Prisons and Penitentiaries.
Perhaps the most critical fact about the origins of the penitentiary in the United States is a frank recognition that the institution does have a history. Prisons were not always the central feature of the American criminal justice system, an inevitable and logical method for punishing unlawful actions. Rather, beginning in the early nineteenth century, Americans, with some debt to the English, invented the prison, and it has been a fixture of American life ever since.... ...
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