Penetentiary

After years of trying to locate the origins of crime and delinquency within society the Jacksonians came to the conclusion that crime was the fault of the environment, not a permanent or inevitable phenomenon. As a result America set out to protect the safety of society and to achieve unprecedented success in eradicating deviancy. This analysis of the origin of crime became a Ð''rallying cry to action' and according to Rothman was directly responsible for the invention of the penitentiary. The Penitentiary was an attempt by the Americans to eliminate the "specific influences that were breeding crime in the community, and to demonstrate the fundamentals of proper social organization" and would "join practically to humanitarianism, reform the criminal, stabilize American society and demonstrate how to improve the condition of mankind".

It is believed that the first penitentiaries were established in the 1780s but they did not spring out of nowhere. The concept of the penitentiary existed in the minds of people long before it took shape as a physical entity consisting of stones and mortar. These carceral schemes that were established in the mid 1780s followed a stream of advocacy and initiatives stretching back in England to the earliest workhouses .

According to Adam J. Hirsch author of Ð''The Rise of the Penitentiary', to fully understand the rise of the penitentiary in America we must move beyond ideology to the social reality of criminal justice in early America. The social reality was one of change, and over the course of the 18th Century a significant change occurred, which set the scene for the abandonment of traditional sanctions in several American states as well as England.

By taking Massachusetts as an example it is possible to show the evolution of the criminal justice system and the rise of the penitentiary in the United States. Throughout the 17th Century Massachusetts remained a conglomerate of small, tight knit communities. Over the course of a century these communities grew slowly and steadily almost entirely naturally. The Criminal Justice System at work in Massachusetts reflected the social intimacy of the communities, because of a lack of turnover in population nearly all of the offenders were life long residents, well known to everyone .

These communities preferred to use sanctions that would draw the offender back into the community and this is reflected in the use of fining practices by the community. The fines relied on the use of deterrence to hold potential offenders in check. These fines were then frequently remitted subject to good behaviour. These remissions had a probationary overtone of sorts and by remitting the fines the community was showing their willingness to accept the offenders back into the fold.

The communities also implemented such public punishments as whipping and the use of the pillory with the hope of producing in offenders the feelings of shame and remorse through as Hirsch describes it Ð''the manifest collective disapproval of the community'. These public punishments served a dual purpose as they also sought to deter not only the offender but the onlookers by administering degrees of physical pain.

The use of these punishments and a small number of others appeared to have held crime to an acceptable level throughout 17th Century Massachusetts, but this was soon to change. During the 18th Century the province experienced a period of rapid population growth that distorted any prior patterns of criminal activity. With over thirty towns in Massachusetts containing a population of 2000 or more there was a gradual increase in the number of offences which sharpened into a rapid increase after the 1770s especially in urban areas . The rise in crime was blamed on idleness and depravity but Publicists of the time also pointed the finger at the Ð''ineffectiveness of traditional sanctions'. This, according to Hirsch, and the disquiet over rampant crime formed crucial links in the chain that led to the rise of the penitentiary .

Crime waves invariably generate pressure for state action and the degradation of criminal sanctions was seen as especially threatening to the society of early Massachusetts. The most notable legislative response that the communities of Massachusetts embarked upon was that of a wider recourse to capital punishment. In 1692 the only property crimes punishable by death were for three offences of burglary and robbery, this had changed drastically by 1761 where the robbery statute was changed to send first time offenders to the gallows . This was not an uncommon occurrence among other states and only after the slide toward traditional, harsher sanctions had led them to a dead end, did the lawmakers turn sideways to explore alternative solutions to the problems of crime that faced the provinces.

The failure of these more traditional sanctions did not immediately result in the incarceration of criminals; hard labour was one of several alternatives offered up. Considered as a deterrent hard labour combined the rationalist virtue of certainty with the traditional virtue of severity with the added bonus that if all else failed then the property criminals would at least be incapacitated for a time. But by the late 18th Century, incarceration was seen as a more reliable way to incapacitate offenders with advocates fro incarceration promising that the prisoners labour would defray the expenses of an otherwise costly punishment .

The introduction of the penitentiary ended the involvement of the community in the punishment of offenders as it was no longer seen as constructive. The move from pillory to penitentiary, like most legal institutions in place took time. After receiving the go ahead from the respective state legislators American penitentiaries began to take shape. These Post-Revolution institutions conformed to the rehabituative tradition, congregate hard labour by day and congregate confinement by night became the institutional routine .

However across the water in England the ideological innovations that were blossoming at the time found their way into American states. This new ideological element that was causing the upheaval was solitary confinement.

In the 1820s New York and Pennsylvania started a movement that would soon spread through the Northeast of America and then over time through to many Midwestern states. New York devised the Ð''Auburn' system of penitentiary organization, implementing it first at the Auburn State Prison between the years of 1819 Ð'- 23. The Ð''Auburn' system was a congregate system where prisoners slept alone in a cell at night, and laboured together in a workshop during the day for the rest of their fixed sentences in the penitentiary. The system allowed absolutely no conversing

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