what principle states that the punishment should fit the crime
Punishment A principle often mentioned with respect to the degree of punishment to be meted out is that the punishment should match the crime.[22][23][24] One standard for measurement is the degree to which a crime affects others or society. Measurements of the degree of seriousness of a crime have been developed.[25] A felony is generally considered to be a crime of "high seriousness", while a misdemeanor is not.
History of United States prison systems Incarceration as a form of criminal punishment is "a comparatively recent episode in Anglo-American jurisprudence," according to historian Adam J. Hirsch.[2] Before the nineteenth century, sentences of penal confinement were rare in the criminal courts of British North America.[3] But penal incarceration had been utilized in England as early as the reign of the Tudors, if not before.[4] When post-revolutionary prisons emerged in United States, they were, in Hirsch's words, not a "fundamental departure" from the former American colonies' intellectual past.[5] Early American prisons systems like Massachusetts' Castle Island Penitentiary, built in 1780, essentially imitated the model of the 1500s English workhouse.[5]