How the Modern Prison System Has Developed

As there were always norms and regulations in society, there must have been always a percentage of people who break these rules and facing punishment by rulers and officials. Punishment, as it is historically known, starts with torture, mutilation and public executions; known as the “Bloody Code”. Changes in society and in the way people understand the world around them brings a new era, known as “Enlightenment”, when they thought that punishment is not necessarily killing people. Imprisonment was the first option for punishing the criminals instead of killing them and it went through many stages from jails to houses of corrections into central prisons. Transportation of criminals to America and later to Australia was another option for getting rid of criminals.

The pre-enlightenment era is known for its brutality and the inhumane treatments of offenders. They had executed the offenders in public places by mutilating and severe torture. People’s minds were dominated by superstition and myth, and there were no room for a rational thinking. Criminals or offenders were treated as bad souls or infections and the only way to get rid of them was by killing them. The purification of soul was the main motive behind the mutilation and torture and all the other methods of physical suffering.

Enlightenment starts with the rational thinking about nature and society and this affects the way people thought about the way they deal with offenders and criminals. The way of life has changed, modernity, science and civilization took the place of myth and superstition. Now criminals were seen as human beings who committed offences and they need to be rehabilitated and corrected. The evilness is not something people born with, they argued, but it is created by the bad situation and circumstances they live in. The Whig historians or the “Liberals” influenced the society’s view towards criminals and asked for changes and reforms in the law and penal policy. As Emsley said:

The traditional Whig interpretation largely accepts the case argued by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformers that the “Bloody Code” was arbitrary and savage, and that the reformers’ stance was morally and rationally unassailable.

These great changes were accompanied by great ideas and philosophical views for human society and nature, in this context the role of Marxism and the Utilitarian thinkers should not be neglected for their contribution in these reforms, as Emsley remarked:

These changes in the system of punishment have been related to the great changes taking place in society, implicitly by the Whig historians who thought in terms of progress with the past developing towards a more enlightened future, and explicitly by Marxists, and others, who have explained the development of the prison in terms of the control needs of bourgeois capitalism.