Prisons Incarceration and Gender

¶ … United States, public executions remained until the middle of the 19th century, when the practice began to fall out of favor due to shifts in attitudes toward criminality and criminal justice. Several states opted to banish public executions, without necessarily abolishing the death penalty itself. In 1936, the last public hanging took place in the United States. During the early 20th century, further reforms took place disallowing "cruel and unusual" forms of execution such as public hangings, but several states continue to allow public viewings of executions (Reggio, 1997).

As capital punishment fell out of favor and humanitarian ideals prevailed in the philosophy of criminal justice, the institution of imprisonment became the de facto recourse for dealing with serious crime. Whereas previously serious crimes would be treated via capital punishment, the prison system provided the means by which to issue heavy sanctions, segregating the accused from the greater public while also permitting for the possibility of rehabilitation. Langbein (1976) points out that the substitution of imprisonment for capital punishment started both in England and in Europe by the 17th century. Enlightenment values and humanism further fomented the shift towards the sanction of imprisonment for serious crime. However, galley imprisonment and other harsh and exploitative methods continued to be used until the early 20th century.

3. The penitentiary system as it exists today has a long history and can be traced as far back as medieval England (Langbein, 1976). A proliferation of penitentiary systems has become integral to criminal justice and a central feature of the social and political landscape of America. Penitentiaries owe their philosophical existence to Enlightenment values, espousing forms of punishment that were less cruel and more humanistic than capital punishment. The notion that criminals could be rehabilitated also made its way into the philosophy of penitentiaries, although prisons had been designed with Bentham's concept of the "panopticon" always in mind. Some penitentiaries provided the means whereby prisoners would perform slave labor, and essentially continue to do so today in America's privatized prison system. The penitentiary system continues to blend tacit belief in rehabilitation with a more overt belief in punitive punishment for crimes.

4. Foucault critiqued the modern disciplinary system from a sociological perspective, showing how the institution of a prison maintains total and complete power over the individuals within it. As such, prisons are "complete and austere." They use methods like continual surveillance to monitor movements of people, and constrain human relations and behavior. A prison institution serves as a tool for people in positions of power to exploit large masses of individuals who have been systematically stripped of their power and humanity. The inmates' lives become forever and completely altered by the incarceration because of the way the system operates completely and austerely.