Prison

In China, prison became a primary form of punishment already during the Han period, two centuries before Christ, though at other times it was not.¹¹⁴ In Europe, however, before the seventeenth cen­tury prisons were generally places to warehouse those awaiting trial.¹¹⁵ Exceptions included the Greeks, who used prison in some instances as a punishment, and in Rome an indefinitely postponed execution might leave a prisoner languishing in jail for life.

Prison gradually became a sanction in itself, not just the help­mate of real punishments. From the late thirteenth century, both the number of prisons and the crimes that landed offenders there increased. In the early sixteenth century, the English common law listed 180 imprisonable offenses.¹¹⁹ As of the eighteenth century, prisons were finally a punishment in themselves. The first to abol­ish death entirely, Tuscany's criminal code of 1786 left imprison­ment as serious crime's main sanction. Largely financed and often run by the inmates themselves, early prisons were porous holding pens that barely separated miscreants from society. Prisoners were expected to pay for their own upkeep, entitled to better conditions for extra fees, and reliant on charity if unable to pay.¹²⁰ As late as the early twentieth century, when the suffragettes were jailed, Britain's prisons had three classes, like its trains.

Prisons were expensive to build and to run. Revolutionary France cut corners by converting nationalized church properties.¹²² Mutila­tion, torture, death, exile, and flogging had been cheaper, but inflict­ing pain and even death eventually lost favor. Banishment worked only if penal colonies or expansive territories were at hand. Using male prisoners for military ends, as galley slaves, for example, raised questions of motivation and reliability—much like for mercenary troops. The Chinese practice of enlisting criminals in military exile to defend the country's borders suffered from obvious inherent con­tradictions.¹²³ The nineteenth century reshaped the armed forces on a universalistic nationalist basis—the male citizen's self-interested duty. With exceptions, such as the French Foreign Legion, it was now thought nonsensical to entrust the nation's defense to soci­ety's outcasts. The refinement of sail in the eighteenth century and the end of the need for oarsmen turned galleys into hulks that now housed prisoners whose muscle power was put to use elsewhere.¹²⁴

Already in the 1700s houses of correction aimed to reform the recal­citrant poor—vagrants, the idle and disorderly, obstreperous servants, unmarried mothers, and the like. As of the mid-seventeenth century, convicts who earlier would have been killed were now imprisoned.¹²⁵ The English were ahead on the prison curve. After 1853, as transpor­tation to Australia ended, prison became the main punishment for serious offenders.¹²⁶ By the early 1800s, 60 percent of those sentenced were imprisoned; by the 1860s that portion was 90 percent. In late eighteenth-century Paris, only 10 percent of sentences were for jail.

To cut costs, inmates were put to work. Prisoners built the pyra­mids, and the Romans used them on public works or in the mines.¹²⁸

Workhouses were an early iteration of what was to become the prison. Galleys made criminals part of the nation's defense. Labor was cen­tral also to nineteenth-century prisons, both for what it brought in and for its disciplinary effects. The Chinese and Soviet camps often worked prisoners to death. Inmates in the American South, Blacks a majority among them, were worked ruthlessly.¹²⁹ To this day, the American prison-industrial complex remains a large corporate pres- ence.¹³0 But inmates were rarely a first-class labor force: work shy, asocial, unmotivated, uncooperative, and hence uncompetitive. Like eighteenth-century workhouses for the poor, prison labor rarely paid for itself.¹³¹ At the same time, prisons' subsidized labor competed with the free market.¹³² Already with the first workhouses, nonincarcerated workers and private employers complained of publicly subsidized goods sold on the open market.¹³³ US law specifically forbade prison labor from competing with the free market. That labor has therefore been tolerated largely to make products consumed by the state itself— license plates, uniforms, and the like—or for public works.¹³⁴

Prison was in effect a fine levied in terms of time. By itself, it could not guarantee a change of behavior. Just as someone might regard a fine as the price of offending, so too an inmate might consider a stint behind bars the cost of doing business, especially if he could pay a fall guy to take the hit. In early modern Europe, debtors often preferred prison to settling their accounts: sometimes they had no choice; at other times they did.

1980s.¹³⁷ Further complexities lurked. The state had long inflicted pain on offenders. Inmates' lives could of course be made a living hell, too, but if torture were the goal, prison was an inefficient and costly way to go about it. Jail incapacitated offenders in an era when banishment was no longer possible. Why not then rehabilitate them, so that prison did not become a breeding ground for further criminal­ity? Prisons, in other words, were inefficient means of inflicting pain and an expensive and possibly dysfunctional form of incapacitation. Why bother locking up criminals if prisons did not improve them?

From such considerations sprang the rehabilitative turn incarcer­ation took in the eighteenth century. Since prison without rehabili­tation was basically torture, and since inmates were the state's for a long time, why not attempt to redeem them?¹³⁸ By itself, prison promised to discourage certain bad habits: drinking, gambling, con­cubinage, whoring. A regular schedule of meals, sleep, and work— even if just the treadwheel's make-work—inculcated industrious discipline. Enforced solitude at least isolated inmates from bad influences and might encourage them to ponder their crimes.¹³⁹ Prison was to be a spiritual ordeal from which inmates emerged purified. The Philadelphia system of extreme isolation therefore became popular. Prisoners lived and worked wholly alone, hooded when they left their cells, receiving only a single visitor and letter annually. England's Petworth prison had stalls built to keep them apart even in chapel. In Pentonville, the guards wore padded shoes so as not to break the silence.¹⁴⁰ Yet total isolation was costly and took a heavy psychic toll on inmates, who often committed suicide or went insane. From such failures emerged a moderated approach, pioneered at Auburn prison in upstate New York, where inmates were isolated in their cells only at night, working communally dur­ing the day.¹⁴¹ Yet all such ambitions for rehabilitation have failed. Today's prisons—overcrowded, understaffed, replete with soci­ety's least favored—perform what is at best incapacitation and at worst—in maximum-security institutions—a form of torture.