CORRECTIONAL LAW

Correctional Law

Correctional Law

Introduction

British colonists brought to the New World an ancient institution the jail. Early in the nineteenth century, the new republic itself devised another type of institution that was to have a profound influence on corrections in this and many other countries: the penitentiary. The two types of institutions survive to this day. Also in the nineteenth century, the United States developed noninstitutional methods of corrections: probation, parole, diversion, work and study release and other systems' designed either to keep offenders out of prison or to shorten their terms of incarceration or permit them to serve part of their time under supervision (Rothman, 2007).

Body: Discussion and Analysis

Colonial jails were primarily penal institutions where convicted persons faced death or corporal punishment, such as the whip, the branding iron or the stocks. The major function of the jail was to hold the prisoners until corporal punishment was meted out to them. However, the insane, the ill, the vagrant, deserted wives or children, the aged, and the poor were more numerous than the lawbreakers in the early jails. These people were incarcerated until some arrangement could be made to take care of them.

Inmates had to pay for their upkeep and when they could not, they were permitted to beg for food. Strong prisoners were used in heavy manual labor clad in conspicuous uniforms and wearing ball and chains. The first reform came in Philadelphia in the latter part of the eighteenth century owing, in large part, to a group of Quakers called The Philadelphia Society to Alleviate the Misery of Public Prisons, an institution that still exists today. The society urged that hardened criminals be separated from lesser offenders, that the sexes be segregated, and that the sale and consumption of liquor be prohibited (Rothman, 2007).

In 1790 the Pennsylvania Legislature ordered the renovation of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia on the basis of these principles. Hardened criminals were placed in single cells in a separate building apart from minor offenders. Women and debtors had their own building. Children were removed from the jail entirely. Food and clothing were supplied at public expense, and no liquor was allowed. Thus, with a rudimentary system of classifying prisoners and the provision of free essential services, the fundamentals of modern correctional management were introduced (Rothman, 2007).

For a time, the new Walnut Street jail worked well. But soon, the number of inmates made it impossible to maintain the standards. Fifteen years later, the jail held four times the number of inmates the jail was designed for. As Walnut Street Jail became outmoded, Pennsylvania built a new one, the Eastern State Penitentiary at Cherry Hill in 1829. Its architecture was designed to advance the so-called silence system, under which no inmate was allowed to speak or otherwise communicate to another. The Cherry Hill prison was built with seven cellblocks radiating from a central rotunda like the spokes of a wheel.

Each prisoner occupied a cell about 8 feet by 12 feet in dimension with running ...