page_title: History of United States prison systems
section_title: Early settlement, convict transportation, and the prisoner trade
hierarchical_section_title: History of United States prison systems / Historical development of United States prison systems / Early settlement, convict transportation, and the prisoner trade
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: Prisoners and prisons appeared in North America simultaneous to the arrival of European settlers. Among the ninety or so men who sailed with the explorer known as Christopher Columbus were a young black man abducted from the Canary Islands and at least four convicts. By 1570, Spanish soldiers in St. Augustine, Florida, had built the first substantial prison in North America. As other European nations began to compete with Spain for land and wealth in the New World, they too turned to convicts to fill out the crews on their ships.
  According to social historian Marie Gottschalk, convicts were "indispensable" to English settlement efforts in what is now the United States. In the late sixteenth century, Richard Hakluyt called for the large-scale conscription of criminals to settle the New World for England. But official action on Haklyut's proposal lagged until 1606, when the English crown escalated its colonization efforts.
  Sir John Popham's colonial venture in present-day Maine was stocked, a contemporary critic complained, "out of all the gaols [jails] of England." The Virginia Company, the corporate entity responsible for settling Jamestown, authorized its colonists to seize Native American children wherever they could "for conversion ... to the knowledge and worship of the true God and their redeemer, Christ Jesus." The colonists themselves lived, in effect, as prisoners of the Company's governor and his agents. Men caught trying to escape were tortured to death; seamstresses who erred in their sewing were subject to whipping. One Richard Barnes, accused of uttering "base and detracting words" against the governor, was ordered to be "disarmed and have his arms broken and his tongue bored through with an awl" before being banished from the settlement entirely.
  When control of the Virginia Company passed to Sir Edwin Sandys in 1618, efforts to bring large numbers of settlers to the New World against their will gained traction alongside less coercive measures like indentured servitude. Vagrancy statutes began to provide for penal transportation to the American colonies as an alternative to capital punishment in this period, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. At the same time, the legal definition of "vagrancy" was greatly expanded.
  Soon, a royal commissions endorsed the notion that any felon—except those convicted of murder, witchcraft, burglary, or rape—could legally be transported to Virginia or the West Indies to work as a plantation servant. Sandys also proposed sending maids to Jamestown as "breeders," whose costs of passage could be paid for by the planters who took them on as "wives." Soon, over sixty such women had made the passage to Virginia, and more followed. King James I's royal administration also sent "vagrant" children to the New World as servants. a letter in the Virginia Company's records suggests that as many as 1,500 children were sent to Virginia between 1619 and 1617. By 1619, African prisoners were brought to Jamestown and sold as slaves as well, marking England's entry into the Atlantic slave trade.
  The infusion of kidnapped children, maids, convicts, and Africans to Virginia during the early part of the seventeenth century inaugurated a pattern that would continue for nearly two centuries. By 1650, the majority of British emigrants to colonial North America went as "prisoners" of one sort or another—whether as indentured servants, convict laborers, or slaves.
  The prisoner trade became the "moving force" of English colonial policy after the Restoration—i.e., from the summer of 1660 onward—according to By 1680, the Reverend Morgan Godwyn estimated that almost 10,000 persons were spirited away to the Americas annually by the English crown.
  Parliament accelerated the prisoner trade in the eighteenth century. Under England's Bloody Code, a large portion of the realm's convicted criminal population faced the death penalty. But pardons were common. During the eighteenth century, the majority of those sentenced to die in English courts were pardoned—often in exchange for voluntary transport to the colo
caption: The Old Newgate Prison in London was one of many detention centers that facilitated the convict trade between England and its American colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries.
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