page_title: History of United States prison systems
section_title: Post-Revolutionary penal reform and the beginnings of United States prison systems
hierarchical_section_title: History of United States prison systems / Historical development of United States prison systems / Post-Revolutionary penal reform and the beginnings of United States prison systems
caption_attribution_description: English: Charlestown State Prison in 1840
context_page_description: Imprisonment as a form of criminal punishment only became widespread in the United States just before the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed since long before then. Prison building efforts in the United States came in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian Era and led to widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, bringing a number of new mechanisms—such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing—into the mainstream of American penal practice. Finally, since the early 1970s, the United States has engaged in a historically unprecedented expansion of its imprisonment systems at both the federal and state level.
context_section_description: The first major prison reform movement in the United States came after the American Revolution, at the start of the nineteenth century. According to historians Adam J. Hirsch and David Rothman, the reform of this period was shaped less by intellectual movements in England than by a general clamor for action in a time of population growth and increasing social mobility, which prompted a critical reappraisal and revision of penal corrective techniques. To address these changes, post-colonial legislators and reformers began to stress the need for a system of hard labor to replace ineffectual corporal and traditional punishments. Ultimately, these early efforts yielded the United States' first penitentiary systems.
  The onset of the eighteenth century brought major demographic and social change to colonial and, eventually post-colonial American life. The century was marked by rapid population growth throughout the colonies—a result of lower mortality rates and increasing (though small at first) rates of immigration. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, this trend persisted. Between 1790 and 1830, the population of the newly independent North American states greatly increased, and the number and density of urban centers did as well. The population of Massachusetts almost doubled in this period, while it tripled in Pennsylvania and increased five-fold in New York. In 1790, no American city had more than fifty thousand residents; however, by 1830 nearly 500,000 people lived in cities larger than that.
  The population of the former British colonies also became increasingly mobile during the eighteenth century, especially after the Revolution. Movement to urban centers, in and out of emerging territories, and up and down a more fluid social ladder throughout the century made it difficult for the localism and hierarchy that had structured American life in the seventeenth century to retain their former significance. The Revolution only accelerated patterns of dislocation and transience, leaving displaced families and former soldiers struggling to adapt to the strictures of a stunted post-war economy. The emergence of cities created a kind of community very different from the pre-revolutionary model. The crowded streets of emerging urban centers like Philadelphia seemed to contemporary observers to dangerously blur class, sex, and racial boundaries.
  Demographic change in the eighteenth century coincided with shifts in the configuration of crime. After 1700, literary evidence from a variety of sources—e.g., ministers, newspapers, and judges—suggest that property crime rates rose (or, at least, were perceived to). Conviction rates appear to have risen during the last half of the eighteenth century, rapidly so in the 1770s and afterward and especially in urban areas. Contemporary accounts also suggest widespread transiency among former criminals.
  Communities began to think about their town as something less than the sum of all its inhabitants during this period, and the notion of a distinct criminal class began to materialize. In the Philadelphia of the 1780s, for example, city authorities worried about the proliferation of taverns on the outskirts of the city, "sites of an alternative, interracial, lower-class culture" that was, in the words of one observer, "the very root of vice." In Boston, a higher urban crime rate led to the creation of a specialized, urban court in 1800.
  The efficacy of traditional, community-based punishments waned during the eighteenth century. Penal servitude, a mainstay of British and colonial American criminal justice, became nearly extinct during the seventeenth century, at the same time that Northern states, beginning with Vermont in 1777, began to abolish slavery. Fines and bonds for good behavior—one of the most common criminal sentences of the colonial era—were nearly impossible to enforce among the transient poor. As the former American colonists expanded their political loyalty beyond the parochial to their new state governments, promoting a broader sense of the public welfare, banishment (or "wa
caption: An artist's 1840 depiction of Massachusetts' Charlestown State Prison, opened in 1805 to accommodate the state's increasing prison population due to post-revolutionary penal reforms.
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