Prisons in the 20th Century

¶ … Penitentiary System

Two Significant Changes to the Penitentiary System during the 20th Century

During the 19th Century prisons were harsh environments that incorporated corporal punishment, striped uniforms and lockstep marching. In 1876 the Elmira Correctional Facility opened in New York. Elmira was the first prison established on the concept of changing behavior instead of punishing behavior. This facility was designed to reform each inmate through an individualized program, discarding meaningless hard labor, regimens of silence, religious and morality lectures and strict compliance attained through cruelty and fear. The programs instituted at the reformatory included courses in ethics and religion, vocational education, and activities such as a band, newspaper and athletic leagues.

Healthcare

Until recently prison healthcare and interest in the health and medical problems of prisoners was under the direction of county sheriffs or prison wardens. With the exception of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which staffed its medical service needs with Public Health Service physicians and provided hospital care in facilities accredited under the Joint Commission for Hospital Accreditation, neither public health officials nor the outside medical community showed much concern for medical services in prisons or jails or for the health status of prisoners. Until the 1970s no general standards for medical services in prisons existed in the United States (Weisbuch, DNI).

Health care in American correctional facilities began to improve in the 1970s. The U.S. Department of Justice provided limited funds to certain states to improve medical care in prisons, and in 1972 the American Medical Association (AMA) surveyed medical services in U.S. prisons and jails, publishing a report that documented its inadequacy. The first Supreme Court decision to address prison health, Estelle v. Gamble (1976), determined that medical care in the Texas prison system was below a constitutional level. Estelle and subsequent decisions established that prisoners have a constitutional right to health care equal in quality to that available in the outside community (Poster, 1992). In 1983 the AMA Correctional Health Care Program evolved into the National Commission for Correctional Health Care (NCCHC), whose standards, in 1999, served more than five hundred jails, prisons, and juvenile facilities and defined the level of health services available to inmates (Weisbuch, DNI).

Technology