Weren’t people getting locked up way before the late 1700s? I’ve seen it in movies!
Yes, but those were jails, not prisons. There were, for example, workhouses in England and the Netherlands in the 16th century that held a big mix of people, including vagrants, debtors and prostitutes. Even orphans in some cases. People who had done minor things or hadn’t necessarily been convicted of a crime, or were being held awaiting trial, or until they paid a fine or for other administrative purposes. Some scholars have argued that those were the first prisons, but in my view they were more similar to what we would call a jail today. Jail is basically a short-term holding cell, not a place of punishment, and we’ve had that throughout history.
If you think of prison in the way we use the word today, that idea is pretty new. I would define it as a place designated for punishment of people who have been convicted of typically serious offenses, and their punishment is long-term confinement, usually more than a year.
Before prisons existed, how were criminals punished?
In England and colonial America, the primary form of punishment was capital punishment. Pretty much everything was a capital offense, including moral offenses like adultery and religious offenses like breaking the Sabbath. Authorities might let it slide the first time, and they handed out a lot of pardons to prevent the system from killing everybody.
Over time, that softened so that less serious offenses were typically punished with corporal punishment like whipping or branding, usually on the cheek or hand. Or, to show how close you came to getting executed, you would be sentenced to spend an hour standing on the scaffold — where they hanged people — with the noose around your neck. In the 16th and 17th century, banishment was also a punishment. In the 18th century, fines were also widely used, often in combination with corporal punishment.
When and where did the first prisons arise?
The first actual prison is the Massachusetts state prison that opened in 1785, just after the American Revolution. Then came Connecticut in 1790 and Pennsylvania in 1794. Those are the first three state prisons in the world.