Europe, local prisons scattered across centers of population and seats of jurisdiction retained their multiple functions, while execution, exile, mutilation, enslavement, and fines remained the dominant forms of punishment. However, by the 13th and 14th centuries, canon law and ecclesiastical courts had developed with jurisdiction over lay persons as well as clergy. At the same time, monastic cells became a locus for penitential expiation within an institutionalized disciplinary system in a manner that foreshadowed the function of the prison as a site for moral correction.

In England, by the 12th century, the Tower of London, the Fleet, and other royal prisons held a range of occupants for both coercive and custodial purposes. People could be sentenced under common law or be placed there by the will of the sovereign for a range of activities, including incursion of debt. At the same time, towns and local nobles responsible for keeping the peace were required to provide local jails for those awaiting trial and sentencing. Jailors charged fees and sold food and clothing to the prisoners. Inmates had to pay any debts incurred during their confinement before they could be released. Conditions in these early jails ranged from relative comfort for those with means to a foul and death-threatening existence for those without.

The numbers of imprisonable offenses increased in England from the 13th century onward. By the 16th century, there were 180 such acts, including vagrancy, illegal bearing of arms, and morals offenses, which carried sentences of penal bondage. People sentenced for these crimes could be placed in “bridewells” or “houses of corrections” that sought to instill habits of discipline, hard labor, and religious observance in a domestic household model. London's Bridewell, the first of many in England, opened in 1556 for the confinement of women and men “idle, criminal and destitute.”

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