How We Punish Offenders in Our System

Our correctional system punishes offenders, by putting them in jail, or in prison. In the early times, before prisons punishments were often cruel and torturous. The unsettling description of a man broken in half on a rack in the early 1700’s is just one of the ways crimes were punished at that time. Flogging was another. The last flogging was in Delaware on June 16,1952. When a burglar got 20 lashes. Workhouses, were an early form of prisons in the sixteenth century Europe. The Penitentiary Era, from 1790-1825, is when the first prison was started in the USA. They started with the Quakers in Philadelphia. The mass prison era started in the 1800’s and has gotten stronger today, beginning in the 1960’s overcrowding and a renewed faith in humanity inspired a movement away from institutionalized corrections and toward a creation of reformation within local communities. Prisons today, there are about 1,325 state prisons, 84, federal prisons in operation in the US. Today. America’s prison population has quadrupled since 1980. We also punish people by putting them in halfway houses, or group homes. The Federal Prison system is used for the civilians convicted of violating federal laws. Leavenworth, in Leavenworth Kansas. Today the federal systems consist of 103 institutions, six regional offices, two staff training centers, and 28 community corrections offices. Jails are another way of punishing the criminal. We can put them in a jail and hold them up to one year, before they either, get probation, or go on to a