History of Imprisonment

in the United States

Issues in Corrections
Dr. Jarrell
Questions
What was the primary reason for American
colonization?

Who were the nations first prisoners?

What crimes did they commit?

What were our nations prisons first used for?

The Emergence and Growth of
the Prison System
The development of the prison as a place of
punishment corresponds not to crime but to
much larger structural changes in the
surrounding society and the specific social and
historical context.

The emergence and growth of the prison system
corresponded to the emergence and growth of
capitalism as a dominant economic form
(Sheldon, 2001: 153).
Discovery of America
Explorer Christopher Columbus (1492) thought
he had discovered the fabled passage to India.

Columbus: They should be good servants and
intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took
in what was said to them.

Columbus went back to Spain with spices, herbs,
cotton, animals, and his exotic prisoners which
the Spaniards referred to as slaves.

Christopher Columbus
Spanish crown would send convicts with
Columbus to deal with settling the
Indians. Columbus also sent back Indian
captives.

Columbus was eventually arrested and
charged with political crimes but released
and returned on a fourth voyage to the
New World.


Lands were not called Columbus; but
America after Italian explorer Amerigo
Vespucci who claimed to discover the New
World a year prior to Columbus.

Spains discovery of precious ore deposits
led to further exploitation of natives, war,
disease, suicide, slavery, etc.

One of the worst genocides in recorded
history.

One Spaniard who was horrified by
what was happening to the natives was
a former explorer, Bartolome de Las
Casas, who vowed to devote the rest of
his life to securing the justice of those
Indian peoples, and to condemn the
robbery, evil, and injustice committed
against them.
To save them from extinction, he beseeched his
king to introduce Negroes from Guinea as a
substitute, arguing that the the labour of one
Negro was more valuable than that of four
Indians.

The king agreed, and in 1517 the first asiento
was arranged, enabling four thousand Negroes
to be imported to the West Indies over the next
eight years.

African slaves started arriving a few months
later, and by 1540 an estimated thirty thousand
men, women, and children had been taken to
Hispaniola alone.

African Slave Trade

At first the Spanish considered these Africans to
be ideally suited for slavery in the mines and
field. But in his old age, Las Casas came to
realize he had made another terrible mistake.

Black slavery did not save the Indians but
merely added another oppressed race- and
the colony became even more dependent
on slavery for its survival.
More and more explorers brought convicts
and Africans (held as prisoners) to the
New World.

They were set up as colonies in order to
bring goods back to Europe.

Tobacco was discovered in Virginia but it
became a tremendous challenge to
produce and ship to England.

That year however, the Virginia Company underwent a
shakeup that put Sir Edwin Sandys in control.

Under his direction the company launched an intensive
promotional campaign to attract more investors, settlers,
and servants.

Publicists wrote enticing broadsides, promising
everything from daily sustenance to eternal bliss to
anyone who would go to Virginia.

Drummers marched from village to village, beating up
interest. Hucksters combed the fairs and groghouses,
enlisting recruits. Minstrels sang seductive ballads.
From Parliament to pulpit, Virginias
colonization was depicted as a noble effort of
Christian reformation, for, as one pious
supporter asked, What can be more excellent,
more precious, more glorious, than to convert a
heathen nation from worshipping the devil to
the saving knowledge and true worship of God
in Jesus Christ.?

Sandys offered a promise of something that was
generally not available in England: an
opportunity for upward mobility. Piece by piece,
he and his image makers created the American
Dream.
Colonization was touted as a way to
spread Christianity but really it was a
mechanism for obtaining labor.

Also: how can we get people here against
their will? Enslave certain groups of
people! Round up societies outcasts!
Banish convicts!

In America, criminals could at least be put to
use earning a profit for company and crown, and
they could serve the interests of Christendom at
the same time.

Having already established the reformative
value of colonization for heathen savages, it
required no great leap to apply this standard to
others.

Thus it was that a royal commission concluded
that any felon, except those convicted of
murder, witchcraft, burglary, or rape, could be
legally be transported to Virginia or the West
Indies to become servants on the plantations.
The economic purpose of this policy was clear
from the start.

In one case, a man convicted of manslaughter
and condemned to death was reprieved
because he was a carpenter and the plantation
needed carpenters.

Soon afterward Sandys proposed sending over
maids as breeders, that wives, children, and
family might make them less movable and settle
them, together with their posterity in that soil.
The Growth of the
Prisoner Trade
The infusion into Virginia of kidnapped
children, maids, convicts, and Africans, all
to work as servants on the plantations,
marked the beginning of a pattern that
would continue for nearly two centuries.
By 1650, most British emigrants to colonial
America went as prisoners of one sort or
another.
Some were forcibly kidnapped or arrested and
shipped there against their will.

Some were tricked or enticed into giving up their liberty.

Others bound themselves as servants in order to avert
execution, starvation, imprisonment, or boredom.

There were some significant distinctions between
indentured servants, transported convicts, slaves, and
seamen or soldiers compelled into military service but all
of them qualified as prisoners, since they were deprived
of their liberty.
British American was not the first prison colony. Many
earlier empires had used transplanted prisoners to
cultivate foreign plantations, dig mines, and perform
hard labor.

Starting in the early seventeenth century and continuing
for 150 years, however, an organized, international
prisoner trade, of which African slave trade was just one
important part, provided the foundation for Englands
colonial wealth and Americas identity.

To the extent that American history is the story of
immigration, then American colonial history is largely the
story of the immigration of prisoners.
Following sea routes discovered by their
explorers, European merchants transported iron,
alcohol, and other goods to Africa, exchanging
them for human cargoes.

These people were brought by force to the West
Indies and the Americas and traded for tobacco,
sugar, gold, silver and other items that were
taken back to English and European ports.

Prisoners manned the ships, prisoners were
carried to the colonies to work in the mines and
fields, prisoners were brought in chains from
Africa and Europe to the Caribbean and the
Americans as slaves.
If a person disappeared, their relatives
or friends would have little hope of finding
them. There was no professional system
of policing; no system of justice. Political,
economic, and religious power ruled all.

Trafficking of prisoners was very
profitable. Immense fortunes were made
from tobacco, sugar, and rum but only
because of the seizure, imprisonment,
shipment, and sale of human beings.

By the end of the seventeenth century,
England dominated African slave trade.
They would establish a colony for
producing tobacco or sugar, a white labor
force would oversee the black slaves:

All that remained was to develop the
legal and moral justification for racial
slavery.

Prisons were an essential part of the
prisoner trade. They would serve as
holding places near the shore to await
shipment abroad.

Plantations
One characteristic which set American slavery apart was
its racial basis. In America, with only a few early and
insignificant exceptions, all slaves were Africans, and
almost all Africans were slaves. This placed the label of
inferiority on black skin and on African culture.

In other societies, it had been possible for a slave who
obtained his freedom to take his place in his society with
relative ease. In America, however, when a slave
became free, he was still obviously an African. The taint
of inferiority clung to him.

Not only did white America become convinced of white
superiority and black inferiority, but it strove to impose
these racial beliefs on the Africans themselves.
The Atlantic slave-trade was different from all
earlier slavery in several respects. Most
enormously important is that it was the first
form of slavery that was solely motivated by
commercial incentives.

Slaves in earlier times enjoyed social and
individual rights - like marriage, freedom to raise
a family, speak their language and worship their
gods, rights which were denied the African
slaves exported to the Americas. Africans
captured and taken into the new world were
stripped of all their personality and humanity -
they could not even bear their own names.
Another Group of Prisoners
Rise of the Quaker movement in
Northern England (1650s), a radical
religious movement; called
themselves Friends but known as
Quakers because of their religious
zeal; led by George Fox

By the winter of 1655-1656, Friends were meeting in
almost every county, despite severe repression. The
more they were imprisoned, the stronger their resolve;
the stronger their resolve, the more converts they
gained; the more members they attracted, the more
threatening they were considered and the more of them
that were imprisoned; and the more that were
imprisoned, the more converts they made.

Thus it was the prisons that became their primary
meeting places and suppliers of new members. Fox
himself was frequently shifted from one prison to
another and often released because he was more of a
threat inside than out. But the more that he and his
supporters were mistreated, the more they seemed to
thrive.
English prisons were used as holding places for
prisoners awaiting transportation; they were
generally not used for punishment.

Punishment was very painful and the death
penalty was often used, publicly, for a large
range of offenses, even minor offenses.

System of penalties known as The Bloody
Code. Religious offenses dominated the courts.
In 1717, Parliament passed an act
empowering courts to sentence offenders
directly to transportation to American
plantations. The convict trade to America
was BIG business.

The passage to America was horrendous.
Many died on the trip. Once they made it
to America, they were sold to the highest
bidder.

The Puritans
War on crime is a moral necessity; every
crime is a sin and every sin is a crime.
The most common crime was drunkenness.
Harsh punishments!


As believers in visible signs of sainthood or sinfulness,
Puritans often attached appropriate physical stigmata to
convicted law breakers.

A woman who skipped worship might have to stand at
the church door with a sign around her neck or, if the
offense was more serious, the town fathers might force
her (like Hester Prynne) to wear a scarlet letter on her
clothes for life.

Some markings were made permanent by the removal of
an ear or two, or the branding of a shoulder, hand,
forehead, or cheek. The punitive alphabet included A
(adulterer), B (blasphemer), D (drunk), F (fighter),
M (manslaughter), R (rogue), and T (thief).
The upper-class persons were almost never
punished.

Whipping was a standard punishment for
servants, seamen, slaves or Indians.

The Massachusetts Bay Company charter
required a House of Corrections to be built for
both the punishment of offenders and to deter
others by example.

In addition to establishing prisons, other criminal
punishments, and a system of servitude, the
Puritans took extreme measures against the
local Indians.
They also carried out one of the bloodiest
attacks on Indians in history, teaming up with
Narragansett and Mohegan warriors to murder
as many as seven hundred Pequot women and
children at Mystick (Connecticut), after which
they sold some of the survivors to the
Narragansett and loaded seventeen others onto
a ship, the Desire.

Captain William Pierce of Salem guided the
vessel to the Caribbean, where he exchanged
them for cotton, tobacco, salt, and negroes,
which he took back to Boston.

The Puritans considered two groups to the
most dangerous and threatening: witches
and Quakers.

The Quakers, trying to escape religious
persecution in England, were arriving in
droves to New England. They began a
new colony called Pennsylvania.

By the end of the seventeenth century, three
main classes (besides the Indians) had emerged
in the North American colonies: black slaves,
convicts/other white servants, free white
persons. Regardless of class, women enjoyed
fewer rights and privileges than their male
counterparts.

There isnt much written about the British and
Irish prisoners who were transported into
servitude. Many historians have simply
dismissed the transports as unsavory types who
did not play any significant role in American
development but this is mainly because firsthand
accounts by transported convicts are extremely
rare.

Many historians have portrayed
transported felons as losers in their own
day who generally failed to rise very much
in economic or social status, a class that
over generations formed the basis for
what came to be known as Southern poor
white trash.
Many colonists strongly resented and
opposed convict transportation and their
legislatures passed ordinances restricting
shipments of prisoners.

Indentured servants generally served six-
year terms and convicts seven or
fourteen, but slaves were bound for life.
Blacks took the place of the Irish as the
colonies most degraded class.

Every colony developed its own slave
code and control apparatus. Police powers
and punishments were bolstered, and
communications networks among the
colonies were improved.

People had become conditioned to accept
the notion of human beings as property to
be bought, sold, taxed, and transferred.
Much of Americas early government was
devised and strengthened to protect
slavery.
Imprisonment was a mechanism for total control over
slaves. The rural Southern plantation was a prison
without walls. George Washington himself was a third
generation slaveholder who grew up accepting slavery
as natural, necessary, and moral.

Consequently, a slaves choices were essentially those of
any prisoner.

Rebellion occurred with greater frequency in the early to
mid 1700s. Punishment for rebellion was brutal.

Escape, although rare, was part of the reason a police
force emerged.


Owners formed networks of volunteers to
patrol their areas. The first were
conducted sporadically, on a rotating
basis; patrols eventually became the duty
of the local militia, whose primary function
in some places grew to be police
supervision of the slaves. Thus was born
the first organized system of police in
plantation country.
Jails were among the first public structures built
in colonial America. They were an essential part
of the prisoner trade and also essential to the
system of servitude and slavery.

Colonial America had more jails than public
schools or hospitals.

Criticisms of the prisoner trade increased during
the 18th century.

Slavery also came under attack.

Man is born free, and yet we see him
everywhere in chains, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
wrote in The Social Contract (1762).

Rousseau rejected the notion that some men
were slaves by nature. He argued that slavery
was not a natural right or condition, but a
forcibly imposed and maintained status.

Force made the first slaves, he wrote, and
slavery, by degrading and corrupting its victims,
perpetuated their bondage.
Up to this point, we find that despite the vanilla
lessons of high school history, most criminals
were the product of slavery, indentured
servitude, and transportation. A new group of
convicts emerged during the Revolutionary War:
prisoners of war.

The prison trade was disrupted by the war which
meant that England faced serious prison
overcrowding. The British could not transport
prisoners of war back to England, so they kept
them in prison ships, anchored off-shore.

By wars end, more Americans had
perished as prisoners than had been killed
in combat. As many as 11,500 men had
died on the Jersey alone- far more than
were lost in all of the battles of the
Revolution.
Jersey Prison Ship
Imports of slave, convicts, and servants
had virtually ceased during the war.

All of the new states ended the
international slave trade. But most slaves
remained slaves and the system continued
to be the law of the land.

Two Northern states outlawed slavery,
Vermont and Pennsylvania. Anti-slavery
activities became better organized.

The Development of the
American Prison System
Did not occur until the late 18th century in
America

Traced back to William Penn

Colonial America: most common form of
punishment was banishment and various forms
of public punishment; stocks, pillory, branding,
workhouses (last resort, usually for the poor,
rogues, vagabonds, and other idle and dissolute
persons).
Shortly after the end of the American
Revolution, a group of prominent citizens,
including Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin
Rush, William Bradford, and Caleb
Lownes, came together to update the
criminal code of 1718.

The new law, passed in 1786, authorized
a penalty of hard labor, publicly and
disgracefully imposed (Takagi, 1975).
Prisoners were to be sentenced to perform
hard labor in the city streets.
However, as in England during the
processionals of condemned men, convicts
began to draw crowds of sympathetic
people.

Shortly thereafter, a group calling
themselves the Philadelphia Society for
Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons
amended the law and in 1788 suggested
the sentences be more private, and even
called for solitary confinement within the
confines of the Walnut Street Jail.
Walnut Street Jail
The reason for this was the new bourgeois class,
having just gained power as the dominant class,
wanted to promote stability and social order, in
addition to respect for the law and for the new
government.

Placing prisoners on city streets did not result in
such respect; placing them indoors would
export out of public view the sufferings and
degradations heaped upon the poor (Takagi,
1975). (Sheldon, 2001: 161-162)
First state prison: Walnut Street Jail

Focus on maintaining social order, rise of
the class system

The major worry was whether the poor would
corrupt society and criminals would roam out
of control. Thus, comprehension and control of
deviance promised to be the first step in
establishing a new system for stabilizing the
community, for binding citizens together. . .

And here one also finds the crucial elements that
led to the discovery of the asylum. In the end,
the prison system became one among several
methods of reforming and controlling the
dangerous classes (Rothman, 1971).
Emergence of the Pennsylvania
and Auburn Systems (1830-1870)

Belief that criminals lacked respect for
authority and proper work habits (needed
hard labor).

Others believed that criminals were
sinners who needed to repent.
Pennsylvania System

Modeled after beliefs of John Howard

1826: Pittsburgh, Western Penitentiary

1829: Cherry Hill, Eastern Penitentiary

Solitary confinement, no contact with other prisoners,
blindfolded

Wheel shaped prison
Pennsylvania System
Auburn System
Work in association with other prisoners

New York, Newgate Prison 1797 and
Auburn 1821

Code of silence all day, solitary
confinement at night
Auburn System

Auburn System eventually prevailed; too
many inmates died, committed suicide, or
went insane in Penn System.

Auburn system was more profitable, cheap
labor, fit into larger structure of
capitalism, resembled factories, produced
goods sold in free market

de Tocqueville, in his classic work,
Democracy in America, had noted that
while the Native American was much too
different to become part of this new order,
the other race (the colored) would, once
freed, be exposed to the new penitentiary
regime- which is exactly what happened.

As to the Native Americans, genocide was
the preferred method (Melossi and
Lettiere, 1998). (Sheldon, 2001)

Rise of the Reformatory
(1870-1900)
Response to the brutality of the prison system

Need treatment and reeducation

Rise of indeterminate sentencing, parole, and
vocational/educational training

Reformatory ideas came from Captain Alexander
Maconochie, head of penal colony on Norfolk
Island in Australia and Sir Walter Crofton in
England.
The reformatories were designed ostensibly to
transform the dangerous criminal classes into
Christian gentlemen and prepare them to
assume their proper place into hardworking, law
abiding, lower class citizens.

These institutions would also inculcate good old-
fashioned American values such a habits of
order, discipline, self-control, cheerful
submission to authority, as well as respect for
God, law, country, and the principles of
capitalism and democracy (Pisciotta, 1994).
1877: Elmira Reformatory, Zebulon
Brockway


Wide variety of programs including
industrial/academic education, religious services,
libraries, gyms, etc.

Good intentions but big failure; strict military
form of discipline, tyrannical cruelty,
overcrowded, beatings were routine.

Convict Labor
It can be said that the use of inmates as
cheap labor has been part of the capitalist
system from the beginning, as owners
seek to maximize profits however they
can, including using the cheapest form of
labor, whether it be slaves, immigrant
labor, or inmates. Such exploitation
persists to the present. (Sheldon, 2001).
Contract system: prisoners produced goods to be sold to
private companies who then sold them on the free
market

Convict lease system: prisoners hired out to private
businesses and worked away from the prison during the
day; build railroads, bridges, roads, etc. Chain gangs

State-use system: prisoners produced goods for the
state (other prisons, schools, hospitals); most common
form of prison labor today.

Convict exploitation disappeared in the North but
became popular in the South after the Civil War.
Twentieth Century Developments
Inmate self-government; goal of rehabilitation

Prison as a community, similar to outside society

Needs humanizing, democratizing

Introduced movies, sports, exercise, etc.

Problem: accused of coddling criminals
Individualized treatment

Medical model: the offender is sick and suffers
from some sort of disease which must be
diagnosed and cured.

Emergence of Positive School of Criminology

Emergence of academic and professional fields
of social work, sociology, and psychology.

Prison as a convenient laboratory for the
scientific study of human behavior

Classification became permanent part of prisons
(sex, age, race, type of offenses, grades, trusty
system)

Problem: treatment never really became a
reality, most states were not willing to spend the
money, medical model never really went beyond
diagnosis.

1900: 81 prisons, 50,000 inmates

1935: 100+ prisons, 120,000 inmates

1990: 1,287 prisons

1995: 1,500 prisons, over 2.5 million
inmates
1900-1946: The Big House
Dominant type of prison until late 1940s/early 1950s

This granite, steel, cement, and asphalt
monstrosity stood as the states most extreme
form of punishment, short of the death penalty.
It was San Quentin in California, Sing Sing in
New York, Stateville in Illinois, Jackson in
Michigan, Jefferson City in Missouri, Canon City
in Colorado, and so on. It was the place of
banishment and punishment to which convicts
were sent up. Its major characteristics were
isolation, routine, and monotony. Its mood was
mean and grim, perforated here and there by
ragged-edged vitality and humor (Irwin, 1980).
1946-1980: The Correctional
Institution
New era of penology after WWII

A correctional system with inmates (not prisons
or convicts), guards were transformed into
correctional officers

Emergence of rehabilitative ideal (used to be
called treatment)

Most common treatment was group counseling
(not very successful)
It did not take too long for this new
treatment-oriented prison to succumb to
the realties of prison life and became just
another prison. Prisoners became aware
of the fact that the new treatment was in
reality simply new methods of control.
Further, an influx of African Americans
and Chicanos created racial divisions.
(Sheldon, 2001).
1980-present: Warehousing
Most prisoners today are still drawn from the
bottom of the class structure, have few
marketable skills, little formal education, and
poor employment records, and are
disproportionately non-white.

Also, it is clear that the prison system is
becoming a form of apartheid because for the
first time in our history, African Americans
constitute a majority of prisoners.
Result of the war on drugs; between
1988-1994, number of persons convicted
of drug offenders jumped 155%.

Over 60% of all federal inmates and 30%
of state inmates are serving time for drug
offenses; over 40% are African American.

American Prisons