During the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt (2050–1786 BCE) Pharaohs used public beating and imprisonment as punishment for those offenses which upset society. Prisoners were regarded as slaves and were placed in work houses and subjected to hard labor. Their confinement varied according to the type of offense and an official scribe kept a record of the inmates.

In Babylonia, the Hammurabi Code (1792–1750 BCE), one of the most ancient codes of law, reports the use of prisons. People were confined for minor crimes and sentenced to hard labor. This type of punishment was also used by the Assyrians (height of Empire: 746–539 BCE).

In Genesis (39:20–23) it is reported that Joseph was confined to a prison for several years. Samson, when captured by the Philistines, was also placed in a prison. The Hebrews are reported to have placed offenders in temporary custody, especially prior to execution (Leviticus 24:12–23 and Numbers 15:32–36). When they were thought to have violated the covenant with God, offenders were also sentenced to exile or death through lapidation, burning, decapitation and beating. It is reported that the prophet Micah was imprisoned for a period of time. Jeremiah was imprisoned in the upper gate of Benjamin (Jeremiah 20:12) because his behavior had irritated Pashur, the son of the high priest and King Zedekiah. The Acts of the Apostles (4:3) reports that both Peter and John were detained by the Sanhedrin, even though briefly. Saul imprisoned the Christians (Acts 8:3; 9:2), and St. Paul, in his Letter to the Hebrews (10:34) mentions imprisonment, in addition to confiscation of property, as a form of punishment (Peters 1995).

In ancient Greece, from the seventh century BCE to the fifth century BCE, the polis was responsible for the punishment of criminals and for the laws which applied to both minor and major crimes. During the period of Draco (620 BCE), strict laws were enacted and enforced in cases of homicide. Those laws led to the frequently-used term “Draconian laws”. These laws were later revised by Solon, the great Athenian jurist (594 BCE). A commonly held opinion of Athenians was that persons found guilty of a crime had to be confined in a prison and that their lack of freedom and/or their punishment should serve as an example to other citizens. At times they were chained in the desmoterios (place of chains). Confinement was viewed not only as retribution but also as a deterrent to further crime and as a method of redemption for offensive behavior (Peters 1995).

While Plato believed that people who committed serious crimes must be subjected to severe punishment, viewed by him as retributive and deterrent, he held that an uneducated offender who did not have the capacity to appreciate the nature of his wrongdoing needed primarily corrective sentencing, what today could be termed behavioral modification (Mackenzie 1981). In Athens, punishment consisted of stoning, tossing an offender from a precipice, or tying them to a stake until death. In the last case, the offender suffered public abuse while dying. The recidivistic offender was hanged. At times offenders were denied burial. In Athens, punishment was three pronged: physical, moral, and patrimonial. Patrimonial punishment consisted in fines, the confiscation of property, or the destruction of the condemned person’s home (Peters 1995).

The Greek phylake (prison) was used both as a place of temporary confinement prior to trial or prior to punishment, and for long-term confinement, especially for slaves. The former use is remindful of the present day function of city and county jails. In prison, offenders were at times subjected to torture and execution.

The Romans had specific courts for particular offenses, with statutory penalties. In ancient Rome, persons found guilty of physical assault, theft, or destruction of private property were punished either with a pecuniary payment or, when that was not possible, after a 60 day period passed by the offender in prison with a death sentence. Prior to trial for any offense, the individual was imprisoned and the types of confinement were various. There was confinement to the home (ergastolo); the carcer, or prison, where the individual was chained; and the quarry-prison (latumiae), which was initially within the city walls on the Capitoline hill, one of the Seven Hills of Rome. The prison often had a pit in which people were confined and occasionally killed. As the city developed, the Romans built prisons outside of the city walls. Those prisons were often underground dungeons—dark, noisy and overcrowded. The prisoners were chained, at times abused and tortured, poorly fed and without supervision. The supervision of the prisons was made mandatory under the code of Emperor Theodosius (fifth century CE) and judges were mandated to inspect the jails or prisons. Humanistic emperors of Rome such as Hadrian and Constantine made the jail/prison a less harsh place for the prisoners and punishment was less severe (Parente 2007).

After centuries of social, military and political splendor, Rome went through a decadent period and eventually came to an end in 476 CE. During its early history, Roman law, based on the 12 Tables, dating back to 451 BCE. They became part of the Justinian Code. The Justinian Code consisted of a complex of judicial norms protecting private and public rights in the administration of justice in the Roman Empire. It was based on jus civile and jus gentium, meaning the common good of the individual and the nation (Dizionario Enciclopedico Italiano-Treccani 1970). It survived beyond the fall of the empire and still continues to influence the jurisprudence of many European countries.

After the fall of Rome, the Christian church, already present for some centuries under the last Roman emperors, became more powerful and enforced its own law—Canon Law—designed to maintain control over people’s misconduct. In addition to State prisons, ecclesiastical prisons began to appear (Parente 2007). These ecclesiastical prisons were present in France until the seventeenth century. The church, which had already been an important agent of social control, albeit with regional variations, was empowered over secular matters by Charlemagne (r. 768–814). The bishops’ tribunals date from that period, and were not only for people guilty of heresy, but also disposed of common criminal matters. People found guilty of serious crimes were confined in the bishop’s prison, at times even for life. If the defendant was found to be incorrigible, he would be turned over to a higher religious court, which usually meant capital punishment.

In the 1600s, while existing prisons were highly functional places, a social interest in the construction of workhouses appeared. In these workhouses, like St. Bridget’s Well, also known as Bridewell, in London, minor offenders and beggars were detained. Similar workhouses were also used in the Netherlands and in America (dating to 1596) during the colonial period. They housed beggars, young malefactors and people who obtained a reduction of penalty for good behavior. Work was mandatory and was performed as part of a group. In these workhouses the prisoners slept two or three to a bed and each cell contained between 4 and 12 people. They received wages for their work as well as religious indoctrination. This type of workhouse can be thought to be a forerunner of the reformed prison of the eighteenth century.

Exile was a frequent form of punishment in many European countries. Until 1750, criminals from Russia were exiled to Siberia; those from Spain and Portugal were sent to Africa; France sent its prisoners to South America. Since 1650 England had sent many criminals to the North American colonies, except for those who were still housed in the so-called convicts’ ships on the river Thames. Prisoners sent to the colonies were those convicted of murder or other serious crimes. They were usually white English citizens who reached the American territory in chains. By 1776 the number of these exiled prisoners was in the tens of thousands. With the American Revolution the convicts were no longer sent to the New World, but England continued the practice of exile, substituting Australia as a penal colony. This also contributed to the development of prisons in England (Soothill 2007).

In the eighteenth century, prisoners in the Maison de Force in Ghent, Belgium, were obliged to do work for which they were remunerated. Their supervision was strict and their discipline was based on a system of moral pedagogy. Idleness was thought to be the cause of most crimes. The time length of a sentence was an issue, since a brief sentence (less than 6 months) was thought not long enough to properly address the offender’s bad habits while it was believed that a life sentence would create despair in them, leading to a desire to rebel and escape.

Already in 1764, Beccaria (1983 [1775]) had spoken against the practice of exhibiting chained prisoners in public. Chain gangs were abolished by the beginning of the nineteenth century. He expressed the idea that the punishment frequently exceeded the crime itself. The pillory was abolished in France in 1789 and in England in 1837. By 1810, detention had become the essential form of punishment in France except for those crimes requiring the death penalty. Cities and counties began to construct their own prisons, together with houses of correction where offenders were kept for sentences up to 1 year. Main prisons were generally used for prisoners whose penalty was longer than 1 year (Foucault 1979).

In the United States the first prison was constructed in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1773. By 1790 prisons had been built in several states, some of them underground. The conditions in those prisons were very harsh. Some were located near taverns, men and women were housed together, food was scarce, the sanitary conditions were very bad and there was no discipline. In 1787, an organization called The Society for Alleviating the Misery of the Public Prisons, headed by Benjamin Rush, had been created in an attempt to implement necessary reforms.

The Ghent prison, perhaps modelled on St. Michaels’ Prison in Rome, was a precursor of the Walnut Street Prison model in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, established in 1790 and operated by the Quakers as a humane alternative to the prevailing standards, which included hanging and torture. The Walnut Street Prison became one of the first in the world to implement radical reforms (Roth 2006). In the prison, the prisoners were isolated but worked while in isolation, going through a basic apprenticeship. It was believed that in so doing they would avoid the bad influences of other inmates, and, through personal introspection, would rediscover the morals they had lost or had never had. The prison was essentially viewed as a place of confinement, the purpose of which was to transform the propensity of the prisoners for antisocial acting out into good habits. The men and women were separated; drinking of alcohol was not allowed; there were cells for solitary confinement where inmates were to meditate while avoiding moral contamination from other prisoners. Inmates received religious instruction and read the Bible.

In 1815, the State of New York established Auburn Prison, a prison that came to be seen by many states as being more economical than the Walnut Street Prison and therefore thought to be more successful. The inmates were exposed to harsh discipline with strong security measures. They were allowed to work together during the day, even though they had to maintain silence; at night they were confined in individual cells. A certain competition developed between the two prison systems—the Walnut Street Prison and Auburn Prison: which would achieve better rehabilitation of the convicts?

At the time that the above changes were taking place in Philadelphia and New York the Puritans were active in prison reform in Boston. Doubtless, the above systems were more humane than the criminal court of England which enforced harsh penalties and showed “…no concern at all about the reformability of the criminal…” (Dumm 1987). Nevertheless, in many prisons harsh punishments, even capital punishment, continued to be used.

Benjamin Rush, who in 1787 had founded the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of the Public Prisons, opposed public execution as a barbarous expression of punishment, asserting that it was the product of “the feeble influence of reason and religion over the human mind” (Foucault 1979). By 1835, a New York law ordered that executions were to be carried out within the prison walls or the enclosure adjoining the prison in the county where the prisoner had been tried (Friedman 1993).

The prison experiments in America by the Quakers and Puritans in Philadelphia, New York and Boston were based on a philosophy of moral and social rehabilitation of the offender. At the same time, the offenders were thought to be deserving of confinement for their own benefit and that of society. Indeed, it was believed that prisons were intended by the law not to punish, but to secure the offenders (Foucault 1979). However, as previously mentioned, the philanthropic approach in dealing with criminals regarded solitary confinement as important because it was believed that it would bring about changes in the moral character of the offenders leading to modifications in their conduct. This was the approach of the Quakers in Philadelphia: “Central to the Quaker mission was a radical modification of the system of criminal punishment….to establish institutions which would redeem rather than torture” (Dumm 1987).

The Quakers believed that merely putting the offenders to work would not change their habits because, they asserted, the habit of a righteous life could only be achieved through inner moral changes and a return to God. They viewed crime as a sin and saw faith and the fear of God as the only means to happiness and rehabilitation. In the Quaker approach, friendly persuasion took the place of physical coercion and became another form of control imposed on offenders. The Quaker ideas were part of the historical reality of that moment in American society, but their application was, by necessity, limited to a small carceral community and could only be actuated when the larger community was cohesive in sharing humane goals.

At the same time, reforms were being implemented elsewhere. In Ireland, Lord Crofton, who became Chief of the Penitentiary Administration in 1854, instituted outdoor work for the inmates whom he subdivided into five different classes, which progressed towards a conditional release or total freedom for good behavior, good work or good educational achievement. The inmates were paid for their work and they received differential treatment on the basis of their behavior. Professional training was available, leading to occupational possibilities for the inmate upon discharge from prison. This Crofton system lasted for only a period of 30 years, during which time some of the Irish prisons were shut down because criminality had lessened. By 1880, however, the number of offenders had reached high levels and it was again necessary to reopen the prisons.