A prison is built to house persons for longer periods of time following conviction for a more serious offense. Since as early as back in the 1500s there have been imprisonment facilities. However, it was not until the year 1790 that the United States of America created its first prison in Pennsylvania which instituted solitary confinement for incarcerated convicts. The offenders that were sentenced to hard labor were moved indoors to an inner block of solitary cells in Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail. Most eighteenth century prisons were simply large holding pens. Groups of adults and children, men and women, and petty thieves and murderers, sorted out their own affairs behind locked doors. Physical punishment and mutilation were common,
