Incarceration, as we now know it, has not been around as long as most people think. Modern-style prisons did not exist when the United States Constitution was written in 1787. While jails and dungeons existed for millennia, large institutional prisons designed to punish most criminals emerged around 1816, in the Northeast from United States. Before the advent of the great prisons (or “penitentiaries,” as they were euphemistically called), the United States and most other nations imposed capital and corporal punishment, fines, involuntary servitude, or exile to penal colonies or wilderness instead. of prolonged imprisonment in a designated place. penal institution.

Humanitarians invented the penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where Quakers believed that capital punishment denied criminals opportunities for penance, religious conversion, and reform. Quakers thought that prisoners should be separated from one another to prevent moral contamination and encourage religious conversions. In practice, his prisoners were isolated in solitary confinement and many went mad. As Europeans populated other areas of the world, their colonies eventually refused to take in additional criminals. Corporal punishment was abandoned, not because of inefficiency, but because it was seen as lower-class punishment in societies that were increasingly achieving equality between social classes. Messy corporal punishment fell out of favour. The authorities then simply locked up the prisoners instead of whipping them. Fines never did much for penniless criminals. In the 20th century, society increasingly limited capital punishment; now it’s weird. The number of prisoners serving long sentences grew. Cocaine was isolated in 1860, and new illegal drugs increasingly infected modern societies, especially the United States.

Circumstances made it necessary to rely on large penal institutions, usually with rows of cells stacked one on top of the other. Prisons grew by default, not by design. No one wanted big prisons because they were a proven idea. Prisons were built because other methods fell out of favor, one by one, for geographic, demographic, social, and political reasons. Prisons were always miserable places to be, but they never deterred much of crime because they were always out of sight. The study of recidivism over the years always showed that released prisoners were re-incarcerated more than half the time. In other words, the prison never functioned as originally intended.

Incarceration became an expensive way to make bad people worse. Incarceration costs per inmate increased with price increases in health care, buildings, and supplies. Courts intervened to prevent cruel and unusual punishment, requiring basic levels of care. Violence, disease, madness, and racist and satanic gangs kept the prison a human cesspool. The War on Drugs filled prisons without stopping the sale of illegal drugs. After the first decade of the 21st century, the American prison population grew to more than two million inmates, with more than seven million in the entire correctional population. With 5% of the world’s population, the United States now has 25% of the world’s prisoners. The number of prisoners right now is a drain on the American economy, because it takes millions of workers outside of prison to support the millions inside prison. The prison industries never really get off the ground due to legal impediments. Prisoners cannot in monetary terms “pay their debt to society” – that phrase is a joke. Families and marriages are broken, children grow up without parents, welfare costs outside prison rise, and released prisoners face a daunting anti-crime regime upon release. Crime victims receive little restitution. The whole impracticable system went unnoticed. Out of sight, out of mind.

It’s time to admit the truth: incarceration as we know it is a failed social experiment. Yes, it incapacitates prisoners and prevents them from committing crimes while in prison…but the number of people who need incapacitation has grown exponentially. We pay more and more for disability benefits, and prison increases the need for disability. It is a vicious circle.

The answers are written in the pages of American history. When the United States Constitution was written, before 1816, the United States did not need prisons like the ones we have now. How did we do it? We had better study the proven methods of the past. We have an ongoing social, economic and human catastrophe of epic proportions on our hands.