When did society start using time as a currency to repaying a crime, rather than the suspect getting punished physically?
Also, a rather vague question, how do they decid how much time needs to be served to pay off a crime? It seems kind of weird when you think about it, “you stole a bike? Yep, that’s about 60 days for you”
As that Wikipedia page shows - and you should read it, OP - the question of time served is a modern “liberal” development from the days when death was the penalty for just about everything. You get a sense of it from this other Wikipedia page:
England’s laws are the reason the American Bill of Rights talks about “cruel and unusual punishments.” The founders didn’t mean that in the way we moderns would think about it, but as a reaction to sentences of death, transportation, or mutilation for trivial crimes.
Remember that until recent times, food was expensive. Paying someone - a serious offender - to sit in jail by feeding them to do nothing was not a normal thing. As the link indicates, they would at the very least be turned into work gangs or sold into slavery. Otherwise, there were punishments like mutilation, whipping, and execution when fines were not enough. Recently there was exile - convicts were sent to Australia when the Americas as a place to unload your undesirables stopped working, for example. Recall from Les Miserables or Ben Hur that galley slave was also a convenient place to make a prisoner earn his keep.
The legendary prisoners like the occupants of the Tower of London (or the Man in the Iron Mask) depicted a different type of confinement; it was inappropriate to just off fellow nobles sometimes, so the simplest solution was to keep them where they could be watched, controlled, and if necessary rendered incommunicado. People who were too likely to support an opposing faction, people for whom they could not prove treason… Lady Jane Grey, for example was locked up in the Tower along with her husband. It was only when an anti-Mary faction started another rebellion with the aim of getting them out (and using them as a figurehead for a different government) that Mary decided that it would be simpler to chop their heads off and remove the motivation for rebellion. After all, the biggest threat to any monarch in troubled times was a near relative or in-law with a plausible claim to the throne. But this wasn’t a specific “crime = punishment” detention.
There’s a number of sequences in Neal Stephenson’s “System of the World” where he describes 1600’s London jails - essentially debtors’ prisons. People were locked up until they could pay what they owed - which seems rather self-defeating. And, IIRC< they were also responsible for paying for or supplying their own food.
This is the subject of Foucault’s most famous book, Discipline and Punish.
Worth your time, if you’re curious: Discipline and Punish - Wikipedia
An unintended side effect of the Bloody Code was that juries were reluctant to convict. I have read an account of juries blatantly ignoring evidence to convict of a lesser, non capital crime, such as the amount of money stolen.
The short answer is it was the Quakers. One of their reform movements was changing the way criminals were punished. They felt that the best course was an attempt to rehabilitate the criminal by isolating him from a bad environment, which included the society of other criminals, and giving him amble to contemplate his life. In practice, this meant prisoners were given extended periods of solitary confinement.
The motives may have been good but the results were not. Extended isolation from human contact does not improve the way people behave or think. It’s more likely to produce mental disorders. The Pennsylvania Method, as it was known, has now been abandoned.
If by England’s laws you mean copying verbatim from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 then yes.
Another effect was the impetus for the saying “Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.” If you’re going to face the death penalty, you might as well make it worth your while, so to speak.
There’s the story of Liu Bang. He was a minor Chinese official. He was given a job to transport some prisoners. During the trip, two of the prisoners escaped. Liu supposedly then addressed all the guards and all the remaining prisoners. He told them, “All you prisoners were going to be executed when we arrived. All you guards are going to be executed now that we let some prisoners escape. So we have nothing to lose. Join me and we’ll start a rebellion.”
Ten years later, Liu Bang was crowned Emperor of China.
As early as the Bible, the concept of prison as a punishment is recorded - Joseph is imprisoned in Egypt for raping Potiphar’s wife (though of course, he was framed).
Obviously, not everyone subscribes to the idea that Biblical stories are true, but at least the concept must have existed when the Bible was written, otherwise, if fiction, it would be a strange thing for the author to have invented out of nowhere.
Nobles were imprisoned, but usually for political reasons rather than legal. Or as a form of kidnapping for ransom.
As noted above, England’s laws went through enormous changes between 1689 and 1787. The distance between ideals and reality is always a deep issue within societies.
I don’t think it is a correct restatement of the historical development to say that corporeal punishment was replaced with incarceration. As stated by others, the concept of locking up offenders in prison is a very old one. It’s just that in the past, it existed alongside a number of other forms of punishment - the death penalty, corporeal punishment, but also pecuniary fines (which was the standard way of punishing offenders in many Germanic tribal laws). Over the course of history, many of these other forms of punishment were abolished, leaving incarceration as the standard form, which is why it is, percentage-wise, more in use now than in many epochs of the past. But even to this day I would not say that prison terms are the standard currency in which crimes are repaid. Some legal systems still retain the death penalty; some of them still retain corporeal punishment (such as Singapore, in addition to a number of Islamic countries); and of course pecuniary fines are still very much in use in the legal systems of the world as well.
As opposed to what? Ghostly punishment?
Punishment of the soul in a penitentiary.
Such a big change that the Bill of Rights of 1689 is still in force today.
I’m reading The Book of the New Sun right now, where torture is used as a penalty for crimes, not long-term imprisonment. The protagonist and others make clear arguments why “torture and release” is superior to long-term imprisonment.
It’s actually kind of convincing.
:eek:
What actually is the difference between “torture” and “corporal punishment”? I would call being whipped 100 times with a cat o’ nine tails or having a hand amputated “torture”, personally.
But maybe they are making a distinction between a one-time punishment and a time-based punishment, but just accelerated because of the torture? So, instead of a ten-year sentence in prison, you get a ten-hour or ten-day torture session?
So is the Bill of Rights. And that obviously never causes any discussion because every single law ever passed since has been perfect.