The history of prison an 18th century dungeon

18th Century Dungeon

The word prison comes from the French derivation comes from the Latin word prehensio, which means seizure. It is defined as a location in which to hold people who have been convicted of a crime by the reigning legal authority to spend their sentence. The primary goal of imprisonment in its infancy was to make sure that the accused would make his trial and appear before the judges, and to serve his due punishment. Their first uses were objectively morally dubious, as they typically housed those whom whatever tyrant who ruled at the time deemed in opposition to his direct authority; either that, or were thought by a benevolent government to serve the greater good of the people it governed, or so theiy thought.

Soon, it became a good idea to use coercion and intimidation, which carried milder penalties than death. It stood to reason that even prison, where your liberties were stripped away, and you were forced to labor tirelessly day after day, was still better than death. The penal code of the time carried with it a variety of more pointed and torturous punishments, such as scaffolding, physical torture, mutilation, exile, sold into slavery, and many more horrible fates. It’s entirely likely that the people in charge of these facilities were completely irresponsible for their charges, since the death of an inmate through whatever means was probably a relief from the hassle of their care. It did take a very long time for the idea of long-term incarceration to hold in the eye of prison masters, even later still was the idea of humane treatment of the inmates as a responsibility and duty of the masters.

In order to understand the progress made in prison conditions, you have to remember the past. There is an iconic picture of conditions of prisons in the late 18th century drawn by John Howard that provides a horrific tale. Prisons were havens for pestilence, overcrowding, rotten food and dirty housing. Inmates only got food if the jailers felt benevolent that week, or upon good samaritans; they slept on rotting straw, and their water was scarce at best, the few times they got it. Prisoners had to endure starvation, squalor, chains, oppression, neglect, drunken behavior, and violent rape in order to stay in prison.

Prisons at the time were mostly thought to be for detention instead of punishment. Many of the inmates were also innocent; often they were just debtors who were only guilty of breaking financial rules, framed by the creditors in order to benefit themselves. Though the Magna Carta dictated that you couldn’t be arrested except on criminal charges, many thousands were framed and put in jail, where they cost far more than they originally owed to the creditor. Those debtors, since they were imprisoned, had no means with which to pay back their debt, and they were quickly joined by families and dependents, which only made the prisons more crowded. You never found an empty prison. It was an extremely rare thing to be released from jail; even if you were acquitted, your release was not put through until manufactured fees were paid.