There have been many developments throughout the history of corrections which have brought about the controversial system we know of today. This system is strongly rooted in, surprisingly, religion and European values. However, the most influential of these practices comes from our own process of learning within the history of the U.S.
The first developments of corrections began with Puritan and Quaker settlers in the colonial era and their humanitarian based codes rather than corporal punishment which used prisons not as a form of punishment but rather a waiting area for trial. It was these same people who converted the idea of jails for a form of punishment with the takeover of the criminal laws of England in 1721. This system took a more firm belief in brutal punishments such as corporal and capital punishment.
It would be years before such a humanitarian outlook on the justice system would ever be revisited again. After the Declaration of Independence was formed the Pennsylvania system came up with a creation known as the penitentiary, starting with the 1790 opening of the penitentiary wing in the Walnut Street Jail. This was also the start of the revolutionary Panopticon design of prisons in which solitary cells are created in a ring with a guard and surveillance room in the center. In this way the idea of constant surveillance without the knowledge of inmates created a new form of punishment, the mental punishment of those in solitary confinement.
[...] For instance we may use the example of, Progressives looked first to environmental factors— poverty— as the most important cause of crime and concluded that no one raised in poverty could be held strictly accountable for his or her actions”. (Bartollas, 2002) As with its predecessors the medical model of corrections was an idea of prison reform thought to embrace the ideas of humane punishment and treatment within prisons despite its realities. Which brings about the reintegration model based in rehabilitation and community based corrections so as to solve problems within the communities they occurred in. [...]
[...] However, none of these developments would have come about without six critical models of thought to drive their passion and ideology. These models include penitence, reformatory, medical, reintegration, community- based corrections, and crime-control models. In the penitence model rehabilitation is key in today's society, yet it wasn't always so. In fact in the decades covered by the Pennsylvania and New York Correctional system imprisonment was the school of thought. In this system the point is to make an offender repent for their crimes and spends much time giving them room for said thought so as to make them better members of society. [...]
[...] Packer, H. L. (1968). Two Models of Criminal Process. In H. L. Packer, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction. Stanford: Stanford University Press. [...]
[...] The final developments of corrections came with the creation of a medical model of rehabilitation which created emphasis on the individualized treatment of offenders so as to create great members of society. The greatest material and mental creation of corrections over the years was the penitentiary design. A penitentiary is considered as a prison in which people found guilty of a felony crime are isolated not only from normal society but many times from one another as well as a form of more severe punishment. As stated before, this design was the result of the Pennsylvania Correctional System and its belief in the benefit of imprisonment on an offender. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
