High Security Prisons

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Prisons Prisons are institutions designed to securely house people who have been convicted of crimes. These people, these criminals are known as prisoners or inmates and they are housed for the time given in their sentence. The type of crime committed determines the length of the sentence the criminal will have to serve. Certain crimes such as murder can have a sentence as long as life in prison. People don’t just end up in prison, in order to be incarcerated a person needs to be accused of a crime. Then they are booked, put on trial and convicted by a jury. Once this process is finished the criminal will be given a sentence that is to be carried out in prison. Over the years, the lives inmates have led in prisons have changed drastically. Prisons haven’t always been what we see today. Historians have found that some of the earliest forms of prisons or imprisonment started in the temples of the time period. These temples weren’t filled with cells, dungeons or torture chambers. Instead these temples were used as a sanctuary for criminals. If someone committed a crime they could join the temple for sanctuary or they would be held accountable for their crimes and punished by the victim or the accuser. This punishment often ended in death (Kosof, pg. 19). Encarta online Encyclopedia states that the existence of prisons originated in Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. Mamertine Prison, one of the first prisons ever built, was constructed in the 7th century B.C. in Rome. It was a maze of tunnels and dungeons that were held under the sewer. They were horrible places to be. In early England, instead of housing more serious offenders they decided to deport them to the new found land of the Americas. So as bad as it may be, subsequently America was founded by criminals. After the American Revolution, Britain was no longer allowed to deport their convicts to America; it is
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