The prison, which would become a dominant correctional strategy in Western societies, emerged in the late 1700s. Throughout its history, the prison has been used in attempts to achieve various goals of criminal sanctioning: retribution, incapacitation, general and specific deterrence, and rehabilitation. No one theory can account for the historical development and evolution of the prison. Michael Welch, a highly regarded criminologist, makes the observation that correctional ideologies, policies, and practices cannot be understood outside the political, economic, religious, and technological forces that shape them.
HISTORY OF THE PRISON
Forerunners of the more sophisticated models of the prison were workhouses and houses of correction that emerged in western Europe. In the eighteenth century, when European societies were experiencing a dramatic population shift to urban areas due to the breakdown of the feudal order and the Industrial Revolution, these institutions became a mechanism for managing the growing numbers of an urban underclass. The expressed objective of workhouses and houses of correction was to provide vocational training and to instill a work ethic among inmates. However, these institutions functioned more effectively to remove "undesirables" from the community and, most importantly, to provide a cheap source of labor to private industry.
The United States is credited with being most influential in the development and proliferation of the modern prison. A wing of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia (1790—1835) was the first penitentiary. Influenced by the religious ideology of the Pennsylvania Quakers, the penitentiary was designed for the solitary confinement of criminal offenders, a place where they would repent for their sins without the contaminating influences of other prisoners or the community. These objectives were the foundation for the design of the Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh and the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, opened in 1826 and 1829, respectively. Because it was believed that work would interfere with inmates’ penitence, inmate work was not originally planned or desired by the founders of the penitentiary. However, individual handicraft work (e.g., weaving, woodcarving, leather tooling) was introduced later to ameliorate the negative consequences of solitary confinement and idleness. During the development of the Pennsylvania system, an alternative prison model, the Auburn system, emerged in New York.
The Auburn Prison opened in Auburn, New York, in 1817. The Auburn model incorporated a silent congregate work system, ostensibly through which inmates would learn vocational skills and be instilled with the work ethic. In complete silence, inmates would work in factory-like settings during the day, and return to their cells at night. The goal of the silent system was to prevent the spread of criminogenic values and influences among inmates. Order was maintained through a quasi-militaristic regimen, such as lockstep marching and harsh punishments for rule infractions.
The Auburn system proliferated in the United States at the same time that western European societies modeled their prisons after the Pennsylvania system. Whereas Europeans were compelled by rehabilitative ideals and what they saw as more humane treatment of inmates, the United States was motivated by the low operating costs and profits generated by cheap inmate labor sold to private industry.
Fortresslike industrial factory prisons dominated the penal landscape in the United States until the early twentieth century, when laws were passed, prompted largely by skyrocketing unemployment in the private sector during the Great Depression, restricting prison industry to the manufacture of instate public-use goods. The result of the demise of prison industry was an idle inmate population in which discipline and control, rather than production and vocational rehabilitation, became the primary objective of the prison.
A radical turn in the objectives and nature of the prison in the United States emerged following World War II (1939-1945) with the emergence and dominance of correctional institutions. The expressed goal of correctional institutions was the treatment and rehabilitation of inmates. Therapeutic professionals, including physicians, psychologists, educators, and social workers, were charged with diagnosing and treating inmates based on individual needs. Under indeterminate sentencing strategies, parole boards were given more discretionary power to release inmates once they were deemed to be rehabilitated.
The ideals of the correctional system began to unravel in the 1960s, in part due to overcrowding, lack of funding, and a turbulent period of unrest associated with the prisoner rights movement. Despite these systemic circumstances, a neoconservative political climate that exaggerated the failings of the rehabilitation model was successful in garnering public support for a "get tough" approach to crime. The momentum of the movement became most evident in the 1980s when the United States embarked on an "imprisonment binge." Within a decade, both the prison population and rate of incarceration more than doubled as a result of the proliferation of new federal and state prisons. This trend of expansion continued through the 1990s with the rate of incarceration reaching 491 per 100,000 U.S. citizens in 2005 compared to 139 in 1980. Longer, determinate sentences contributed to this growth, but no single factor is more responsible than the concentration on the arrest and incarceration of illegal drug offenders.
Between 1985 and 1995, over 80 percent of the increase in the federal prison population was due to illegal drug offenses. In 1985, 34 percent of prisoners were incarcerated for drug offenses; by 1995 the proportion was 60 percent. As the state prison populations tripled in the late 1900s, the proportion of inmates incarcerated for drug offenses grew from 9 percent in 1986 to 23 percent by 1995.
IMPACT ON WOMEN AND MINORITIES
The crackdown on drugs had a disproportionate impact on women and minorities, particularly African Americans. There were almost eight times as many female prisoners in 2003 as there were in 1980, and the primary reason for the growth was drug offenses.
Similarly, illegal drug offenses contributed to a much greater extent to the growth of the African American prison population in the latter twentieth century compared to the growth for whites and Hispanics. Welch points out that "African Americans represent 12 percent of the U.S. population, 13 percent of drug users, 35 percent of the arrests for drug possession, 55 percent of convictions for drug possession, and 74 percent of the prison sentences for drug convictions" (2004, p. 439).
PERSPECTIVES ON THE PRISON
The ideals and functions of the prison can be viewed from three broad and competing perspectives: conservative, liberal, and critical. From the conservative perspective, the threat of imprisonment is believed to deter would-be offenders from committing crimes (general deterrence), while the purpose of prisons is to protect society from those who are not deterred (incapacitation), and through this punishment, deter convicted offenders from repeating crimes (specific deterrence). The conservative ideology is based on a fundamental belief that criminal offenders are driven by the choice to engage in criminal behavior and that crime can be controlled through the threat of punishment and the incapacitation of those who are not deterred.
From the liberal perspective, a criminal offense is seen as a result of forces—biological, psychological, or socio-environmental—that influence the behavior. This perspective upholds the rehabilitative ideal that prisons should function to treat and rehabilitate offenders in order that they ultimately may be reintegrated into free society. Under the liberal perspective, scientific inquiry into the etiology of criminal behavior will reveal its underlying causes, and correctional rehabilitation is ideally guided by those etiological factors.
From the critical perspective, the criminal justice system is considered a means of social control that is used by the powerful class over the less powerful. Consistent with Karl Marx’s (1818-1883) writings, criminal behavior is primarily the consequence of the economic order and politics in society. The criminal justice system and prisons, in particular, function to control an economically marginalized population, also defined as a surplus labor pool. Critical criminologists point to historical trends across societies in which correctional populations swell in times of abundant free-market labor and shrink in times of labor shortages. In his compelling book, The Warehouse Prison (2005), John Irwin adopts a critical perspective to describe the economic conditions and resulting marginalized population that spawned the prison expansion in the United States in the late twentieth century.
While the prison remains a dominant strategy aimed at controlling crime and punishing offenders in Western societies, there is a great deal of doubt among scholars that it is an effective strategy beyond retribution and incapacitation. The high recidivism rate of ex-inmates points to the general failure of imprisonment to deter or rehabilitate and, further, may promote a higher level of criminality among those released. With over 90 percent of inmates ultimately returning to free society, this is, or should be, a central concern for social reform.
Prison abolitionists advocate radical reform in the use of incarceration. Vocal prison abolitionists span both ends of the political spectrum. Pointing to the failure of the prison system to reform or deter, and to the swelling prison population, as well as to the evidence and claims that current practices are racist and classist, abolitionists promote expanded and widespread use of alternatives to incarceration for most offenses and support the decriminalization of certain behaviors, such as drug offenses. With the entrenchment of the prison as a primary means of criminal sanctioning, along with the recent privatization of prisons and of corrections, in general, the abolitionists face powerful ideological and economic barriers.
