the term prisoner's' dilemma refers to a game in which
Prisoner's dilemma It is implied that the prisoners will have no opportunity to reward or punish their partner other than the prison sentences they get, and that their decision will not affect their reputation in the future. Because betraying a partner offers a greater reward than cooperating with them, all purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them to betray each other.[1] The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads both of the prisoners to betray, when they would get a better reward if they both kept silent. In reality, humans display a systemic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games, much more so than predicted by simple models of "rational" self-interested action.[2][3][4][5] A model based on a different kind of rationality, where people forecast how the game would be played if they formed coalitions and then maximized their forecasts, has been shown to make better predictions of the rate of cooperation in this and similar games, given only the payoffs of the game.[6]
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]