“The first U.S. prisons emerged in reaction to the overcrowded, violent, disease-infested jails of the colonial era.
Prisons as we understand them today – places of long-term confinement as a punishment for crime – are relatively new developments. In the U.S. they came about in the 1780s and 1790s, after the American Revolution.
Previously, American colonies under British control relied on execution and corporal punishments.
Jails in America and England during that period were not themselves places of punishment. They were just holding tanks. Debtors were jailed until they paid their debts. Vagrants were jailed until they found work. Accused criminals were jailed while awaiting trial, and convicted criminals were jailed while awaiting punishment or until they paid their court fines.
Consequently, early American jails were not designed for long detentions, even if people sometimes stayed for months or longer.
The physical structure of these unregulated local facilities – often run by sheriffs or private citizens who charged room and board fees – varied. Jail could be a spare room in a roadside inn, a stone building with barred windows or a subterranean dungeon.
Fear of disease
Disease, violence and exploitation were rampant in these squalid American colonial and British jails.
John Howard, a British aristocrat whose ideas influenced American penal reformers, became concerned about living conditions in these “abode[s] of wickedness, disease, and misery” when he became a sheriff. In a 1777 book, Howard recounts smelling vinegar, a common disinfectant of the era, to protect against the revolting smell of the jails he visited.
Howard warned readers that jails spread disease not only among inmates but also beyond, into society. He recalled the so-called Black Assize of 1577, in which prisoners awaiting trial were brought from jail to an Oxford courthouse and “within forty hours” more than 300 people who had been at court were dead from “gaol fever” – what we now call typhus.
He also wrote of infected prisoners who, once released, brought diseases from jail into their communities, killing scores.
Disease also shaped Howard’s understanding of how criminality spread.
He described how young “innocents” – the children of people jailed for debt or those awaiting trial for a petty offense – were seduced by dashing bandits’ stories of crime and adventure. Thus “infected,” they went on to become criminals themselves.
America’s first prisons
Howard’s ideas, particularly the realization that jails posed a threat to the public, were brought to the U.S. by Philadelphia reformers like Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Following the recommendations in Howard’s book, American penal reformers pushed for new jails designed to ward off disease, crime and immorality of all kinds.
Howard envisioned new facilities that would be well ventilated and cleaned daily. Clothing and bedding should be changed weekly. There would even be an infirmary staffed by “an experienced surgeon” who would update authorities on the state of prisoner health.
American reformers followed Howard’s advice that “women-felons” should be kept “quite separate from the men: and young criminals from old and hardened offenders.” Debtors, too, should be kept “totally separate” from the “felons.”
Prisoners should be separated from one another, ideally in cells. Crowding should be avoided. All this would prevent the spread of disease and enable the prisoners’ repentance – and thus their rehabilitation.
Using Howard’s book as their guide, Rush and his colleagues transformed Philadelphia’s aging and overcrowded Walnut Street Jail into one of the country’s first state prisons by 1794. The Walnut Street Prison model was soon adopted nationwide.” - Ashley Rubin, “Prisons and jails are coronavirus epicenters – but they were once designed to prevent disease outbreaks.” The Conversation. April 15, 2020.
