Leonard Navarro
CJA/234
January-Thursday 3, 2013
LaJuana Haselrig
Purpose and History
What is the purpose of having penitentiaries in our country? What is the history of the penitentiary? What is punishment and what is its history? How have prisons developed? What is the Pennsylvania system? What is the Auburn system? What is the impact and involvement of prison labor over time? What is the process of corrections? What is a penitentiary? What is the mission of corrections?
Let’s first begin with what punishment means. Punishment is the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense. While completing my research I was able to stumble across two definitions that caught my attention. The general definition for punishment is “aversive stimulus that follows an undesirable behavior, and is intended to decrease or eliminate the occurrence of that behavior. It may be triggered either due to the performance of an undesirable act (negligence) or the non-performance of a desirable act (disobedience). Punishments take the form of presentation of an unpleasant stimulus (criticism or warning) or withdrawal of a pleasant one (employment or promotion). Threat of punishment usually also constitutes a punishment”. The definition of punishment pertaining to the law is “Confinement, fine, penalty, sanction, or loss of a privilege, property, or right, assessed and administered as deterrence or retribution by an authorized court to an entity duly convicted of violating the law of the land”. [ (Buisness Dictionary, 2013) ] Punishments must be adequate match the reasons why the crimes were committed. History shows that Cesare Beccarua who was an Italian theorist, first suggested linking crime causation to punishments in the eighteenth century. He is known as the founder of the Classical School of criminology. The classical School is the theory linking crime causation to punishment, based on offenders’ free will and