Copying And Creativity In Prison History

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Creative Corrections
Prison has been around since the beginning of time and has played various roles throughout its history. To understand how copying and creativity have influenced our corrections system we must understand how crime and punishment have been dealt with in the past. Through analyzing the history behind prisons and punishment we can see how copying and creativity has made its mark on the idea of prison. Copying and creativity have played an active role in shaping the western concepts of prison and punishment.
For the majority of our time here on earth prison has not been a means of punishment in itself. The earliest record of prisons is from the 1st millennia BC, as part of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
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In Ron Fridell’s book, Capital Punishment, he says, “A Colonist in Virginia could be executed for crimes as trivial as stealing grapes, killing chickens, or trading with the Indians.” This eventually lead the to the Quakers from Pennsylvania to create a movement to for alternate forms of punishment than death sentences. Their idea was to take away someone’s freedom, separate them from the criminal realm, institute a routine. As a result of their efforts Pennsylvania limited the death penalty to acts of treason and murder only in 1682. They were ahead of their time with the creation of this line of thinking let alone enacting this as law. This wouldn’t show up prominently in Europe until the eighteenth …show more content…
As a result of the Enlightenment Period there is more diverse thinking about society, placing reason as the basis of authority and legitimacy. So this carries over to thinking behind prisons and punishment as well. We see that figures like, Richard Mead, John Howard, and Jeremy Betham arise and come up with creative innovations. Richard Mead was among the earlier figures calling for reform were he created ideals related to health and cleanliness that should be upheld within prisons. The Pennsylvania Quakers copied several of his ideas and created their own movement again for health and cleanliness within prisons. Thinkers like Howard and Betham created works on reformation of the prison system itself and were influential in seeing prison as a form of punishment in itself. Howard wrote, The State of the Prisons in England and Whales, in which he lays out the idea of confinement as the primary means of punishment, based on the workhouse model. The creation of this work inspire the adoption of a law in the U.K. that used prison as a the primary form of punishment and rehabilitation in 1779, only 2 years after he wrote the

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