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A. Prisons must be distinguished from such other places of confinement as dungeons and concentration camps. During the Middle Ages many castles had dungeons, usually underground vaults, in which political prisoners, or enemies of a king or noble, were incarcerated for indefinite periods—sometimes for life. Occasionally prisoners were held until a ransom was paid. The concentration camp is a 19th-century invention for confining large groups of people, most of whom are not criminals. During wartime prisoners of war are often confined in such camps (see Concentration Camp).

B. In the United States there are four main divisions in the prison system: local jails, county jails, state prisons, and federal prisons. Nearly every community has a jail, or lockup, and county jails are found in nearly every county in all the states. Jails are chiefly for holding persons for trial after they have been arrested. Each state has its own prisons and reformatories for convicted felons, and the national government maintains prisons for felons who have been convicted of breaking federal laws. The prisons range from maximum-security institutions for very dangerous criminals to minimum-security institutions for individuals such as white-collar criminals—those whose crimes are generally financial, such as embezzlers, swindlers, and bribe-taking politicians. Today's prisons segregate offenders by sex and age, a practice that was started in the 19th century.

Because of extreme overcrowding and the huge costs of operating prisons, a means was found in the early 1980s of confining minor offenders outside prison. It is basically a system of house arrest. The offender lives at home and is allowed to go to work but wears an electronic ankle bracelet that sends out radio signals every 35 seconds to a small box. The box is attached to a telephone and transmits a signal to a computer in a probation office. If the offender removes the bracelet, the signal is lost, suggesting that the criminal has tried to flee.

C. Imprisonment as a form of criminal punishment which only became widespread in the United States after the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed since long before then. Prison building efforts in the United States came in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian Era and led to widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, bringing a number of new mechanisms—such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing—into the mainstream of American penal practice. Finally, since the early 1970s, the United States has engaged in a historically unprecedented expansion of its imprisonment systems at both the federal and state level. Since 1973, the number of incarcerated persons in the United States has increased five-fold, and in a given year 7 million persons are under the supervision or control of correctional services in the United States.^[1] These periods of prison construction and reform produced major changes in the structure of prison systems and their missions, the responsibilities of federal and state agencies for administering and supervising them, as well as the legal and political status of prisoners themselves.

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