Imprisonment as a form of punishment rather than merely a method of detention is a relatively modern phenomenon. The prisons which exist in most countries today had their genesis in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Western Europe and the United States, and in the course of the following hundred years or so spread around the world, often as the result of colonial expansion (see, for example, Morris and Rothman, 1998; Brown and Dikötter, 2007). As we saw in the first section of this book, its use has increased significantly in many countries over recent decades, to the extent that one commentator has noted:

The purpose of imprisonment

Since the days of John Howard (Howard, 1792) and his contemporaries, there have been continuous attempts to reform prisons; but, while much may have altered superficially, the reality of imprisonment has remained singularly impervious to change. The prison is subject to frequent criticism and its failings well documented, yet it remains a frequently used instrument of criminal justice systems. In this chapter we shall look to a possible different future. However, before doing so we would do well to pause to consider the purpose of the prison. In order to do this we need to distinguish between the purpose of imprisonment, that is, the reason why the court sends a person to prison, and the role of the prison, that is, how a person should be treated while in prison. This short volume is not the place to enter into a substantive discussion on sentencing theory and practice or of the extensive contributions by numerous legal scholars on the philosophy of punishment.