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Penitentiaries established as means for criminal punsihment
Prior to the 1820s, several states had in place different forms of incarceration, including small prisons and the equivalent of English workhouses, but during the beginning of the Jacksonian era, penitentiaries became the accepted institution for rehabilitating criminals. -
Reconstruction Era
End of Civil War made states look closely at their penitentiary systems and reform them to focus more on institutionally induced behavioral changes, as well as 'science' based approaches to criminality (eugenics was becoming popular at the time). -
Convict Lease System
While this was largely a problem in post-Civil War southern states, the leasing of convicts stretched across a couple of decades after the Civil War in both the North and the South. Somewhat of a remnant of the slave trade, most of the convicts in the program were freed slaves. Men with money would purchase the lives of incarcerated men for any given period of time and put them to work on their farming, mining or other operations. -
Convict lease system nearly eradicated
While some southern states were still using, and abusing, the convict lease system, jusdges in many states were making an effort to move away from the inhumane treatment of inmates as was commonplace in the convict lease system. -
Private prisons, higher incarceration rates
Today, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The privatization of many prisons in the US means it is much cheaper to incarcerate large numbers of inmates. It also means that there is a profit incentive for these corporate entities to have their prisons be at maximum capacity at all times. This fact to me is not a far reach in explaining the extraordinary number of people imprisoned for non-violent crimes.
