For this reaction essay, I am focusing on the writings of George Ives about the history of prisons. Punishment (prisons) as a form of law was not always the common practice. In ancient times, rather than to punish people, the goal was retribution or revenge. The idea was to get back at the person who did someone or their family wrong rather than lock them away. When prisons did become the popular form of punishment, the conditions there were compared to that of the plague. They were often over crowded with very poor conditions/sanitation so many people exposed to the area would end up sick or dying. Also, the people who ran the prisons, were much too powerful and exploited their prisoners by charging them fees which often lead to the torture of the prisoners to extract the charges that they wanted. Prisons were also used to house the mentally ill, and those prisons were known as some of the worst imaginable.
Often times, torture methods took place to try and “cure” the mentally ill and their conditions included being solitary, unclean, starved, and beaten. One extreme practice was allowing common people to tour asylums for their entertainment and watch/mock the those who were labeled “lunatics”. After people, including scientists and doctors, finally realized that criminals and mentally ill people were being treated wrong a prison reform happened which turned the prisons into more clean places, but the idea of cells and solitary punishment became common. The goal of these prisons was to reform the prisoners through suffering though It was later found that reform was nearly impossible when prisoners were confined to solitary cells and deprived physically, emotionally, and mentally.
My reaction to this essay is that it is obvious that prisons were built on ideas that were not founded by any research and led to the violent or unfair death of many “prisoners”. It seems as though in history, prisons were never meant to better the prisoners and return them to society with skills to be successful. Instead they unknowingly made the prisoners victims by subjecting them to many forms of abuse and ruined the chances of ever reforming these people. It also stuck out to me that in many cases, prisoners were used as a form of entertainment for common people. They would tour prisons and asylums to be entertained by the suffering of the prisoners and the behavior they conducted due to their awful conditions.
One of the deeper insights you can take from criminology is the awareness that humans tend to be vindictive and revenge-oriented. Before the widespread use of prisons, punishments were imposed as painful physical torment (maiming, whipping, beating) upon the transgressor, or they were killed, or they were humiliated, or they were banished. If they had access to wealth (or if their family and friends did), it would be possible to pay off the victim or the survivors of the victim. The thing is, if you do not have an institutional process through which the community can inflict some sort of fine or torment on persons who transgress the morality or codes of expected behavior, people will take the law into their own hands, and start exacting vengeance, but as such vengeance tends toward being disproportionate (“You inflicted 10 units of harm on me, so my friends and I will inflict 10 units of harm on you for fairness plus an additional 10 units of harm to punish you for doing this”), and since friends and allies of the person who pays for their transgression will be wroth with anger at the perceived injustice of such vengeance, a cycle of feuding escalates and undermines the peace of society. Thus, we have laws with consequences for transgressions imposed by impartial courts (or so we aspire). George and other criminologists have, since the mid-19th century, been trying to help civilization perceive that a system based on revenge and sadistic delight in vengeance is not successful; we would be better off to organize our system of punishment for criminals with three goals: 1) having consequences so that people do not take the law into their own hands; 2) rehabilitating transgressors so that they cease their transgressions; and 3) removing those who are dangerous from society so that we will be safe from the dangers they pose to us (but doing so without malice or sadism). Further, we should 1) orient our societies to put much more efforts into preventing crime in the first place, and 2) we would be better off putting resources into finding more criminals and solving more cases than putting resources into inflicting longer sentences and harsher penalties on those we do find, and 3) we should reexamine some of the “crimes” we perceive to note whether perhaps some are not really deserving of the label of “criminal”.
These suggestions were made by George Ives in 1910, and he was making such recommendations based on his reading of history and reports of others involved in criminal justice who had been noticing similar things for decades before he wrote. And, if you read the work of many modern criminologists or the recent publications, you will find that many of the best researchers still are advocating the same approach. And yet, our society continues to revel in the torments we inflict on criminals. We continue to succumb to the rhetoric of “law and order” when that phrase really stands for being merciless and cruel to all who become ensnared in the courts (please remember the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, Missouri, and what the courts and police were doing to the people of that hellish community).
