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.

Throughout the eighteenth century prisoners were kept in houses of correction, which were run by the local Gaolers and Justice Officials. Prisoners in these prisons had to pay the Gaolers for their services. These prisons where subject to bribery and corruption. The prison was more than a prison for the poor people:

A prison sentence for those without resources was virtually a death sentence. Unsanitary conditions, risk of disease and starvation were forever present.

In the 1770’s and specifically John Howard’s report paved the way for the 1779 Penitentiary Act, which introduced religious instructions for reforming the criminals. Offenders were forced to wear masks when they went around and they were totally isolated from each others, this bad condition of the prisoners lead to a rise in mental illness and suicide. There were many calls for reform in the prison system and the most important one of them was:

The 1823 Gaol Act was the first piece of legislation to lay down a uniform penal practice for all local prisons. Reforms recommended by John Howard such as the abolition of the sale and consumption of alcohol in prisons, and regular visit by prison inspectors were made compulsory.

As it was not possible to kill all the offenders because of the nature of their offence, their age or other considerations and they were not also satisfied just with whipping and flogging before releasing them, transportation became a suitable option Transportation was become official with the Transportation Act of 1718 and continued for about fifty years.

In 1878 Du Cane became the chairman of the prison commission; he had introduced a firm system known as the “Du Cane Era”. Prisoners were forced to get cropped hair, he made the prison as hard as possible for them, known as “penal servitude”, and they were forced to do the hard meaningless labour known as crank and tread wheel and oakum picking.

Du Cane was a very strong believer in the prevailing wisdom that offenders were sent to prison for deliberate punishment by infliction of rigid, measures severity and saw one of his missions as being to ensure carefully graded suffering to prisoners in order to achieve quantified deterrence.

The Gladstone report in 1895 came as a result of discussions about the effectiveness of the punishment and deterrence as the main object of imprisonment. The committee remarked that prison should become a place where people reformed and deterred from further offending. The system of unproductive and meaningless labour came under question and they asked to replace it with productive labour. Books and education for prisoners was introduced as part of reformation and preparation for being good citizens after release. Prisoners, the report said, should be classified according to their offences. They made proposals for developing juvenile establishments known as “Borstals”.

Although the idea of Borstals was introduced by the Gladstone Committee, but it took quite a long time to develop a special form of institution for the young offenders. The Gladstone report made it clear that the young offenders should be segregated from the adult offenders; they need more training both physically and mentally as well as rehabilitation for coming back to the normal life after release from prison.

In 1900 they chose a group of lads from London and they have trained them to lead a good life after release. In 1902 they had used a branch of Borstal prison for the same purpose. In a famous report Edwards& Hurley described theses pilot schemes as:

The Borstal experiment did not encounter any serious setbacks and although the number who could benefit from it was small, a modified system was soon introduced in local prisons under which young offenders were as far as possible separated from adult prisoners and given a little more attention than previously.

Punishment and imprisonment went through many stages until it has reached the present day condition. The great historical changes and scientific discoveries played a vital role in developing the whole society and all its institutions towards a better understanding of human conduct and behaviour. Despite all these great reforms and changes the question of a better prison system is always present.

Throughout the history of punishment, imprisonment remains as the most important and at the same time problematic method of dealing with offenders. It has still the principal role in the English penal system.

While the aim behind imprisonment and the way of dealing with the offenders had developed throughout the history, this does not lead to a new alternative for prison:

As prison has the highest profile of any sanction in common use in our kind of society, it plays an important part in reassuring people that “something is being done” about the problem of law and order, and the social threats which they are persuaded to take most seriously.

Prison is the most expensive method of punishment, its role in punishing, reforming and rehabilitating offenders and deterring them from re-offending is very controversial. For the first target it can be argued that it plays the role, but punishment may lead to further re-offending if it has taken by itself. Cullingford said:

There is little evidence that putting people into prison for long periods, or the threat of doing so, reduces crime. One can argue that the only way of preventing the activities of certain criminals is incarceration, but this has little to do with crime prevention. The threat of vastly increased prison sentences has no effect on crime. It is shame rather than fear that has an effect.

However, it can be argued that, as [Wilson& Ashton] said’ The government have a duty to be seen to support law and order, to protect people and property;’ [1998:12] this duty cannot be maintained without a punishment system and specifically without prison. This kind of thinking is supported by the conservatives, as Michael Howard in 1993 said:

Let’s make one thing absolutely clear: Prison Works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists- and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice… This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.

However studies from the United States, who have a much more higher rates of incarceration, does not support this idea; crime still rises and the country does not become a safer place to live in.

Privatisation of the prison system may help in reducing the funds and high expenses of prisons; however this system may bring other problems such as corruption, bribery and inhumane treatment of the inmates. The target of the private companies is profit and business, which cannot guarantee a better prison system for the benefits of the public and the government. There are many disadvantages of privatization:

These include, first, the potential for exploitation and mistreatment of inmates by contractors; secondly, a lack of effective government oversight; and, thirdly, the possibility of corruption between government officials, prison staff members and private contractors.

Prison overcrowding is another crisis facing the English penal system. When a prison is overcrowded it will cause many problems for the prison officers and the inmates. Inmates cannot get access to the services like education, training and rehabilitation because there are great numbers of them, and it will become difficult for the prison officers to control them, so the possibility of disturbances will rise.

One of the main and fundamental targets of a contemporary prison is rehabilitation and deterring re-offending, while prison is a place where all kinds of offenders and criminals are collected, this may bring an opposite result. Wilson& Ashton mention four reasons for re-offending which related to the collection of criminals, labelling, unemployment and social situation.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 (CJA 2003) suggests some alternative solutions in terms of community sentences and restrictions on imprisonment powers of the magistrates. The (CJA 2003) introduced five purposes for sentencing, which are punishment of offenders, reduction of crime, reform and rehabilitation, protection of the public and reparation.

Community sentence is regarded as a powerful method for keeping many offenders out of walls and bars of prison. Community sentence in this Act has many forms as they are described in s147 of the Act. At the same time the community order is subject to many restrictions as it is not automatically imposing on every offender. These restrictions are defined in s148 of (CJA 2003)

According to (CJA 2003) the court should try all the possible means of community sentence and fine before passing a custodial sentence (CJA 2003) s.152 (2). However, if a sentence is fixed by law, as in the fire arms offences, repeated offences and dangerous offenders, the community sentence is not available (CJA 2003) s.150.

The new technology of tagging and monitoring offenders and suspects is regarded as a highly valuable kind of “prisons without walls”, because the traditional prison system is under question:

Prison might keep dangerous people off the street, but on the whole it does not make them better people- anything but. The prison service monitors the future criminal convictions of all inmates who are released from prison, and the statistics make depressing reading.

However, as it is defined in (CJA 2003), the community sentence, fines, surveillance and tagging may not work for all types of offenders; some sorts of offenders cannot be controlled without prison, as Wilson& Ashton said:

Although it is our belief that the British prison population is currently too high, some criminals clearly need to be locked up, both as a punishment to them and to protect society. The question is, what type of prison system should we be locking them up in? The general answer has to be one that makes them better people when they come out.

It can be argued that community sentence combines many targets of punishment together, as offenders get punishment by several means and it will work better than prisons in rehabilitating and deterring them from re-offending.

Politicians viewed community service as an attractive option because it blended punishment and reparation. Ideally it also brought about the rehabilitation of the offender.

At the conclusion it can be argued that the new measures may help in reducing the number of people sent to prison and the number of re-offenders at the same time. However, we should not forget that a number of offenders should get custodial sentence as the only possible punishment, but which kind of prison should be called prison of the future:

For most offenders, imprisonment has to be justified in terms of public protection, denunciation or retribution. Otherwise it can be an expensive way of making bad people worse.