In the early years before the great American Revolution, imprisoning of individuals who had done wrong in the United States of America was not possible as the system had not come into effect like other places such as the United Kingdom. When the idea of incarceration came in the US, it came in three major eras, and this was slightly before the beginning of the American Revolution as stated before. “The initial stage or age involved putting into prisons and even rehabilitating persons who were involved in any crime and during this time the American Civil War was still in progress. This era was commonly referred to as the time of Jacksonian (Roth 97)”. It was followed by a period where some new ideas and methodologies became useful, and these changes came immediately after the war. It was known as the Progressive era, an idea such as probation unspecified sentencing came into place. Then significant changes in American Penal continued to be observed up to today.
A lot had changed in the US Penal system as compared to what it was in the early years when this practice was being practiced for the first time. “When America was being colonized by the British, the slaves who were brought in the form of prisoners and laborers were shipped in America using the Atlantic Ocean (Rothman 76)”. It became the first major method of imprisoning and it evolved to later being known as the prisoner trade. This was around the 1660s onwards, and thousands of people were moved to America by the English forces. During this time, the jails that were built were not purposely meant to imprison people but to detain them. “The most common modes of punishment during this era was caning and punishments such as hard labor or even sometimes paying fines for those people who were found to have done criminal activities (Skotnicki 78)”.
There are similarities and differences between the American