What is Community-based Corrections and is it Effective Essay

What is Community-based Corrections and is it Effective - Essay Example The earliest American prisons were patterned after the English gaols which served as temporary places of confinement. The English gaols began to mushroom in England as places of confinement where prostitutes and beggars were beaten as punishment. The conditions in these gaols called bridewells were such that more prisoners died of sickness than execution. In 1779, the concept of penitentiary, a place where prisoners were given the opportunity to repent, was introduced by the prison reformist John Howard (Carlson & Garrett 2007 pp 7-8). Colonist America, together with Australia, later on became a place where the English threw their convicts. After the American Revolution however, new penal systems, not patterned after the English, were introduced. In the 1600s, William Penn, for whom Pennsylvania was named after, introduced the Great Law, a penal code which abolished all forms of capital punishment except for murder and advocated incarceration, fines and hard labor instead of violent punishments. After his death however, the previous Anglican Code of violent penalties reemerged until another prison reformer in the person of Benjamin Rush surfaced in the late 1700s and advocated the reformist point of view. The first prison group, the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, was created (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 8). The first prison in the US was located in Simsbury, Connecticut and was called Newgate which emphasized punishment and labor but numerous riots and other disturbances forced it to shut down. With the advent of the prison reform movement advocated by the Quakers, the Walnut Street Jail was established. The new penal system, called the Pennsylvania system, took a humanitarian approach to punishment where reforming the convict became the purpose of incarceration. Solitary confinement to induce prisoners to contemplate and