PRISONS. A prison is a place of confine ment or of involuntary restraint for the safe custody of criminals and others committed by process of law. There are detention prisons for persons awaiting trial and confinement ; prisons for those convicted and sentenced to imprison ment. The former are sometimes called jails and the latter are frequently called peniten tiaries or workhouses or houses of correction or reformatories. See REFORMATORIES.
Workhouses and houses of correction are supposed to be used for the older and for petty offenders while reformatories are for those ca pable of learning a trade or of receiving an edu cation in a school. Confinement prisons and penitentiaries are generally thought of as places for the imprisonment of more hardened or seri ous offenders, where the discipline is supposed to be firmer and more arbitrary. In actual prac tice, however, the statutes and sentences to im prisonment do not recognize clearly these dis tinctions.
Detention Orisons came into general use be fore confinement prisons and penitentiaries, as the former were needed for those whose cases had not been disposed of by the courts, whereas those convicted were, until the latter part of the 18th century, frequently put to death or branded or mutilated and let go, or were de ported beyond the seas. Only in certain ex ceptional cases were the guilty held in custody in surroundings which were always unpleasant and provided with coarse fare and rough lodg ings and required to engage in irksome labor. Only one workhouse or house of correction was built in London up to 1550 and a workhouse was established in Amsterdam in 1588. In Lu beck and Bremen there was no institution of this type until 1663. Berne in 1615, Hamburg in 1620, Basle in 1667, Vienna and Breslau in 1670, Luneburg in 1676, Florence in 1677 and Munich in 1687 were among the other European cities to establish and build one such institution, respectively.
The shocking picture of English prisons given us by John Howard during the latter part of the 18th century forced people to think about prisons and awakened the public conscience on both sides of the Atlantic to indescribable evils, particularly the evils of the English detention prisons, and enabled Howard to force a change in England's treatment of offenders. Howard made people see that these prisons were " Pestiferous dens, overcrowded, dark foully dirty; not only ill-ventilated, but deprived altogether of fresh air. The wretched inmates were dependent for food upon the caprice of their gaolers or the charity of the benevolent; water was denied them in the scantiest proportions; their only bedding was putrid straw. Every one in durance, whether tried or untried, was heavily ironed. all alike were subject to the rapacity of their gaolers and the extortions of their fellows. . . . Idleness, drunkenness, vicious in tercourse, sickness, starvation, squalor, cruelty, chains, awful oppression and every culpable neglect—in these words may be summed up the state of the gaols of the time of Howard's visitation."
Hundred of these wretches were debtors, guilty only of breaches of financial rules. Hun dreds more of them had been committed under legal fictions. The poor father of a family, often shiftless and unfortunate, was locked up only to be joined by his wife and children, who were made penniless by his confinement. Though in nocent before the law, yet these unfortunates remained in jail without trial and without re dress.
Howard's recommendation that penitentiaries or confinement prisons be established finally bore fruit in the erection of Milbank Prison in England, which was begun in 1813 and partly completed by 1816. However, Newgate in Lon don still remained a public den of iniquity in 1817 when Elizabeth Fry began her remarkable visitations and ministrations to the crazed crea tures confined there.
Howard's work in England was paralleled by a similar movement in America, led by the Phil adelphia Quakers. To relieve the horrible suf fering in the city jail or prison of Philadelphia, these Quakers formed in 1776 The Philadelphia Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners, but their activities were terminated by the British occupation of the city in the Revolutionary War. Immediately after the close of the war the leading citizens of Philadelphia began a suc cessful agitation for the reform of the barbar ous colonial Penal Code. In 1787 the Philadelphia Quakers and others interested in prison reform founded The Philadelphia Society for Alleviat ing the Miseries of Public Prisons. This soci ety still exists as the leading force in Pennsyl vania prison reform, its name having -been changed to that of the Pennsylvania Prison So ciety in 1887. It is, thus, the oldest prison re form society in Europe or America. Its activi ties were most effective in bettering prison con ditions in Pennsylvania. It aided in the refor mation of the Criminal Code, introduced preach ing into the Walnut Street Prison, devised the Pennsylvania or Separate system of prison ad ministration and brought about a general im provement of discipline in the city prison. The work of the society extended beyond the bor ders of Pennsylvania. They carried on a cor respondence with John Howard in England, ex changing ideas on desirable modes of prison reform and were the centre from which the re form of criminal jurisprudence and prison ad ministration spread into other States of this country. Their success led to the establishment of similar organizations elsewhere. The Lon don Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline was formed in 1815; the Prison Dis cipline Society of Boston in 1826; the New Jer sey Prison Instruction Society in 1833; and The New York Prison Association in 1845.