Discuss the influence of the Enlightenment and key persons on correctional reform. Next, the Quakers took on the terrible conditions in jails. The Auburn System (New York, 1819) used the Quaker idea of solitary confinement at night but used a system of congregating inmates in a common workroom during the day. As people began to move around more frequently and easily, the effectiveness of ridicule naturally declined. Eventually, in 1829, the state built the Western Penitentiary outside Pittsburgh and the Eastern Penitentiary near Philadelphia. Beccaria wrote that “the purpose of punishment is not to torment a sensible being, or to undo a crime [but] is none other than to prevent the criminal from doing further injury to society and to prevent others from committing the like offense.” He urged that accused criminals be treated humanely prior to trial and be afforded every opportunity to present evidence in their own behalf.

Two very famous prisons wereThe Hospice of San Michele and the Maison de Force in Ghent, Belgium. European countries tended to adopt the Pennsylvania system while most American states chose the Auburn system. It promised a vast improvement in the treatment of jailed offenders.

However, experts differed as to why this decrease in crime occurred. Whereas the fathers of the penitentiary had expected inmates to be amenable to change, most were hardened criminals serving long sentences and had little to lose by making trouble or trying to escape.

Since the 1970s, however, support for prison factories as a way to train inmates for outside jobs has grown.

It could be used to rehabilitate offenders. To do this, prison administrators have at times constructed factories within prison walls or hired inmates out as laborers in "chain gangs." Gaols/Jails were very small with few inmates. "History of Corrections—Punishment, Prevention, or Rehabilitation? This decade saw the expanded use of felony probation and the growth of halfway houses and pre-release centers. He traveled throughout Europe and brought attention to the bad conditions under which inmates were confined. © Copyright 1949-2018 American Heritage Publishing Co. All Rights Reserved.

This became the first prison as we know it. Furthermore, we Americans invented the prison.

They favored probation, educational courses, and job training. So wardens concentrated on maintaining order, and almost every form of brutality found its way back into the penitentiary.

Early punishments included transportation, indentured servitude and economic sanctions, public humiliation, pillory, stocks and ducking stools. In the United States today, as articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court, punishment has at least four justifications: deterrence, societal retribution, rehabilitation, and incapacitation—the last category intended to protect society by permanently incarcerating those who cannot be reformed. The "just deserts" doctrine goes back to the basics. During this postwar boom, there was an interest to reform prisons.

Many free citizens, after all, earned their livings doing such work in factories and fields. The surpassing aim in the public mind is simply to lock up as many prisoners as possible and forget about them, and the states are currently spending four billion dollars simply to try to build prisons fast enough to keep up with the demand. This sample, based on 108,580 state prisoners released in 1983 and 272,111 prisoners released in 1994, shows that nearly two-thirds of prisoners (62.5%) released in 1983 were arrested again within three years.

In 1981, as the state appealed the order, a disturbance erupted among inmates at the state’s Eastham prison in which prison officials stood by while the tenders went on a rampage, bloodying dozens of inmates with clubs, bats, chains, and knives.