Prisons period, in fact, would be strange to 18th century sensibilities. Facilities to detain prisoners of the state are ancient, but the modern prison has its roots in the early to mid 19th century.
Before then the concept that part of one’s “punishment” for a criminal act would be ending up locked in a facility, in which you’d be fed and housed by the government, for a fixed term of years, would not be the norm.
Before the modern prison system being convicted of a crime basically then required a few things:
- Something be done to deter others from committing your crime
- Something be done to invoke retribution for the bad thing you’ve done
- Something be done to provide some degree of equity for the victims of your crime
These three things were typically accomplished by a few different means, chiefly: execution for serious crimes (this included far more crimes than today or recent history), flogging and other physical corporal punishment, shaming punishments (stocks and such) and fining. Once someone had been flogged or fined or both, the idea that it made sense to keep them locked up would’ve been foreign. It was generally viewed that being flogged and having to pay a fine was a strong disincentive to commit future crimes, and thus society was protected because you wouldn’t want to do so again.
Of course, many flogged criminals would go on to re-offend, there was also a system of “branding” where you’d get branded if you committed certain serious crimes. If you were re-arrested for a serious crime and found to have the brand, any level of mercy the court might extend you would be withheld since you’d been previously punished. Infamously the British soldiers who fired into a crowd in Boston (the “Boston massacre”) were convicted of manslaughter in lieu of murder (but still a capital offense), branded on the thumb, and released. In theory had they been re-arrested for any further crime the fact they’d already been branded and convicted of manslaughter, but spared execution, would make it much more likely they’d be punished very harshly.
It wasn’t nearly as common in America as it was in Britain, but a form of banishment also existed, when you’d be forced to leave the jurisdiction in which you’d committed your crime. In Britain these deportations were infamously larger scale, with Georgia and Australia serving as some of the destinations used to export criminals.
Probably the precursors to what we’d think of as modern prisons would be the “poor houses”, “poor farms”, “debtor’s prisons” and the concept of penal servitude. These all have similarities. A poor house / poor farm was a work facility or a farm in which indigent persons who couldn’t pay debts, or who were just so poor they couldn’t feed themselves and were looking for a form of help would go to, in exchange for room and board (very meager by any standards, then or now) they had to work pretty backbreaking menial labor in long shifts. They could largely come and go when not working so it wasn’t incarceration. While often used for the poor, it wasn’t uncommon for indigent criminals who couldn’t pay fines to end up “working it off” in such a place.
Debtor’s prisons were often indistinguishable from the poor houses/poor farms, except that you’d end up in one because you could not pay a debt. You’d have to stay until you had “worked off” what you owed. A single facility might house debtor’s, indigent poor, and criminals or civil defendants working off a court ordered fine or civil judgment. Notably while early forms of county governments often ran these facilities, they were often also private ventures, with their operators hoping to find a way to turn a profit on their free labor (basically they could do so if the value of the work product exceeded the value of the room and board, thus the reason for the extremely poor conditions in such facilities–Dickensian in fact.)
Penal servitude was very similar, except that you’d be turned over to a private individual to work for them, the arrangements varied. Sometimes you might be in penal servitude to a person you owed a civil judgment or a criminal restitution to, other times you might just be “rented out” to pay off a fine or such.
While some forms of poor houses/farms and debtor’s facilities existed up until the 20th century (remember there was no social welfare at all in the 19th century America, so grim as it was a poor house could be your only option if you were facing starvation, and many areas didn’t have them so you’d be lucky to have one you could go to in that context), by the early 19th century as part of the criminal justice system it started to become less common. As a form of criminal punishment these facilities had issues. For one, implicit in all of them was the concept that you cared about working off money owed so you could return to your life as it were. Some of the indigent poor preferred to just leave town and seek prospects elsewhere, and these facilities weren’t really designed or staffed to be “secure”, so there was little to stop them from just leaving. Resources for tracking them back down were pretty scarce. In that era unless there was a bounty reward there wasn’t a lot of incentive for anyone to track someone down who had just fled a very small criminal judgment.
