Why the penitentiary developed in this country

Information collection and management systems are also very inadequate or non-existent in many prison systems worldwide, hindering the development of sound policies and strategies based on reliable, factual data. UNODC can provide much assistance in reforming national legislation, developing training programmes for prison managers to improve their leadership role and staff to apply international standards and norms in their daily practice, and by contributing to the institutional capacity building of prison administrations.

Overcrowding is a key concern in almost all prison systems worldwide, while punitive criminal policies, as well as a shortage of social protection services in the community, continue to contribute to the rapid growth of the prison population in many countries.

As mentioned earlier, overcrowding is the root cause of many human rights violations in prisons. Solutions to overcrowding need to be explored and implemented in almost all countries in which UNODC is operational. While overcrowding can be temporarily decreased by building new prisons, practice shows that trying to overcome the harmful effects of prison overcrowding through the construction of new prisons does not provide a sustainable solution. In addition, building new prisons and maintaining them is expensive, putting pressure on valuable resources.

Instead, numerous international instruments recommend a rationalization in sentencing policy, including the wider use of alternatives to prison, aiming to reduce the number of people being isolated from society for long periods. The use of non-custodial sanctions and measures also reflects a fundamental change in the approach to crime, offenders and their place in society, changing the focus of penitentiary measures from punishment and isolation, to restorative justice and reintegration.

When accompanied by adequate support for offenders, it assists some of the most vulnerable members of society to lead a life without having to relapse back into criminal behavior patterns. Thus, the implementation of penal sanctions within the community, rather than through a process of isolation from it, offers in the long term better protection for society. Supporting the introduction and implementation of non-custodial sanctions and measures is therefore a key element of UNODC's work in the area of prison reform.

One of the principle objectives of the United Nations in the area of prison reform is to contribute to the successful reintegration of prisoners into society following their release. Social reintegration initiatives should start as early as possible within the criminal justice process in order to have maximum effect.

This means that diversion from the criminal justice process especially of vulnerable groups to appropriate treatment programmes, non-custodial sanctions, instead of isolation from society and purposeful activities and programmes in prisons, can all be considered as elements of a comprehensive "social reintegration" policy.

Interventions to support former prisoners following release from prison, continuum of care in the community for those in need, will all be more effective if the period in prison is used to prepare a prisoner for re-entry to society. This policy requires close coordination between criminal justice institutions and social protection and health services in the community and probation services where they exist.

UNODC can offer key support and advice in this area, including supporting the development of social reintegration programmes in prisons and in assisting with the planning and implementation of continuum of care and support in the community. Equivalence of healthcare and the right to health is a principle that applies to all prisoners, who are entitled to receive the same quality of medical care that is available in the community.

However, this right is rarely realised in prisons, where usually healthcare services are extremely inadequate. Prison health services are almost always severely under-funded and understaffed and sometimes non-existent. Most of the time under the responsibility of the authority in charge of the prisons administration, prison health services work in complete isolation from national health authorities, including national HIV and national TB programmes.

Specific women's health needs are rarely addressed. The right to health includes not only the access to preventive, curative, reproductive, palliative and supportive health care but also the access to the underlying determinants of health, which include: safe drinking water and adequate sanitation; safe food; adequate nutrition and housing; safe health and dental services; healthy working and environmental conditions; health-related education and information and gender equality.

Improved prison management and prison conditions are fundamental to developing a sustainable health strategy in prisons. In addition, prison health is an integral part of public health, and improving prison health is crucial for the success of public health policies. United Nations. Office on Drugs and Crime. Site Search. In in Georgia, 90 percent of people in state custody during an investigation of the convict leasing system were black.

State penal authorities deployed these imprisoned people to help rebuild the South—they rented out convicted people to private companies through a system of convict leasing and put incarcerated individuals to work on, for example, prison farms to produce agricultural products. Blackburn, Shannon K. Fowler, and Joycelyn M. In the Reconstruction South, these were fiscally attractive strategies given the destruction of Southern prisons during the Civil War and the economic depression that followed it.

In terms of prison infrastructure, it is also important to note that even before , Southern states had few prisons. Prisons in Southern states, therefore, were primarily used for white felons. The region depended heavily on extralegal systems to resolve legal disputes involving slaves and—in contrast to the North—defined white crime as arising from individual passion rather than social conditions or moral failings.

Southern punishment ideology therefore tended more toward the retributive, while Northern ideology included ideals of reform and rehabilitation although evidence suggests harsh prison operations routinely failed to support these ideals. Despite the differences between Northern and Southern ideas of crime, punishment, and reform, all Southern states had at least one large prison modeled on the Auburn Prison style congregate model by Convict leasing programs that operated through an external supervision model—in which incarcerated people were supervised entirely by a private company that was paying the state for their labor—turned a state cost into a much-needed profit and enabled states to take penal custody of people without the need to build prisons in which to house them.

Prior to the Civil War, prisons all over the country had experimented with strategies to profit off of the labor of incarcerated people, with most adopting factory-style contract work in which incarcerated people were used to perform work for outside companies at the prison. During the earliest period of convict leasing, most contracting companies were headquartered in Northern states and were actually compensated by the Southern states for taking the supervision of those in state criminal custody off their hands.

Only in the s and s, after Southern-based companies and individuals retook control of state governments, did the arrangements reverse: companies began to compensate states for leasing convict labor. Under convict leasing schemes, state prison systems in the South often did not know where those who were leased out were housed or whether they were living or dead. Private convict leasing was replaced by the chain gang, or labor on public works such as the building of roads, in the first decade of the 20 th century in both Georgia and North Carolina.

The chain gang continued into the s. Those sentenced to serve on chain gangs were predominantly black. Although economic, political, and industrial changes in the United States contributed to the end of private convict leasing in practice by , other forms of slavery-like labor practices emerged.

Matthew J. State prison authorities introduced the chain gang, a brutal form of forced labor in which incarcerated people toiled on public works, such as building roads or clearing land. Chain gangs existed into the s. And, as with convict leasing before it, those sentenced to serve on chain gangs were predominantly black. Prison farms also continued to dominate the Southern landscape during this period. In , Texas was operating 12 state prison farms and nearly percent of the workers on them were black.

The loophole contained within the 13 th Amendment, which abolished slavery and indentured servitude except as punishment for a crime , paved the way for Southern states to use convict leasing, prison farms, and chain gangs as legal means to continue white control over black people and to secure their labor at no or little cost.

The language was selected for the 13 th Amendment in part due to its legal strength. The concept had first entered federal law in Northwest Ordinance of , which governed territories that later became the states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

These states subsequently incorporated this aspect of the Northwest Ordinance into their state constitutions.

Many other states followed suit. By the time the 13 th Amendment was ratified by Congress, it had been tested by the courts and adopted into the constitutions of 23 of the 36 states in the nation and the Home Rule Charter of the District of Columbia.

Maine entered the union as a free state in For more information about the congressional debate surrounding the adoption of the 13 th Amendment, see David R.

Furthering control over black bodies was the continued use of extralegal punishment following emancipation, including brutal lynchings that were widely supported by state and local leaders and witnessed by large celebratory crowds.

At least 4, such extra-judicial killings occurred between and in 20 states. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America Very few white men and women were ever sent to work under these arrangements. Incarcerated whites were not included in convict leasing agreements, and few white people were sent to the chain gangs that followed convict leasing into the middle of the 20 th century. By assigning black people to work in the fields and on government works, the state-sanctioned punishment of black people was visible to the public, while white punishment was obscured behind prison walls.

By many accounts, conditions under the convict leasing system were harsher than they had been under slavery, as these private companies no longer had an ownership interest in the longevity of their laborers, who could be easily replaced at low cost by the state.

Although the incarcerated people subjected to this treatment sought redress from the courts, they found little relief. He is for the time being the slave of the state. Commonwealth , 62 Va. The first half of the 20 th century saw an expansion of prison populations in the Northern states, which coincided with shifting ideas about race and ethnicity, an influx of black Americans to urban regions in the North, and increased competition over limited jobs in Northern cities between newly arrived black Americans and European immigrants.

As a backdrop to these changing demographics, public anxiety about crime flourished. As crime was on the decline, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, began to characterize those who committed violent robberies as public enemies. The growing fear of crime—often directed at black Americans—intensified policing practices across the country and inspired the passage of a spate of mandatory sentencing policies, both of which contributed to a surge in incarceration.

Policies establishing mandatory life sentences triggered by conviction of a fourth felony were passed first in New York in and, soon thereafter, in California, Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, and Vermont. Between and , state prison populations across the country increased by 67 percent.

The arrest rate among white people for robbery declined by 42 percent, while it increased by 23 percent among black people. For homicide, arrests declined by 8 percent for white people, but rose by 25 percent for black people. Between and , over six million black Americans migrated from the South to Northern urban centers. Known as the Great Migration, this movement of people dramatically transformed the makeup of both the South and the North: in , 90 percent of black Americans lived in the South but, by , that number had dropped to 53 percent.

These migrants—typically more financially stable black Americans—were fleeing racial terror and economic exclusion. This social, political, and economic exclusion extended to second-generation immigrants as well. If we compare the incarceration rates of individual U.

New Jersey and New York follow just after Cuba. Rwanda incarcerates so many people per , because thousands are sentenced or awaiting trial in connection with the genocide that killed an estimated , people. Next comes the state of Washington, which claims the same incarceration rate as the Russian Federation. In the wake of collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia used to rival the United States for the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Utah, Nebraska and Iowa all lock up a greater portion of their populations than El Salvador, a country with a recent civil war and one of the highest homicide rates in the world. The two U. The other NATO nations, for example, are concentrated in the lower half of this list. These nations incarcerate their own citizens at a rate five to ten times lower than the United States does: 9 These data reveal that even the U.

To fill this gap, we used U. Census data that shows the total number of people in each state who are confined in local, state, and federal adult correctional facilities. This powerful census dataset comes with one quirk worth discussing: the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as if they were residents of prison locations rather than their home communities.

But given the sheer size of the federal prison system alone — larger than the total prison population of every nation on the planet except for seven China, Russian Federation, Brazil, India, Thailand, Mexico, and Iran — it wouldn't be appropriate to exclude this population from our data.