The Evolution of Corrections

 From: Covering Crime and Justice, http://www.justicejournalism.org/crimeguide/chapter13/chapter13_pg02.html

Chapter 13
Covering Prisons and Jails
By Jenifer Warren

The Evolution of Corrections

Early Punishment
American corrections has been whipsawed through the years by countless conflicting theories about its desired objective and how best to achieve it.
 Is prison just about punishment and incapacitation, or should we help lawbreakers reshape their lives and rejoin society as productive citizens?
Can we really rehabilitate offenders, or is advancing age the only true antidote to criminal behavior?
Do all offenders deserve a stint behind bars, or should we reserve expensive prison cells for only the most violent, chronic criminals?
Given the dizzying number of pendulum swings within American correctional practice, it’s a good idea for journalists to have at least some familiarity with its history.
From the earliest accounts of civilization, punishment has been a central form of social control, a way to force people to behave according to communal rules and norms. The simplest expression is a parent disciplining a child. Criminal punishment is the most structured arrangement, allowing society to define the limits of acceptable behavior and impose appropriate sanctions that express collective outrage toward the transgressor.
Until the 1800s, punishment of lawbreakers in Europe and America was a highly public affair. Crowds bellowed with rage and excitement at whippings, burnings, beheadings, hangings, brandings and various other mutilations. These spectacles not only answered society’s desire for revenge but also served as a deterrent and vivid expression of the governing authorities’ power.
In Colonial America, most people lived within a system of laws adapted from England. But unlike that country, the colonies had little use for jails or other forms of confinement. Rather, according to criminologist Todd Clear of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the colonists used banishment, fines, and corporal punishments to inflict their desired retribution
The death penalty also was popular, and not just for a community’s most serious crimes. Pickpockets, burglars, rebellious slaves, horse thieves—all were liable to meet their maker by burning, hanging or other brutal means. No energy was spent on rehabilitating such offenders, as they were considered predestined to their sorry fate from birth.
In 1829, America gave the world its first penitentiary, near Philadelphia, which  Clear described as a place “to reform offenders within an environment designed to focus their full attention on their moral rehabilitation.” Its opening marked a significant change in thought about “human nature and the purpose of punishment,” Clear noted. Anchoring the new corrective approach was the belief that isolation—one prisoner, one cell, with visits only from occasional clergymen—would force prisoners to contemplate their transgressions and repent. (The word penitentiary comes from the Latin for penitence, or remorse—a powerful idea at the time.)
As prisoners proliferated, however, the isolation approach became too expensive. Moreover, Clear notes, critics began to sound alarms over reports that inmates were going insane because of their solitary living conditions.
From that point forward American corrections seesawed through a variety of models, including the “reformatory” phase, which emphasized education and training for offenders, and the later “medical” model, which rested on the notion that criminal behavior stemmed from a social, psychological or biological deficiency.
Tough on Crime
By the late 1960s, rising crime rates and doubts about the effectiveness of offender treatment programs propelled the country into a new, more punitive “crime control” phase. This era ushered in a wave of “tough on crime” policy making targeting violent and repeat offenders as well as drug dealers.
Determinate sentencing, or the imposition of fixed terms, became the rule in about half of the states, resulting in longer prison stays and the decline of discretion in release decisions. Rehabilitation fell out of favor, with incapacitation becoming viewed as the most desirable way to combat criminal behavior. Also during this time, the death penalty was suspended for several years and reinstated in many states in conformance with Supreme Court requirements.
Much of the legislating in this period was influenced by a series of sensational, headline-grabbing crimes. The most infamous was the violent 1987 rape of a woman by furloughed Massachusetts felon Willie Horton.
After Horton was used successfully in Republican campaign ads against former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, few politicians were willing to ignore the dangerous potential of a released offender. Overnight, it seemed, governors and other lawmakers concluded that you could not be too cautious when it came to the parole or furlough of a felon.
Similarly, the 1993 abduction and killing of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma, Calif., spurred an outcry that led to passage of California’s “three strikes” law. The law, passed both in the legislature and by voter initiative, imposed a 25-years-to-life sentence on offenders convicted of two previous serious or violent felonies. Despite stories about “strikers” locked away for life on a third offense as minor as the theft of a loaf of bread, efforts to amend the statute have been futile, and it has been widely copied in other states.
The rape and murder of Megan Kanka in New Jersey by a released sex offender fueled a nationwide campaign to pass “Megan’s Law” beginning in 1994. While the law varies somewhat state by state, it generally requires official notification of neighborhoods when a convicted sex offender moves in.
A decade later came “Jessica’s Law.” Named after nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford of Florida, who was raped and murdered in 2005 by a previously convicted sex offender, it imposed a minimum sentence of 25 years on first-time Florida sex offenders who assault children. America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh, whose son, Adam, was abducted from a Sears department store and murdered in 1981, has been a vocal champion, and Bill O’Reilly, host of The O’Reilly Factor, has pushed every state to adopt a version of the law.
Many have complied. In California, for example, a sweeping 2006 voter initiative known as Proposition 83 banned sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park and subjected paroled sex offenders to electronic monitoring for life.
In all of these cases, media coverage—both of the original crimes and the subsequent legislative responses—has played a central, sometimes controversial role.