Penitentiary Movement
Definition
The early nineteenth-century reform movement that built prisons designed to induce penitence through labour, isolation and religious instruction rather than corporal pain.
Related terms
- Corporal Punishment
- Punishment inflicted on the body, such as flogging, branding or mutilation, historically administered in public as a deterrent.
- Danda
- The graded scheme of punishment set out in the Dharmashastra tradition, whose severity varied with the gravity of the offence and the...
- Lex Talionis
- The principle of proportionate retaliation, an injury for an equivalent injury, codified in the Code of Hammurabi and the Hebrew Bible.
- Panopticon
- Jeremy Bentham's 1791 design for an institution built around a central observation tower, letting a single supervisor watch many inmates who cannot...
- Beccaria
- Cesare Beccaria, author of the 1764 treatise On Crimes and Punishments, who argued punishment should be proportionate, certain and no crueller than...
- Bentham
- Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarian framework judged punishment by whether it prevents more harm than it inflicts, and who designed the panopticon.
- Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems
- The two competing early American penitentiary regimes: solitary confinement at Eastern State Penitentiary versus congregate, silent labour at Auburn Prison.
- Penology
- The branch of criminology concerned with the theory and practice of punishment and imprisonment. It examines the aims of punishment (retribution, deterrence,...