Early Release

The History of Early Release

Founded in the Pennsylvania Quaker system under the guidance of William Penn, America'first prisons were designed to produce a reflection of sins [Page 62]and a recommitment to societal norms. Penitents entered penitentiaries to reform themselves during a pre-arranged length of stay (a flat sentence). At the end of their time, they were released under an assumption of repentance but without any formal assessment. Philadelphia'High Street Jail (1682) and Pennsylvania'Western (1818) and Eastern (1820) State Penitentiaries are good examples of these types of prisons. A slightly different penal ideology emerged out of New York'Auburn Prison (1816). Auburn worked on a step-model, where prisoners were initially isolated but were later allowed contact with other inmates. After a rash of suicides and other mental illnesses among inmates that many claimed erupted from sustained, forced isolation, Auburn switched to a system that allowed silent labor among other prisoners during the day and forced isolation only in the evenings. In both New York and Pennsylvania, inmates served the entire length of their sentence without any discretionary or early release.

Influenced by early prison reformers both inside and outside of the United States, early release developed as a result of the need for incentives within institutional environments. In the United States, good-time laws emerged as early as 1817 in New York State, when prison administrators began asking their state legislatures for a way to reward well-behaved inmates. By the mid-1800s, nearly half the states had good-time laws in place. Abroad, Captain Alexander Maconochie, the Scottish Warden of Norfolk Island—a notoriously rough Australian prison—developed the mark system, where inmates could earn their freedom early through hard work and good behavior. At the same time, Sir Walter Crofton, director of an Irish prison, began to question how penitentiaries were achieving repentance if inmates were never ascribed this status and given release as reward. Crofton developed what he called “the Irish system,” where inmates progressed through various custody stages from solitary confinement, to group work, and finally to a type of halfway house where they reestablished relations with their community. If prisoners completed the stages successfully, they were said to have earned a “ticket of leave.” Crofton took his version of early release a step further by having community members supervise former inmates post-incarceration as a component of their conditional release.

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