U.S. Prison System

Introduction

Anation's jail scheme retains persons who have been convicted by the enclosures and punished to a term of imprisonment. Offenders in the joined States may be put in a state or in a federal correctional facility. If they are punished for less than one year, they will be held in a localizedized or shire jail. Other components that work out which kind of penal organisation an one-by-one is sent to encompass the crimes for which he or she has been convicted and his or her sex, age, mental wellbeing, and physical health. Juvenile offenders, except they are endeavoured as mature persons, are held individually from mature person criminals in juvenile detention centers. Since the 1980s, the prison community in the joined States has advanced dramatically. Between 1980 and 1998 solely, it “ballooned from 329,821 to 1,302,019—a increase of 295 percent”—and as the community extends to increase after two million, “there is little evidence that America's imprisonment crusade will end shortly” (Austin and Irwin 2001: 1). As the population has bigger, so, too, have the costs of lodgings them as “spending on corrections increased from $9.1 billion in 1982 to almost $40 billion in 1995” (Austin and Irwin 2001: 13). In light of the expansion of the confined community and the corresponding boost in the economic burdens of incarceration, it is becoming progressively pressing to address what jail is like and what it is for.

Origins of 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 ...