The prison seems so natural today that it is easy to forget how new it is as the main form of punishment. For most of history, punishments were fines, compensation to victims, whipping, branding, the stocks, banishment and execution, often carried out in public. Jails existed, but they mainly held people awaiting trial or punishment, or debtors, rather than serving as the punishment itself.

Punishment as spectacle

Executions were public events meant to display the power of the ruler and to warn the crowd. In 1757 in Paris, Robert-François Damiens, who had stabbed King Louis XV, was publicly tortured and torn apart by horses. The French thinker Michel Foucault opened his book Discipline and Punish (1975) with this scene to show how dramatically punishment later changed.

In England, the so-called Bloody Code grew during the eighteenth century until, by the early 1800s, more than 200 offenses, many of them crimes against property, carried the death penalty. In practice many of those condemned were pardoned or transported, first to the American colonies and then, from 1788 to 1868, to Australia.

Beccaria

In 1764 a young Milanese nobleman, Cesare Beccaria, published On Crimes and Punishments. It became one of the most influential books of the Enlightenment. Beccaria argued that:

• punishment is justified only to prevent crime, and anything beyond that is tyranny;
• punishments should be proportionate to crimes and set by clear, public laws;
• the certainty and promptness of punishment matter more than its severity;
• torture should be abolished, and so should the death penalty.

His ideas spread quickly. In 1786 the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, under Grand Duke Leopold, became one of the first modern states to abolish the death penalty.

Howard and the reform of jails

The English reformer John Howard visited hundreds of jails in Britain and Europe and published The State of the Prisons (1777). He documented filth, disease and the practice of jailers charging prisoners fees, and his work helped launch a movement for cleaner, better ordered prisons.

Bentham's panopticon

Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon in the late 1780s: a circular building with cells around the outside and an inspection tower in the center. Inmates could not tell whether they were being watched at any given moment, so they would behave as if they always were. Bentham thought the design could be used for prisons, schools, factories and hospitals. It was never built in Britain as he planned, though some later prisons borrowed its circular form. Foucault later used it as a symbol of a modern kind of power that works through constant observation.

The penitentiary

The word penitentiary reflects the hope that prisoners would become penitent. In the United States two rival models emerged in the 1820s. At Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (opened 1829), the separate system kept each prisoner alone in a cell, to work and reflect, an approach influenced by Quaker ideas. At Auburn, New York, the congregate system had prisoners work together in silence by day and sleep in separate cells at night. Visitors came from Europe to study both; Charles Dickens, after visiting Eastern State in 1842, condemned long solitary confinement as a cruel torment of the mind.

From body to mind

By the mid-nineteenth century, much of the Western world had moved from punishing the body in public to confining people out of sight. England held its last public execution in 1868. Whether this was simple progress, or a new kind of control, is a question historians still debate.

Worked example: one theft across three centuries

Imagine a young servant who steals a silver spoon from her employer. Follow her case through three periods of English and American history.

London, around 1750. Under the Bloody Code, stealing goods of a certain value from a house could be a capital offense. A jury, reluctant to see her hanged, might deliberately value the spoon below the threshold. If convicted of a capital charge, she might be pardoned on condition of transportation to the American colonies. Her punishment would be sudden, harsh and very uncertain: many thieves were never caught at all.

Philadelphia, around 1835. Convicted of larceny, she might be sent to a penitentiary. Under the separate system, she would live alone in a cell, working and reading the Bible, seeing almost no one. Reformers hoped solitude would lead her to reflect and repent. Critics, like Dickens a few years later, would argue that such isolation damaged the mind.

A modern European city. As a first-time offender for a minor theft, she would most likely receive a fine, perhaps a day fine scaled to her income, or a community sentence. Prison would be reserved for serious or repeated offenses.

Notice what changed. Punishment moved from the body to liberty and then, for minor crimes, to money and supervision. Beccaria's ideas run through the story: clearer laws, more proportionate penalties and the hope that sure, prompt punishment would do more than terrifying, rare punishment. Whether each change was purely humane is a question this level leaves open.