Prior to the founding of our country, there were no prisons in colonial America.  Rather, there were jails where people accused of criminal offenses were held until tried by a court and if found guilty were then punished.  Depending on the nature of their crime, the guilty could be hanged, fined, whipped, or placed in the stockade for a period of time in full public view.  These were some of the punishments for the guilty.  Imprisonment was not at this early time a means of punishment.

Shortly after the founding of the United States, there began an attempt to reform criminal justice in the new country.  A motivating force for the reform came from evangelical Christians, including Methodists, some Presbyterians and Lutherans, African Americans, and Quakers. The reformers were residents in Pennsylvania, principally Philadelphia, and New York, state and city.

These Protestant and Quaker reformers saw the prison as a place for those found guilty to recognize their sin and seek redemption.  The prison was to be a pleasant place where the prisoner could experience what the redeemed life was like.  The Newgate Prison in New York City, built in 1797 and the first of these new prisons, was designed with a garden in its center.  The prison officials were evangelical Christians and Quakers who sought to lead the convicted person to recognize their sin and through an emotional experience become redeemed.  The prison was not a place of pain and suffering but a place of redemption.

But many of the prisoners saw imprisonment as punishment and were not interested in the evangelical Christian agenda.  There were prison riots and fires and New York state officials sent in the state militia to bring order to the prison.  The evangelical Christians and Quakers no longer ran the prison, state personnel replaced them.  Solitary confinement, although introduced on a very limited scale by the Christian and Quaker reformers, became a major feature of the state run prisons.  The prisons were transformed from a place of redemption to one of pain and suffering for wrong doing.  Prisons became the "furnace of affliction" (from the Book of Isaiah), as these prison reformer evangelical Christians viewed the prison transformation.

Source: Jennifer Graber, Ph. D. The College of  Wooster
                                               2013 Spring Academy of Religion

Submitted by Don Gordon

While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States' population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned. The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates. The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men. 

From "The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United States"

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