page_title: History of United States prison systems
section_title: Colonial criminal punishments, jails, and workhouses
hierarchical_section_title: History of United States prison systems / Historical development of United States prison systems / Colonial criminal punishments, jails, and workhouses
caption_attribution_description: English: "Slaves working in 17th-century Virginia," by an unknown artist, 1670.
context_page_description: Imprisonment as a form of criminal punishment only became widespread in the United States just before the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed since long before then. Prison building efforts in the United States came in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian Era and led to widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, bringing a number of new mechanisms—such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing—into the mainstream of American penal practice. Finally, since the early 1970s, the United States has engaged in a historically unprecedented expansion of its imprisonment systems at both the federal and state level.
context_section_description: The jail was built in 1690 by order of Plimouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony Courts. Used as a jail from 1690–1820; at one time moved and attached to the Constable's home. The 'Old Gaol' was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
  Although jails were an early fixture of colonial North American communities, they generally did not serve as places of incarceration as a form of criminal punishment. Instead, the main role of the colonial American jail was as a non-punitive detention facility for pre-trial and pre-sentence criminal defendants, as well as imprisoned debtors. The most common penal sanctions of the day were fines, whipping, and community-oriented punishments like the stocks.
  Jails were among the earliest public structures built in colonial British North America. The 1629 colonial charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, granted the shareholders behind the venture the right to establish laws for their settlement "not contrarie to the lawes of our realm in England" and to administer "lawfull correction" to violators, and Massachusetts established a house of correction for punishing criminals by 1635. Colonial Pennsylvania built two houses of correction starting in 1682, and Connecticut established one in 1727. By the eighteenth century, every county in the North American colonies had a jail.
  Colonial American jails were not the "ordinary mechanism of correction" for criminal offenders, according to social historian David Rothman. Criminal incarceration as a penal sanction was "plainly a second choice," either a supplement to or a substitute for traditional criminal punishments of the day, in the words of historian Adam J. Hirsch. Eighteenth-century criminal codes provided for a far wider range of criminal punishments than contemporary state and federal criminal laws in the United States. Fines, whippings, the stocks, the pillory, the public cage, banishment, capital punishment at the gallows, penal servitude in private homes—all of these punishments came before imprisonment in British colonial America.
  The most common sentence of the colonial era was a fine or a whipping, but the stocks were another common punishment—so much so that most colonies, like Virginia in 1662, hastened to build these before either the courthouse or the jail. The theocratic communities of Puritan Massachusetts imposed faith-based punishments like the admonition—a formal censure, apology, and pronouncement of criminal sentence (generally reduced or suspended), performed in front of the church-going community. Sentences to the colonial American workhouse—when they were actually imposed on defendants—rarely exceeded three months, and sometimes spanned just a single day.
  Colonial jails served a variety of public functions other than penal imprisonment. Civil imprisonment for debt was one of these, but colonial jails also served as warehouses for prisoners-of-war and political prisoners (especially during the American Revolution). They were also an integral part of the transportation and slavery systems—not only as warehouses for convicts and slaves being put up for auction, but also as a means of disciplining both kinds of servants.
  The colonial jail's primary criminal law function was as a pre-trial and pre-sentence detention facility. Generally, only the poorest or most despised defendants found their way into the jails of colonial North America, since colonial judges rarely denied requests for bail. The only penal function of significance that colonial jails served was for contempt—but this was a coercive technique designed to protect the power of the courts, not a penal sanction in its own right.
  The colonial jail differed from today's United States prisons not only in its purpose, but in its structure. Many were no more than a cage or closet. Colonial jailers ran their institutions on a "familial" model and resided in an apartment attached to the jail, sometimes with a family of their own. The colonial jail's design resembled an ordinary domestic residence, and inmates essentially rented their bed and paid 
caption: Depiction of slaves—another labor force brought to England's American colonies in captivity—processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia.
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