Chapter Summary and Learning Objectives

Ideas about crime and punishment are rooted in social structures and culture. Political ideology, economic realities, and class, race, and gender norms all exert a powerful influence on systems of punishment.

By controlling specific individuals, penal systems sup- press and control whole classes of people whose obedience is essential to the maintenance of the social and economic order, especially for the benefit of the privileged and empowered classes. Slavery is both an extreme expression of the exertion of power over an oppressed class of people for economic gain and an extreme form of the imposition of punishment. It is also directly linked to the evolution of the American penal system. Eruptions of social turmoil have occurred throughout history and are a consequence of this systematized oppression.

From the fall of the Roman Empire to the early Middle Ages, the principal responses to crime were designed to regulate the relationships among members of a given class—fines for the wealthy and enslaved, hard labor for the poor.

In the Middle Ages, an increasingly destitute rural population began to migrate to cities, adding to poverty and competition. The dominant methods of punishment during this time were acts of brutal physical torture and either agonizing death or (the quicker and more humane) beheading or hanging carried out in the public square for all to see.

Galley slavery and transportation as a form of exile played an important role in the viability of colonialism. These practices later gave way to imprisonment in institutions.

Extracting revenue from the administration of justice was a prime factor in transforming the private system of arbitration to a public system of centralized control. The exploitation of prisoner labor was introduced at the end of the 16th century. The early forms of the prison were the European and English houses of corrections, where inmates were forced to work. This inmate labor source has often been in economic competition with the free and law-abiding pool of workers.

In the United States, the demand for prison labor has increased and decreased with changing economic conditions over time. Prisons provide labor, in both rural and urban settings. But a surplus of labor led to a movement away from prisoners as laborers. Large-scale prison idleness is an issue when prison labor is less in demand. Isolation emerged as a strategy for penitence as well as man- aging idle prisoners. During the Enlightenment, Cesare Beccaria argued for proportional punishment, humane conditions of confinement, and renouncing brutality.

Harsh corporal punishment, along with military regimentation, reemerged under the influence of Zebulon Brockway, whose ideas were based on the premise that criminals were morally inferior.

The modern criminal and juvenile justice systems arose during the Progressive Era. Prison classification, federal law enforcement, and professionalizing corrections administration were all developed during this time. However, even modern prisons must deal with the tension inherent between the jailers and the jailed. Current policy debates on what are the most effective and cost-conscious ways of addressing crime can be enlightened by an accurate analysis of how penal systems have evolved from social and economic conditions.

  • To understand some of the early forms of punishment and see how current forms stem from them.
  • To understand how crime control has been rooted in social class and control of the underclasses.
  • To grasp some of the penal inventions that have supported economic developments, such as colonization of the New World.
  • To be able to discuss how prison labor has supported economic enterprises at various times in Western history.
  • To understand the philosophic basis of the Quaker approach to early institutions of confinement in the United States.
  • To be able to describe the thinking behind the Auburn System and the ideas of Zebulon Brockway and explain why they represented a departure from the thinking that preceded them.
  • To grasp how the civil rights movement of the 1960s affected the criminal justice system.
  • To explain the main influences on the demise of the rehabilitative ideal during the 1970s and 1980s.