According to the material on page 27 in chapter 2 of this week’s material, nineteenth-century prisons employed strict controls and severe disciplinary practices, commonly based on physical punishment. The most important restriction was the rule of silence that was applied in Auburn-style prisons. Since most convicts spent majority of their waking time in contact with other inmates, silence was believed necessary to prevent the moral contamination that authorities feared would spread in prison.
Other form of punishment was implemented in the Auburn system of prison management which was created and ran by Elam Lynds. Captain Elam Lynds, was warden of Auburn prison and then built the new, improved Sing Sing in the 1820s. Lynds’s view was that convicts were cowards and dogs and ought to be treated accordingly. Lynds invented two of the control devices associated with early prisons—prison stripes and the lockstep. He put inmates in striped uniforms to make them more visible and also to humiliate them, as it would be humiliating to you to have to wear pink pajamas with little bunny feet outside all day. The lockstep was a method of moving convicts around inside the prison; prisoners marched—shuffled their feet, actually— with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of them. A long line of men going off to work or chow looked like a giant striped caterpillar, shuffling along in silence.
These punishments were intended to keep prisoners from committing any further crimes against society through humiliation and harsh disciplinary actions. If the prisons of today were ran as they were back then, I believe we would have far less repeat