-
Essay / how prisons were born in America - 1493
The long and winding road: How prisons were born in America a person comes back. This is not true. The more negative experiences a person goes through, the more they turn into a violent, cruel, mean and heartless individual, I know this to be a fact – Prisoner Anonymous, “The Trauma of Prison Rape” (Manner 130) The Prisoner described the truth of prisons as he currently experiences them, while the original intentions of the Quakers had something very different in mind. The Quakers, led by William Penn, were the first group to establish an institutionalized system of punishment in the United States. Since the initial plans for the prison system were developed, the goals and intentions have been reformed many times. Although prisons are supposed to be a place of rehabilitation, the reality is that they are actually a breeding ground for criminals to become more violent than when they were admitted. Even before prisons were established in America, the colonists had a rather different approach to punishment. led to the creation of prisons. The original view of criminals came from the colonists' religious belief that criminals were sinners who were workers of the devil. The colonists believed that they should be protected from the work of the devil and therefore criminals should have their names crushed, run out of town, or in the most extreme cases, be hanged. Before colonists accepted institutions, they turned to public humiliation as a means of correcting petty criminals. The most severe punishments, such as death, were inflicted on people considered irreducible. But with population growth due to the industrialization of cities, city dwellers knew each other less and less. With less recognition among citizens, the idea of public humiliation as punishment has weakened as a threat. On top of that, people were growing tired of the fact that capital punishment was perhaps too barbaric and generally ineffective. However, the colonists were not yet completely convinced of the usefulness of prisons. This hesitation was due to the community's feeling that most of the men were not salvageable and that their institutionalization would only be gratifying. However, this design began to collapse in the late 1600s when Pennsylvania Quakers proposed a plan that would eventually be accepted..