From the Pillory to the Panopticon

Wergild: the price of a person

Early law tried to stop blood feuds by turning harm into a debt owed to the victim's kin.

Law codes such as Æthelberht's (Kent, c. 600) list payments by injury and by the victim's rank. The price of a lord was higher than the price of a free farmer, and an enslaved person's injury was paid to the owner.

1. What does a price list say about who counted most?
2. Is a fine today a modern wergild? What changed: who gets paid?

The ordeal: let God decide

When there were no witnesses, courts asked heaven for the answer: carry hot iron, or be lowered into cold water, and see.

The ordeal needed a priest to bless it. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council forbade clergy to take part, and the practice faded. England turned to the jury.

1. Why might people who believed in the ordeal still confess before it?
2. What replaced divine proof, and what does a jury rely on instead?

Stocks, pillory, brand and lash

Shame was the sentence. The crowd did the work, and the town watched the lesson.

The pillory held head and hands in a board in the market square; the crowd could pelt the prisoner. Branding marked repeat offenders. England abolished the pillory in 1837. Flogging lasted much longer in navies, colonies and some US states.

1. What does a public punishment need that a private one does not?
2. Is posting a mugshot online a kind of pillory?

The scaffold as theater

A public execution was meant to show the power of the king over the body of the condemned.

Crowds of thousands came to Tyburn in London. Officials worried the crowd sided with the condemned, and Britain ended public hanging in 1868. Foucault opens Discipline and Punish with a 1757 execution in Paris, then a prison timetable from 1838, eighty years apart.

1. Why would rulers stop staging the very show meant to frighten people?
2. What replaced the crowd as the audience of punishment?

Outlawry and exile

The oldest punishment may be to put someone outside the protection of the group.

A medieval English outlaw lost the law's protection: his goods were forfeit, and he could be killed without penalty. Athens could vote to exile a citizen for ten years by ostracism. Exile, internal and external, remained a tool of states into the 20th century.

1. Durkheim said punishment marks the boundary of the group. How does exile draw that line?
2. What modern sentences cut a person off from the community without walls?

Transportation: Botany Bay, Siberia, Devil's Island

Empires solved crowded jails by shipping prisoners to the edge of the map, and built colonies with their labor.

Britain sent convicts to Maryland and Virginia until the American Revolution closed that door, then about 162,000 to Australia between 1788 and 1868. Russia sent prisoners to forced-labor katorga in Siberia. France sent convicts to French Guiana, including the Devil's Island camps, from 1852 until they closed in 1953. Georgia (1732) is often remembered as a colony for debtors, but few debtors were ever sent there.

1. Who gained from transportation: the prisoner, the empire, or the colony?
2. Australia's convicts built a nation. Does that change how we judge the punishment?

The age of impressment: the press gang

For a century and a half, Britain filled its warships partly by force. The press gang turned seafaring men, and sometimes vagrants and petty offenders, into sailors without their consent, and the line between punishment and service blurred.

English law let the Crown "press" men who earned their living on the water, and the Navy's Impress Service sent gangs through port towns and boarded merchant ships at sea. In the long wars with France, magistrates and county quota laws (1795) also pushed debtors, vagrants and minor offenders into the fleet, so service at sea sometimes stood in for a sentence. British ships took thousands of sailors off American vessels; estimates for 1793–1812 run from about 6,000 to 10,000. The attack on the USS Chesapeake by HMS Leopard in 1807 made "free trade and sailors' rights" a slogan, and impressment became one of the causes of the War of 1812. The practice faded after 1815, and from 1853 the Navy relied on continuous-service volunteers. In American ports, "crimps" kept shanghaiing drunk or drugged men onto ships into the early 1900s, until the Seamen's Act of 1915 curbed it.

1. Was impressment a punishment, a tax paid in bodies, or a draft? Make the case for one.
2. Why did taking sailors from American ships matter so much to a young country trying to prove it was independent?
3. Compare the press gang with transportation: both moved unwanted people to where the state needed labor. Who decided who was "unwanted"?

Beccaria: certain, swift, proportionate

Punishment should prevent crime, not take revenge, and it works by being certain more than by being cruel.

Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments (1764) attacked torture and the death penalty and argued for laws that are public, clear and proportionate. Jefferson and Adams read it. Modern deterrence research still finds that the certainty of being caught matters more than the length of a sentence.

1. Why would certainty deter more than severity?
2. Find one modern law that Beccaria would criticize. Start with these, read on Justia and Cornell's Legal Information Institute, and say which of his principles each one tests: certainty, proportion, or no death penalty.
   • Three strikes: Ewing v. California (2003), 25 years to life for stealing three golf clubs, upheld. Proportion?
   • Life for a first drug offense: Harmelin v. Michigan (1991), mandatory life without parole for 672 grams of cocaine, upheld. Compare Solem v. Helm (1983), where a life sentence for a bad check was struck down.
   • Mandatory minimums by drug weight: 21 U.S. Code § 841(b). Does the sentence fit the person or the scale?
   • The federal death penalty: 18 U.S. Code § 3591. Beccaria argued against it outright.
   • Florida's death-sentence vote: Florida Statutes § 921.141, changed in 2023 so 8 of 12 jurors can recommend death.

Bentham's panopticon

If prisoners can always be seen but never see the watcher, they will watch themselves.

Jeremy Bentham drew a ring of cells around a central tower, lit so the watcher stays hidden. Britain never built his design, but its idea shaped later prisons, such as the round cellhouses at Stateville in Illinois (1925) and the Presidio Modelo in Cuba (1926–1928).

Bentham's plan, drawn by the architect Willey Reveley in 1791, and photos: the panopticon plan · Stateville's roundhouse, Crest Hill, Illinois (closed 2016) and photos inside the roundhouse · Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba (closed 1967, now a museum), with an Atlas Obscura photo essay. Compare each with the plan drawn on this card: where is the tower, and can the guard be seen?

1. Where in your life are you watched by someone you cannot see?
2. Does a camera you know is there change what you do even when it is off?

Two American systems

Americans believed a prison could reform a person, and argued over how.

Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) kept each prisoner alone, day and night, to reflect and repent: the Pennsylvania system. New York's Auburn prison had prisoners work together in silence by day and sleep alone: the congregate system. Auburn was cheaper and its workshops earned money, so most states copied it. Charles Dickens visited Eastern State in 1842 and wrote that long solitude hurt the mind more than the lash.

1. Why did cost decide the contest between two ideas about the soul?
2. Our prison table lists Eastern State (opened 1829, now closed). What is it today, and why keep it?

The reformatory and the juvenile court

If a prison can reform, a sentence should end when the reform is done, not on a date.

New York's Elmira Reformatory (1876) used grades, schooling and the indeterminate sentence, with release on parole. Chicago opened the first juvenile court in 1899, treating children as needing care, not punishment. In 1841 John Augustus, a Boston shoemaker, had already begun bailing people out and vouching for them: the start of probation.

1. Who decides when a person is "reformed," and what can go wrong?
2. Why might a judge prefer a fixed sentence to an open one?

Convict leasing

After emancipation, Southern states used the criminal law to rebuild forced labor.

The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery "except as a punishment for crime." Black Codes made vagrancy and loitering crimes, and states leased prisoners to mines, railroads, lumber camps and turpentine farms. Death rates in the camps were very high. Florida ended leasing in 1923 after Martin Tabert, a 22-year-old from North Dakota arrested for riding a train without a ticket, was whipped and died in a lumber camp in 1922. Alabama was the last state to end it, in 1928.

1. Read the exception clause of the Thirteenth Amendment. Why does it matter today?
2. Why did a white Northerner's death move Florida when thousands before had not?

The chain gang

When leasing ended, the state kept the labor and put it to work on public roads.

County and state road gangs, chained together and housed in camps, built much of the South's early highway network. Georgia's chain gangs drew national outrage after Robert Burns's 1932 memoir and the film made from it. Most states ended chained gangs by the 1960s. Alabama briefly brought them back in 1995 and stopped in 1996.

1. Who rode on the roads, and who built them?
2. Is prison labor today (license plates, firefighting crews) the same thing or different?

The county stockade

In Florida, "stockade" came to mean the county prison camp: a fenced compound where county prisoners lived and from which they worked roads and public jobs.

After 1923, Florida counties kept their own prisoners on road work, housed in county camps and stockades. In Manatee County the word is older: in the Indian scare of 1856, Dr. Franklin Branch's home on the Manatee River was ringed by a stockade where settlers took shelter. That stockade was for protection, not punishment.

To verifyWe have not yet found a primary source dating Manatee County's own county prison camp or stockade, where it stood, or when it closed. The clerk's Historical Resources office and the Manatee County commission minutes are the next places to look. Nothing on this card about a Manatee camp should be taught as fact until that record is found.

1. Find your county's old jail or road camp. What stands on the site now?
2. Why did counties, not the state, keep road prisoners?

From under 200,000 to 1.6 million

Starting in the 1970s the United States built the largest prison system in the world, by choice, not because crime alone demanded it.

State and federal prisons held under 200,000 people in the early 1970s and about 1.6 million at the 2009 peak. At the end of 2023 they held 1,254,224 (Bureau of Justice Statistics), not counting local jails. Longer sentences, mandatory minimums, the war on drugs and three-strikes laws drove the rise. David Garland calls it a "culture of control"; Michelle Alexander calls it "the New Jim Crow."

1. Crime fell after the early 1990s. How much of that fall can prisons claim?
2. Use the map below: which states hold the most people? Is that just because they are big?

Private prisons

Supporters said private companies would build faster and run prisons cheaper; critics said profit should never depend on how many people are locked up.

Corrections Corporation of America was founded in Tennessee in 1983 and renamed CoreCivic in 2016. Wackenhut Corrections became the GEO Group in 2003. Private firms hold a small share of all prisoners but a large share of immigration detainees. A January 2021 executive order told the Justice Department not to renew private federal prison contracts; it was rescinded in January 2025. Our prison table includes a CoreCivic site in Clifton, Tennessee (1992) and GEO's Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington (2004).

1. A contract guarantees a company that 90% of its beds will be filled. What problem does that create?
2. Public prisons have budgets, unions and jobs too. Is the profit motive really different?

Supermax and solitary

The Pennsylvania system came back in concrete: the supermax keeps people alone in a cell for 22 to 24 hours a day.

After two guards were killed at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois in 1983, it went into permanent lockdown. ADX Florence in Colorado opened in 1994 as the federal supermax. The United Nations' Nelson Mandela Rules (2015) call solitary confinement for more than 15 days in a row "prolonged" and forbid it.

1. Compare Dickens on Eastern State (1842) with today's research on solitary. What has changed?
2. Is there a safe way to hold the most dangerous prisoners?

Stopped, then restarted

The Court never ruled the death penalty itself unconstitutional, only the way it was handed out.

Furman v. Georgia (1972) struck down death sentences as arbitrary. States rewrote their laws, and Gregg v. Georgia (1976) allowed executions to resume under guided procedures. Utah carried out the first one under the new laws in 1977. Later cases barred executing people with intellectual disability (Atkins, 2002), people under 18 at the crime (Roper, 2005) and executing for crimes other than murder against an individual (Kennedy v. Louisiana, 2008).

1. What does "arbitrary" mean, and how could a law fix it?
2. Each limit the Court added came from "evolving standards of decency." Who decides what those are?

Who is on death row, and where

The death penalty is national in law but local in practice: a few states, and a few counties within them, carry out most executions.

At the end of 2023, 2,192 people were under sentence of death, in 26 states and the federal system; California held the most (653) but had carried out 13 executions since 1977, while Texas carried out 586. From 1977 to 2023 there were 1,582 executions in all (BJS). Use the map's two layers to see the gap between sentencing and executing.

1. Why might a state keep a large death row but rarely execute?
2. Which matters more for the people involved: the sentence, or the execution?

Probation and parole

Most people under correctional control in the US are not behind bars at all.

Probation (supervision instead of prison) and parole (supervised release after prison) together cover more people than prisons and jails combined. Critics note that missed appointments and rule breaks send many back inside without a new crime.

1. What rules would you set for someone on probation, and which could trap them?

Drug courts and problem-solving courts

Some crimes come from a problem, such as addiction, that a judge can supervise better than a prison can fix.

The first drug court opened in Miami-Dade County in 1989: treatment, testing and frequent hearings in place of a sentence. Thousands now exist, along with mental-health and veterans courts.

1. Who should be allowed into a drug court, and who left out?

The ankle monitor

Electronic monitoring moves the watched cell into the home: Bentham's tower, worn on the leg.

A New Mexico judge, Jack Love, began using an electronic ankle bracelet in 1983. GPS monitoring now follows people on pretrial release, probation, parole and immigration cases, often at the wearer's own cost.

1. Is a monitor a kinder punishment or a wider net? Use Foucault to argue one side.

Restorative justice

Crime is first a harm to people and relationships, and justice should repair it.

Howard Zehr's Changing Lenses (1990) set out the idea: victim and offender meet, with the community, and agree on repair. New Zealand made family group conferences the standard path for young offenders in 1989.

1. When would a victim refuse to meet? Should the process still go on?

The Nordic model: Halden

If almost every prisoner comes home, the prison should look like the home they will return to.

Halden prison in Norway (opened 2010) has private rooms, kitchens, schooling and officers trained for two years who work alongside prisoners. Norway's guiding idea is "normality": the loss of liberty is the punishment, nothing more. Its sentences are short and its reoffending rates are among the lowest measured.

1. Norway is small and wealthy. What would carry over to a US state, and what would not?

Newgate Prison

City of London, England · opened 12th century · closed 1902

For seven centuries London's main jail held debtors, people awaiting trial and the condemned. From 1783 public hangings moved from Tyburn to the street outside its walls, and crowds gathered there until 1868.

Overcrowding, disease and "gaol fever" made Newgate a byword for misery. Elizabeth Fry's visits from 1813 to its women's side helped start British prison reform.

Demolished 1902; the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) stands on the site.

1. Why did reformers start with the conditions of women and children?

The Bastille

Paris, France · opened 1370s (fortress) · closed 1789

A medieval fortress used by French kings to hold prisoners by royal order (lettre de cachet), without trial. It held writers and nobles as well as forgers and the unlucky.

On 14 July 1789 a Paris crowd stormed it for its gunpowder and freed its seven prisoners; its fall became the symbol of the French Revolution, and the fortress was pulled down stone by stone.

Demolished 1789–90; the Place de la Bastille marks the site.

1. Why did a nearly empty prison become a symbol worth storming?

Château d'If

Off Marseille, France · opened 1531 (fort) · closed 1890 (as prison)

A small island fortress in the bay of Marseille used as a state prison for political and religious prisoners, including thousands of Protestants after 1685.

Alexandre Dumas made it famous as the prison of Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), so a fictional prisoner is its best-known inmate.

A national monument open to visitors.

1. How does a novel change what visitors expect from a real prison?

The Tower of London

London, England · opened 1070s · still standing

A royal fortress that also served as a prison for nobles, rebels and political prisoners for almost nine centuries.

Executions on Tower Green and the stories of prisoners held there, from medieval princes to Tudor queens, made it the most famous prison in English history; its last prisoners were held during the Second World War.

A royal palace, museum and World Heritage Site.

1. Why were high-status prisoners kept in a palace-fortress rather than a common jail?

Port Arthur

Tasmania, Australia · opened 1830 · closed 1877

A penal settlement for convicts who reoffended after transportation, on a peninsula guarded by water and a narrow neck of land.

It tried every theory of the age: hard labor, a boys' prison at Point Puer, and a Separate Prison built on the Pennsylvania model of silence and isolation.

A World Heritage Site and museum (Australian Convict Sites).

1. Compare the Separate Prison with Eastern State: what did Britain copy from America?

Andersonville (Camp Sumter)

Georgia, United States · opened 1864 · closed 1865

A Confederate prisoner-of-war camp: an open stockade of about 26 acres that held up to 32,000 Union soldiers at once.

About 13,000 prisoners died there of disease, exposure and starvation. Its commander, Henry Wirz, was tried and executed for war crimes in 1865.

Andersonville National Historic Site and the National Prisoner of War Museum.

1. Who is responsible when a prison is overwhelmed: the commander, the government, or the war?

Sing Sing

Ossining, New York, United States · opened 1826 · still open

Built by its own prisoners from Hudson River marble, Sing Sing ran on the Auburn system of silent group labor by day and solitary cells at night.

"Up the river" to Sing Sing became slang for prison. New York's electric chair was used there from 1891 to 1963.

Still an operating maximum-security state prison (Sing Sing Correctional Facility). (checked 1 Nov 2026)

1. Why build a prison so prisoners could build it themselves?

Alcatraz

San Francisco Bay, United States · opened 1934 (federal penitentiary) · closed 1963

A federal penitentiary on a rock in San Francisco Bay for prisoners other prisons could not hold, run on strict rules: one man to a cell, privileges earned.

Cold currents made escape nearly impossible; the 1962 escape attempt by three men has never been solved. High costs closed it in 1963, and in 1969–71 Native activists occupied the island.

Part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, run by the National Park Service; proposals to reopen it as a prison were raised in 2025. (checked 1 Nov 2026)

1. Why would a government spend so much on a prison for a few hundred men?

San Quentin

Marin County, California, United States · opened 1852 · still open

California's oldest prison, begun on a prison ship in the bay during the Gold Rush. It held the state's largest death row for decades.

Its history runs from brutal early conditions to education programs, a prison newspaper and a podcast made inside. California has paused executions since 2019 and moved its death row elsewhere.

Operating; being converted into the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center under a plan announced in 2023. (checked 1 Nov 2026)

1. Can a prison known for its death row become known for rehabilitation?

Attica

Attica, New York, United States · opened 1931 · still open

A maximum-security prison where, in September 1971, about 1,300 prisoners took control of a yard and held hostages, demanding better conditions.

After four days of negotiation, state police retook the prison; 43 people died, most of them killed in the assault. The state's McKay Commission called it, apart from the Indian massacres of the late 1800s, the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.

An operating state prison (Attica Correctional Facility). (checked 1 Nov 2026)

1. What did the prisoners ask for, and how many of those demands are now law?

Robben Island

Table Bay, Cape Town, South Africa · opened 17th century · closed 1996

An island prison used for centuries for exiles and lepers and, under apartheid, for political prisoners. Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison there.

Political prisoners turned the lime quarry and the cells into a "university," teaching each other; the island became a symbol of the struggle against apartheid.

A museum and World Heritage Site; former prisoners have worked as guides.

1. How can a prison become a school?

Solovki and the Gulag

Solovetsky Islands, White Sea, Russia · opened 1923 · closed 1939 (Solovki)

A medieval monastery on the White Sea became the first Soviet special camp in 1923, the model for the Gulag: a system of forced-labor camps that held millions.

Prisoners, many convicted for political reasons, cut timber, mined and built canals in deadly cold. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Solovki the mother of the Gulag.

The monastery is active again and a World Heritage Site; a memorial stone honours camp victims.

1. How did a labor camp system serve an economy as well as a government?

Hỏa Lò Prison

Hanoi, Vietnam · opened 1896 · closed 1993

Built by the French colonial government to hold Vietnamese political prisoners, it was later used by North Vietnam to hold American prisoners of war.

American POWs called it the "Hanoi Hilton." Both French-era prisoners and American airmen described harsh treatment; the museum today tells mainly the colonial story.

Mostly demolished in the 1990s; the gatehouse is a museum.

1. How does a museum choose whose story to tell first?

Spandau Prison

Berlin, Germany · opened 1876 · closed 1987

A military prison that, after 1947, held seven senior Nazi officials convicted at Nuremberg, guarded in turn by the four Allied powers.

For its last 21 years it held a single prisoner, Rudolf Hess. When he died in 1987 the prison was torn down so it could not become a shrine.

Demolished 1987; a shopping centre stands on the site.

1. Why tear down a prison to prevent it from becoming a place of pilgrimage?

Long Kesh / the Maze

Lisburn, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom · opened 1971 · closed 2000

Built on an airfield to intern people without trial during the Troubles, it later held prisoners convicted in the conflict in its H-shaped blocks.

Prisoners' protests for political status led to the 1981 hunger strikes, in which ten men died; the prison emptied after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Mostly demolished; the future of the remaining buildings is still debated.

1. Should a prison from a conflict be kept as a museum, or removed?

Carandiru

São Paulo, Brazil · opened 1920 · closed 2002

Once the largest prison in Latin America, it held more than 7,000 men in buildings meant for far fewer.

In October 1992 military police ended a riot in Pavilion 9; 111 prisoners were killed. The massacre led to long trials and to the prison's demolition.

Demolished 2002; the site is the Parque da Juventude, with a library and park.

1. What does a massacre reveal about how a society sees the people it imprisons?

Abu Ghraib

Near Baghdad, Iraq · opened 1950s · closed 2014

A prison used under Saddam Hussein's government for political prisoners and executions, then by the US-led coalition after 2003.

In 2004 photographs revealed abuse of Iraqi detainees by US military police; courts-martial and investigations followed, and the scandal changed US detention and interrogation policy debates.

Closed by Iraq in 2014.

1. How do chains of command and photographs shape accountability?

Guantánamo Bay detention camp

US Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (US-held) · opened 2002 · still open

Opened in January 2002 to hold men captured in the war on terrorism, outside the US mainland. About 780 men have been held there.

Detention without trial, interrogation methods and military commissions drew court challenges (Rasul 2004, Hamdan 2006, Boumediene 2008) and wide criticism. Presidents have promised to close it.

Still open: 15 detainees remained as of January 2026 (La Nación, 18 Jan 2026). (checked 1 Nov 2026)

1. What rights should a prisoner held outside a country's borders have?

Rikers Island

East River, New York City, United States · opened 1932 · closure ordered by 2027

New York City's main jail complex, on an island in the East River, holding mostly people awaiting trial.

Violence, deaths in custody and long waits for trial led the city to vote in 2019 to close it and replace it with smaller borough jails, under federal court oversight.

Still open. City law requires closure by 31 August 2027; reports say the city will not meet it (Amsterdam News, 27 Aug 2026). (checked 1 Nov 2026)

1. Most people at Rikers have not been convicted. What should a jail for the unconvicted look like?