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state of being imprisoned, despite the drop in crime in past decade, rates of arrest and
The prison start in Ancient Athens was known as the “desmoterion” (“a place of
chains”) The Romans were among the first to use prisons as a form of punishment,
rather than simply detention. A variety of existing structures were used to house
prisoners, such as mental cages, basements of building and, quarries. The history
imprisonment was not to punish them, but was means of keeping the perpetrator of a
crime detained until the actual punishment could be carried out. This was usually in
the form of corporal punishment that was intended to cause the guilty person pain,
such as being beaten with whip, of capital punishment which used a variety of methods
to claim the lives of condemned individuals. London is known as the birth place of
modern imprisonment. A philosopher named Jeremy Bentham was against the death
penalty and thus created a concept for a prison that would be used to hold prisoners
would remain for extended periods of time. His design was intended to ensure that the
people who are locked up would never know if they were being watched by guards or
not, which he felt world allow the prison to save money. Since inmates could not be
certain how many guards were present Bentham reasoned, fewer officers would need
to be hired to maintain the peace. In the end this prison was never built, but the
concept of using prisons as a form of long term punishment did catch on.
By the 19th century prisons were being built for the sole purpose of housing inmates
they were intended to deter people from community crimes. People who were found
guilty of various crimes would be sent to these penitentiaries and stripped of their
personal freedom. Inmates were often forced to do hard labor while they were
incarcerated and to live very harsh conditions. One of the goals of a prison sentence
became the rehabilitation on inmates many people felt that the fear of being locked up
would be enough deter an inmate from ever committing another crime, but other
theories held that policies should be introduced to help reform prisoners before they
were set free. These policies include mental examinations, educational programs and
sometimes even for more drastic measures such as electroshock therapy. An opposing
view point to the rehabilitative effects of imprisonment claims that being incarcerated
will actually cause people to become even more involved with a life of crime regardless
prisons, which they believed needed a chance to become morally pure in order to stop
or slow crime. Since at least 1740, some of this philosophers began thinking of solitary
English people immigrated to North America, so did these theories of penology. Some
of first structures built in America were jails, and by the 18 th century every English
North American country had a jail. These jails served as variety of functions such as a
holding place for debtors, prisoners-of-war, and political prisoners , these bound in the
penal transportation and slavery systems, and those excused of but not tried crimes.
Sentence for those constricted crimes were rarely longer that three months, and often
lasted only a day. Poor citizens were often imprisoned for longer that their richer
neighbors, as bails was rarely not accepted. One of the first prisons in America was
founded 1790by the Pennsylvanian Quakers. The Quakers wanted something that was
less cruel than dungeon prisons. They created a space where prisoners could read
scriptures and repent as a means of self-improvement. After the civil war and really
gaining momentum during the p[progressive Era of America, new concepts of prison
increase in crime causing criminals to handle crime in a more retributive way. But as
the crime rate declined, they started to focus more on rehabilitation. In September, the
incarceration rate of United State of America was the highest in the world at 716 per
100,00 of the national population. While the United State Represent about $ 74 billion
At the end of 2016 the Prison Policy Initiative a non-profit organization for
decarceration estimated that in the United State about 2,298,300 people were
incarcerated out of a population of 324.2 million. This means that 0.7٪ of the population
was behind bars. Incarceration in the United States is one of the main forms of
punishment and rehabilitation for the commission of felony and other offences. The
United States has the largest prison population in the world and highest per capita
incarceration rate.