page_title: History of United States prison systems
section_title: Rationalist penology
hierarchical_section_title: History of United States prison systems / Prisons in America / Rationalist penology
caption_attribution_description: English: Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), father of classical criminal theory
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: A third group involved in English penal reform were the "rationalists" or "utlitarians". According to historian Adam J. Hirsch, eighteenth-century rationalist criminology "rejected scripture in favor of human logic and reason as the only valid guide to constructing social institutions.
  Eighteenth-century rational philosophers like Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham developed a "novel theory of crime"—specifically, that what made an action subject to criminal punishment was the harm it caused to other members of society. For the rationalists, sins that did not result in social harm were outside the purview of civil courts. With John Locke's "sensational psychology" as a guide, which maintained that environment alone defined human behavior, many rationalists sought the roots of a criminal's behavior in his or her past environment.
  Rationalists differed as to what environmental factors gave rise to criminality. Some rationalists, including Cesare Beccaria, blamed criminality on the uncertainty criminal punishment, whereas earlier criminologists had linked criminal deterrence to the severity of punishment. In essence, Beccaria believed that where arrest, conviction, and sentencing for crime were "rapid and infallible," punishments for crime could remain moderate. Beccaria did not take issue with the substance of contemporary penal codes—e.g., whipping and the pillory; rather, he took issue with their form and implementation.
  Other rationalists, like Jeremy Bentham, believed that deterrence alone could not end criminality and looked instead to the social environment as the ultimate source of crime. Bentham's conception of criminality led him to concur with philanthropist reformers on the need for rehabilitation of offenders. But, unlike the philanthropists, Bentham and like-minded rationalists believed the true goal of rehabilitation was to show convicts the logical "inexpedience" of crime, not their estrangement from religion. For these rationalists, society was the source of and the solution to crime.
  Ultimately, hard labor became the preferred rationalist therapy. Bentham eventually adopted this approach, and his well-known 1791 design for the Panopticon prison called for inmates to labor in solitary cells for the course of their imprisonment. Another rationalist, William Eden, collaborated with John Howard and Justice William Blackstone in drafting the Penitentiary Act of 1779, which called for a penal regime of hard labor.
  According to social and legal historian Adam J. Hirsch, the rationalists had only a secondary impact on United States penal practices. But their ideas—whether consciously adopted by United States prison reformers or not—resonate in various United States penal initiatives to the present day.
caption: Cesare Beccaria, Italian rationalist penal reformer and author of On Crimes and Punishments (1764).
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