Posted: February 28th, 2023

History of Punishment

According to (Seiter, 2011) Cesare Beccaria is known as the founder of the classical school of criminology, the first organized theory of crime causation linked to appropriate punishments. According to (Seiter, 2011) Beccaria suggested that the purpose of punishment is utility or the prevention of crime. According to (Seiter, 2011) Jeremy Bentham is the creator of the hedonistic calculus suggesting that punishments outweigh the pleasure criminals get from committing crime.
According to (Seiter, 2011) another way to remove offenders from society was through transportation or deportation. Transportation started in England and was used throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to send undesirables to the colonies in America. According to (Seiter, 2011) the first response to crime in the American colonies was based on the English criminal codes and incorporated the Puritans linking of crime with sin in developing a rigid and strict system of punishments.
Violations of expected community behavior were death with severely using corporal and capital punishment carried out in public to deter both individual offenders and the broader community. According to (Seiter, 2011) whipping at the town center whipping post or placement in stocks and pillories was common punishment for minor offenses such as drunkenness, slander, or stealing something of minor value. Pillories were wooden frames with holes for offender’s hands and head. According to (Seiter, 2011) historical punishment were both painful and shameful.

Stocks and pillories were used both as physical punishment and to ridicule offenders in front of their fellow towns people, in the hopes that they would end their criminal ways. Branding was also a way of punishment. They branded criminals with letters, on their hands and face. Prison did not exist in the colonial times. According to (Seiter, 2011) colonist did use jails copying English system of gaols, for holding defendants awaiting trial of those already convicted and waiting for their corporal or capital punishment to be carried out.
These jails according to (Seiter, 2011) had deplorable conditions in which poor men, women, and children all lived together in filth, with little food or sanitary conditions. According to (Seiter, 2011) the most famous jail reformer was John Howard, who was the sheriff of the Bedfordshire, England. Howard himself, while on an English ship, was taken captive by a French privateer and subsequently imprisoned. He later was paroled to England, but never forgot the horrendous conditions resulting in the death of several English prisoners.
According to (Seiter, 2011) as soon as he became the sheriff he was responsible for the operation of the jail and was disturbed over the conditions and the fact that some people were there for weeks because they were unable to pay the fee required for release. According to (Seiter, 2011) he also pushed for the passage of the English penitentiary act of 1779 to require minimum standards for jail conditions. According to (Seiter, 2011) as a result of the brutality and extensive use of corporal and capital punishment, some were dissatisfied with these methods of responding to criminal behavior.
William Penn and the Quakers were hardworking and economical people. They realized that the criminal codes were both inhumane and inefficient in that judges often did not follow the criminal codes because they did not want to inflict more severe punishment on relatively minor offenders. According to (Seiter, 2011) the abolition of capital punishment for all crimes other than homicide, the substitution of imprisonment at hard labor for bloody corporal punishments, the provision of free food and logging to inmates the replacement of the stocks and pillory with houses of detention.
The Walnut street jail was the first penitentiary in the United States according to (Seiter, 2011). According to (Seiter, 2011) the Pennsylvania system was known as the separate and silent system with silence enforced and inmates not allowed to see or talk with each other. Through this approach, it was believed that offenders would not be morally contaminated and be trained in crime by other prisoners.
According to (Seiter, 2011) the Auburn system became known as the congregate and silent system as officials continued to reduce the spread of criminals ideas by inmates through silence and strict discipline they wanted inmates to march with their eyes looking down at the ground. They did not want the inmates to give other inmates ideas. According to (Seiter, 2011) the emphasis was on having inmates work and produce products that could help make the prisons economically self- supporting using there free labor, prisons became very successful at this prison management emphasized production as much as security and ehabilitation, and the volume of prison made products sold on the open market increased considerably. According to the industrial prison era from 1910 to 1935, led to the first major interest in the management of prisons by external parties. According to (Seiter, 2011) as time went on the Ashurst- summers act was amended in 1940 , that severely limited the sale of prison made products on the open market. Seiter, R. P. (2011). Corrections:An Introduction Third Edition. Prentise Hall.

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