In ancient societies and in the medieval period prisons were too expensive to maintain, so the authorities opted for capital or corporal punishments or some form of slavery.
Corporal punishment through the ages was more commonly imposed on soldiers, sailors, serfs, slaves, criminals and lower social classes. All slave-holding societies in history controlled slaves with corporal punishment, while elites usually exempted themselves from this punishment. The ancient Romans, for example, only flogged non-citizens, as the Apostle Paul reminded a Roman who was about to flog him.
During the Tudor monarchies, English authorities executed large numbers of criminals by hanging. In 1603, England punished about 50 capital crimes. By 1815, the number of hanging offenses in England had risen to over 200.
Dungeons and prisons historically held prisoners temporarily, before or in lieu of trial, during interrogation, until ransomed or as a warning, but prison was not usually the ultimate destination for convicted offenders. France, Spain, Italy and England all worked galley slaves and continued to work prisoners in bagni, naval projects on land, after galleys fell into disuse.
In 1750, two prisoners with typhus from the unventilated Newgate jail infected and killed an entire courtroom at the Old Bailey in London, the judge, all the lawyers, 12 jurymen, many spectators and others. Henry Fielding said English prisons were “seminaries of vice and sewers of nastiness and disease.” Various movements to clean up prisons began after events like the one at the Old Bailey. English jail and prison reformer John Howard (1726-1790) envisioned penitentiaries where prisoners worked appropriately and under better conditions than the awful jails and prisons he inspected in England, Wales, Germany and France.
Howard’s colleague as commissioner and collaborating reformer, prominent political leader and diplomat William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland, went further in his 1771 treatise
Principles of Penal Law:
“Imprisonment, inflicted by law as a punishment, is not according to the principles of wise legislation. It sinks useful subjects into burdens on the community, and has always a bad effect on their morals: nor can it communicate the benefit of example, being in its nature secluded from the eye of the people.”
Every subsequent generation proved the accuracy of Baron Auckland’s observation. Faced with an abundance of offenders and prisoners, Great Britain chose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to transport many to their colonies. Great Britain deposited some 50,000 criminals in the American Colonies, though we Americans scarcely dwell on that part of our history. Nevertheless, many of our ancestors were criminals. Transported criminals did relatively well after their servitude ended. The descendants of transported criminals blended in with the gentry or common folks. American planters learned that African slaves were better workers than criminals transported from England. Transporting criminals to America stopped with the Declaration of Independence, so Great Britain passed the Penitentiary Act of 1779, hoping to build large, well-run penitentiaries that would heavily regulate, rehabilitate and work prisoners. This Act was a reaction to the effects of the American Revolution and terrible conditions in British prisons, but after the American Revolution, Great Britain still avoided mass incarceration by creating penal colonies in Australia. In 1788, the first shipment of prisoners landed in Australia. Ex-convicts often prospered in Australia, because land was cheap and labor valuable. One of the Australian penal colonies was a great success emphasizing work tasks, until it relapsed back to punitive methods. Transportation to unsettled colonial destinations worked out better than other punishments in the end. Prisoners stepped off the boat, were immediately employed and found inexpensive land on which to settle after serving their sentences. Eventually, British colonies refused to be the dumping grounds for criminals.