12 - Prisons around the World

Summary

This chapter will provide an overview of the key issues related to prisons around the world, including a brief historical overview of prisons, global incarceration numbers, trends, and governance, and the global concern about prison crowding.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF PRISONS

Although the common use of the term “penitentiary” is credited to United States, it is believed that a Benedictine monk named Jean Mabillon in the seventeenth century first coined the phrase. The first institution bearing that moniker appeared in France after the 1790 revolution, while the same year a variation of the penitentiary was being implemented at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, philosophical roots of the penitentiary were formed in Europe during the late 1700s through the Age of the Enlightenment and the ideas of Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Howard. The penitentiary method was seen as an advance – opposite the retributive view of punishment. It took an optimistic view of human nature and the belief in the possibility of change and reform. Conceived as a place where prisoners would be isolated from the bad influences of society, engaged in productive labor, and made to reflect on past misdeeds, they could be reformed and become “penitent” (sorry) for their sins – hence the term, “penitentiary” (Clear, Cole, & Reisig, 2011).

Although the earliest attempt to institute the penitentiary system failed at the Walnut Street Jail, between 1790 and 1829 numerous other states in America adopted aspects of the system. In 1829, an influential group of Pennsylvania Quakers were eventually able to open two correctional institutions with a system of solitary confinement with labor, silence, and religious instruction in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia called Western and Eastern Penitentiary, respectively. In Auburn, New York a prison opened in 1817, and being influenced by the reported success of the Walnut Street Jail, administrators began to implement the separate and silent Pennsylvania system.