Chapter 2 I. History of Corrections Many students wonder why they need to know and understand the “history” of anything before they delve into learning how things are now. In the field of corrections, understanding the “History” of corrections means understanding corrections “Now” and in the “Future”. As in other fields, corrections is a cyclical field of study, many ideas and issues from the past reemerge as ideas and issues of the future. Please pay attention to the evolution of corrections as it emerges in the next two lectures, you will be amazed at the similarity of ideas, issues and solutions to those of today. A. Middle Ages to the American Revolution: 1. Legal Codes and Law – The earliest known (written) legal codes appear to be the Sumerian Law of Mesopotamia (3100 B.C.) and the Code of Hammurabi (1759 B.C.). Both of these codes described criminal offenses against the people and affixed penalties. The Draconian Code not only defined crimes and penalties, but also set up legal procedures for determining guilt and affixing penalty. The Roman Law of the Twelve Tables and the Emperor Justinian Code laid the groundwork for early European law. 2. However, legal sanctions familiar to us today did not appear in Europe until the Middle Ages. Before that time, responses to crime were handled privately between families. Lex talionis (an eye for an eye) and wergild were common methods of avenging and/or forgiving crimes between families. The concept of Lex talionis allowed the family of the victim to seek revenge against the family of the offender – it was otherwise known as a “blood feud”, which in many cases went on for generations after the initial offense. Wergild evolved as a payment system between the families of the victim and the offender in which the offender’s family pays a monetary sum to the victim’s family as atonement for the crimes of the clan. 3. As societies developed, the concepts of lex talionis and wergild were rolled over into the emerging legal systems: Secular Law and Benefit of Clergy. Secular Law (otherwise known as English common law) was the law of the common man, usually applied in some form by the ruling class (landowner, king, conquering entity, etc.). It encompassed little legal process and embraced harsh punishments. The legal principal of the time was that you were “guilty until you proved yourself innocent”. Torture was used regularly to prompt confessions from the “guilty”, and there was no legal process through which you could prove your “innocence”. Benefit of Clergy (otherwise known as Church law) emerged as a separate legal system operated within the powers and protection of the church. Benefit of Clergy encompassed a legal procedure that allowed both sides of a criminal case to be presented within the parameters of the church. The punishments attached to a finding of guilt were substantially less harsh than those embodied i ...

1. Chapter 2
I. History of Corrections
Many students wonder why they need to know and understand
the “history” of anything before they delve into learning how
things are now. In the field of corrections, understanding the
“History” of corrections means understanding corrections
“Now”
and in the “Future”. As in other fields, corrections is a cyclical
field of study, many ideas and issues from the past reemerge
as ideas and issues of the future. Please pay attention to the
evolution of corrections as it emerges in the next two lectures,
you will be amazed at the similarity of ideas, issues and
solutions to those of today.
A. Middle Ages to the American Revolution:
1. Legal Codes and Law – The earliest known (written)
legal codes appear to be the Sumerian Law of
Mesopotamia (3100 B.C.) and the Code of Hammurabi
(1759 B.C.). Both of these codes described criminal
offenses against the people and affixed penalties. The
Draconian Code not only defined crimes and penalties,
but also set up legal procedures for determining guilt
and affixing penalty. The Roman Law of the Twelve
Tables and the Emperor Justinian Code laid the
groundwork for early European law.
2. However, legal sanctions familiar to us today did not

2. appear in Europe until the Middle Ages. Before that
time, responses to crime were handled privately
between families. Lex talionis (an eye for an eye) and
wergild were common methods of avenging and/or
forgiving crimes between families. The concept of Lex
talionis allowed the family of the victim to seek revenge
against the family of the offender – it was otherwise
known as a “blood feud”, which in many cases went on
for generations after the initial offense. Wergild evolved
as a payment system between the families of the victim
and the offender in which the offender’s family pays a
monetary sum to the victim’s family as atonement for the
crimes of the clan.
3. As societies developed, the concepts of lex talionis and
wergild were rolled over into the emerging legal
systems: Secular Law and Benefit of Clergy. Secular
Law (otherwise known as English common law) was the
law of the common man, usually applied in some form
by the ruling class (landowner, king, conquering entity,
etc.). It encompassed little legal process and embraced
harsh punishments. The legal principal of the time was
that you were “guilty until you proved yourself innocent”.
Torture was used regularly to prompt confessions from
the “guilty”, and there was no legal process through
which you could prove your “innocence”. Benefit of
Clergy (otherwise known as Church law) emerged as a
separate legal system operated within the powers and
protection of the church. Benefit of Clergy
encompassed a legal procedure that allowed both sides
of a criminal case to be presented within the parameters

3. of the church. The punishments attached to a finding of
guilt were substantially less harsh than those embodied
in Secular law, and there was the possibility that an
individual could be found innocent of the crime they
were accused of. The defining line between who was
subject to Secular law and who was subject to Benefit of
Clergy was simple – the ability to read. If you could
read, you would be tried under the rules of Benefit of
Clergy. If you were illiterate, you would be subject to the
harshness of Secular law.
4. Beginning in the late 1400’s, the two legal systems
slowly merged into one punishment system. You could
still be tried in either legal system, but the punishment
options were similar and usually took one or more of five
forms:
a. Galley Slavery – Able-bodied men were often
indentured to ship captains to serve as rowers of
large sailing ships instead of being subjected to the
death penalty. This penalty was seen as being
more merciful, but the individuals who rowed the
ships were subjected to life sentences in the hulls of
the ships. This punishment option was discontinued
in the mid 1700”s.
b. Imprisonment – Until the late Middle Ages,

4. imprisonment was used as a pre-trial and pre-
punishment option only. People were housed in
dungeons, sewers, mine shafts, rock quarries, etc.
prior to being tried or punished – the imprisonment
did not serve as punishment it was only a holding
area. Beginning in the 1500’s, the powers that be
were looking at the possibility of using imprisonment
as a form of punishment. Houses of Corrections
(otherwise known as workhouses) emerged in the
mid 1500’s, with the first being called Bridewell.
These Houses of Corrections were to be designed
to hold convicted offenders, teach them a trade, and
get as much labor as possible out of them during
their term of incarceration. The offenders were to
work their way out of the House of Corrections. The
idea spread rapidly, and by the mid 1700’s,
Bridewell Houses were common across Europe.
Unfortunately, as with most correctional ideas, the
conditions at the Houses of Corrections and the
work ethic that supported the Houses of Corrections
deteriorated and they no longer served to
rehabilitate offenders – they were no better than the
jails that preceded them. The Prison Act of 1865
joined the jail system and the house of corrections
system into one system and renamed it a prison
system.
c. Transportation – European countries used
transportation extensively as a punishment
alternative to death and as a way to funnel labor
sources to their colonies around the world. With the
Vagrancy Act of 1597, transportation became a
prescribed punishment in England, and they used it

5. extensively to transport prisoners to America until
1776 when the American Revolution stopped such
transportation. In 1787, England started
transporting prisoners to Australia and to New
South Wales with one significant change – the
prisoners were transported to prison colonies on
those islands, not into the general public. The
inmates then worked for the crown until the time of
their release. The practice of transportation did not
cease until 1868.
d. Corporal Punishment – Corporal punishment has
been used extensively throughout the history of the
world. Historians can trace its use back to the
beginning of recorded time, when groups of
individuals would control their own through
sometimes harsh corporal punishment in order to
maintain social control. The types of corporal
punishment options utilized were as broad as the
imagination and included – the removal of limbs, the
slitting of nostrils, the severing of an ear, branding,
tattooing on a visible area, dunking booths, stocks,
pillars, the iron mask, stretching on the rack,
whipping, etc. The key to the use of corporal
punishment during the Middle Ages was that it was
intended to serve as a deterrent to the public as well
as a punishment of the offender. There was no
descending order of crimes and punishment – you
could be subject to an extremely harsh punishment
for what we today would consider a very minor
crime (crossing the street in front of a royal carriage
was punishable by death unless you were a youth,

6. then it was punishable by the harshest of corporal
punishments).
e. Capital Punishment – The use of death as a penalty
during the Middle Ages was routine. In 1800,
England had 225 crimes punishable by death! (In
Arkansas, we currently have 1 – Capital Murder –
which is a highly restricted form of murder.) The
range of crimes was extensive, and the range of
death options was also extensive. You could be
drawn and quartered, you could be beheaded,
garroted, hung, buried alive, burned alive, broken
on the wheel, impaled, etc. Again, there was no
rhyme or reason as to which crimes were punished
with the quick death options and which crimes were
punished by the slooooooow and painful death
options – all was governed by the ruling class.
f. By the middle of the 1700’s many leaders in
England were disgusted with the procedures of the
criminal justice system and the options for
punishment, and they were ready for a change.
Many factors influenced this change in mindset –
economic and social factors, the success of the
American Revolution, the emerging labor needs of
the country, changes in the status of the Church as
a governing body, and changing political forces
within the country. As a result, historians have
designated 1770 as the eve of the Age of

7. Enlightenment.
B. The Age of Enlightenment:
1. The Age of Enlightenment (otherwise known as the Age
of Reason) was a remarkable period of time during
which traditional assumptions of status, the role of the
church, the influence of ruling classes, etc. were
challenged and replaced by new social ideas based on
rationalism, the importance of the individual citizen, and
the role and limitations of government. As a result of
this shift in thought, correctional thought and practice
were radically reformed. (Many of the ideas that
emerged during this period are the foundations of our
criminal justice system today.)
2. The leaders of this period were Cesare Beccaria (1738 -
1794) – the founder of the classical school of
criminological thought; Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832)
– the promoter of the utilitarian approach to crime and
punishment; and John Howard (1726 – 1790) – who
focused on the practical application of punishment and
the conditions under which it was carried out.
a. Cesare Beccaria was an Italian scholar and
nobleman who was intrigued by the idea of

8. rationality and crime – the establishment of a
rational link between the gravity of crime and the
severity of punishment. He published a classic text
(still used in PhD programs today) in 1764, called
Essays on Crimes and Punishments. The book
covered a wide array of topics, but for our purposes,
six of the principles therein are critical:
1. The basis of all social action must have as it
foundation “the greatest good for the greatest
number”. In other words, society’s well-being
is more important than the wishes of a single
individual. (Think about the principle of who
does a prosecutor represent – the state or an
individual?)
2. Crime must be considered an injury to society
and the injury should be measured based on
the gravity of the crime. In other words, a
hierarchy of crime must be created that runs
the gambit from low impact crimes to high
impact crimes, and those that have the
greatest impact on society should be punished
the most severely.
3. Prevention of crime is more important than
punishment for crime; therefore, codes and
procedures must be written and distributed so
that the general public knows what is against
the law and understands the process of
determining guilt or innocence. This was the
real beginning of a legal code and a set of
legal processes that were widely disseminated
and known to all.
4. Secret accusations and torture must be

9. eliminated. Trials should be public and
speedy, and treatment prior to trial should be
humane. This principle set the stage for the
Constitutional rights we enjoy today by shifting
the burden of proof from “guilty until you prove
yourself innocent” to “innocent until proven
guilty”.
5. The purpose of punishment is crime
deterrence, not social revenge; therefore
punishment should be swift, certain, and must
match the magnitude of the crime. The
creation of a scale of justice emerged from
this idea, leading to penalties that more
closely matched the injury of the crime against
society.
6. Incarceration should become the foundation of
a penalty structure; with sanitary conditions
and separation of offenders by age, sex, and
offense. This principle created the idea of a
classification system for incarceration – the
grouping of like offenders in living areas to
prevent the co-mingling of dissimilar groups.
Beccaria’s ideas took hold around the world with France
adopting them into the French Code of 1791. He
summarized his thinking as follows, ”In order for
punishment not to be, in every instance, an act of violence
of one or many against a private citizen, it must be
essentially public, prompt, necessary, the least possible in
the given circumstances, proportionate to the crime,

10. dictated by laws”.
b. Jeremy Bentham was an English scholar who is best
known for his utilitarian theories encompassing the concept
of free will and Hedonistic Calculus. (He was also
certifiably crazy.) He believed that the foundation for
society should be “the greatest happiness of the greatest
number” and promoted utilitarianism as a method of
promoting stability within society by focusing on
discouraging wrong-doers from crime by identifying their
individual balance point between pleasure and pain. He
coined this balance “hedonistic calculus” – the concept of
making sure that an offender receives just enough
punishment (pain) to overcome any pleasure he may have
derived from the commission of the criminal act. He
focused on reforming the criminal laws of England so that
they did not emphasize punishment, but rather deterrence
and prevention of crime. He contended that “The goal was
not to avenge the illegal act but to prevent the commission
of such an act in the first place”.
c. John Howard was the high Sheriff of Bedfordshire
England and as part of his responsibilities, he toured his
local jail. He was appalled at the conditions under which
citizens and offenders were held and set out to survey as
many jails across Europe as possible. He found that most
of the jails and prisons he inspected were in poor condition,
and there was no structure or order within them. His work,
unlike that of Beccaria and Bentham, focused not on lofty
theories of crime and punishment, but on the reality of
punishment for those who were subject to it. As a result of

11. his work, he and others drafted the Penitentiary Act of
1779, which set down four principles for incarceration:
1. Places of incarceration must be secure and
sanitary.
2. There should be instituted a regular series of
systematic inspections of jails and prisons.
3. There should be no fees assessed on those
incarcerated.
4. Each place of incarceration should have in its
structure a method for reforming those
incarcerated therein.
Howard advocated a twofold purpose for incarceration –
to punish those who have committed crime and to reform
them, so that they emerged as contributing members of
society. He died of typhus (otherwise known as jail fever)
in 1790, caught while inspecting jails.
We will see more of these scholars’ ideas emerge as we look at
the
development of corrections in America.