Penitentiaries: The Role Of Solitary Confinement In Prison

For years commonly known form of deterrence during the beginning of times which was capital punishment, shaming and torture dominated were established but were being questioned in their effectiveness. Many of the colonist felt that inflicting physical pain or the town spectacle of capital punishment, was not necessary answer for all crimes, neitherless a deterrence ”Anglo-American Elites began to worry that public punishment was doing more harm than good (“Far from preventing crime by terror they excite in… spectators [public punishment] are directly calculated to produce them.”) ”(Perkins,2010, 63). Penitentiaries were introduced with the sole purpose to implement rehabilitation towards an individual through the action of solitary confinement. In solitary confinement, the criminal would seek a religious finding for forgiveness …show more content…
Penitentiaries during this era focuses on rehabilitating the white man or white women back into society with no intentions of future criminal intent with small sentences. When it came to those who were enslaved only major acts, like committing murder of their owner they would either be lynched or serve time in a pentatries and submitted to torture. Slaves were not seen as capable of seeking redemption so a final solution was mostly always established. According to Perkinson, African American slaves were seen at that point in time not capable of rehabilitation for they were seen more as a physical body that was part of production in a growing economy. Pententrys became popular in many Northern states and the success grew high but it was not till the end of slavery that the penitentiary spread its roots to these states in a more appealing fashion for them , what is now known as the Southern Prison