Day-Today's Prison Life After The Industrial Revolution

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Before the American Revolution, imprisonment wasn’t used very often as punishment for any crime in England, and it was very rare in the American colonies. Most punishments were under England’s “Bloody Code,” which included executions and other forms of torture like whipping, the stocks, branding, mutilation, and castration, which were all shown to the public. The prison systems were most isolated and kept in secrecy. The prison’s walls functioned to keep prisoners in and keep the public out so they can’t see or know what was going on inside. Only the prisoners and guards knew what happened inside so the prison became a place where unspeakable torture occurred without any restraint. It also became a place for cultural fantasy. American…show more content…
Together these factors have dramatically altered the nature of day-today prison life and inmate culture. Today’s prison life is much better than past times. I think it’s barbaric that prisons used to torture their prisoners, and they had no say in anything. Although today’s prisoners still don’t have much of a say in what occurs inside prison, they know they won’t get tortured like prisoners in the past. I’ve always heard that during the Industrial Revolution, many prisoners were used as free labor, but I never realized how much money the prisons actually made from this kind of labor. I believe that prisoners are a good resource for free labor because they deserve to be punished in some kind of way, but it’s not fair that the prisons made such a large profit from them. Also, I think it’s terrible that the prisoners were silenced when there was a literary movement about prisons. Prisons obviously had terrible conditions in the past, and they have the right to voice their opinions so I don’t think all that information should have been hidden from the public. The public had no idea what went on inside the prison even though the public is typically the one determining the fate of these criminals as the jury. The public should know because it is deterrence for the rest of the public so they don’t wind up in

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