As an abstract condition , prison house is quite unsubdivided : it ’s a place where your freedom , movements and access to basically everything is restricted , usually as penalty for committing a crime . But for anyone who has ever done hard clock time , a prison is so much more : it ’s a place where dignity , seclusion and ascendance are given up to guards and prison administrators , where closing off and boredom can ride someone mad , and where the simplest of necessities seem like luxuriousness . In the United States , where more than two million the great unwashed are in prison and more than 400,000 work at them , prisons are big business [ seed : U.S. Department of Justice ] .
Prisons have historically been used for a number of purposes . They are most ordinarily used to jail criminals , but they have also been used to shut away away political contestant , the mentally sick , prisoner of war and even multitude who could n’t pay their debt . The prison camp of the American Civil War were infamous in both the North and South for being unsanitary place with horrendous living conditions . Overcrowding , disease and malnutrition lead to hundreds of deaths [ Source : AltonWeb ] . In the 18th and 19th century , people who could n’t afford to pay their debt were often thrown into jail , or used as forced labor . The sentence drop working or in poky was an alternative means to pay off the debt . Today , certain debtors still get sentenced to jail – those who do n’t pay youngster support or tax bank note can be convict and given a prison house sentence .
The ethnic function of prisons are more complex . A prison house sentence is apunishment . In this regard , it swear out both as a form of Department of Justice ( we believe people who commit crimes should suffer some form of retribution ) and as adeterrent(prison is unpleasant , so people are reluctant to commit crimes for fear of run low there ) . Prisons often serve as a safeguard , keeping dangerous people locked away from society so they can not commit any more violent crimes . In some case , prisons are used to rehabilitate criminal and set them up for a raw life with an improved Department of Education , Book of Job and social skills and a unexampled outlook .
U.S. prisons are break down into three basic levels of security system : maximum , medium and lower limit . Minimum surety prison often resemble camps or college campus . They are reserved for non - violent offenders with comparatively sportsmanlike reprehensible records , or prisoners who have serve most of their condition in a higher - protection deftness and displayed cautionary behavior . A medium security prison house restricts the day-after-day movements of the convict to a peachy extent , but rather of cells they unremarkably have dormitories , and the prison is unremarkably enclosed by a razor - wire fencing .
maximal security department prisons are what most people opine of when they think of prison . However , only a quarter of all prisoners in the United States are housed in a maximal security measure adroitness . These types of prisons are appropriate for violent wrongdoer , those who have escaped ( or tried to escape ) or inmate who could cause trouble in miserable certificate prisons . They are besiege by gamey wall topped with razor wire , and armed guards in observance tower shoot at anyone who makes it " over the paries . " We ’ll describe life in a maximal surety prison in more particular in the next section .
When an incident occurs at a maximum security measures prison house , all the inmates are confined to their cells for several days , with perfectly no exemption whatsoever . This is know aslockdown . In 1983 , two guard at a federal prison in Marion , Illinois were dispatch in freestanding incident on the same day . That prison snuff it into lasting lockdown . Since then , several prison house have been built and draw under lasting lockdown – they are have sex asSuperMaxprisons . Most maximum security measures prison have a SuperMax unit within the prison house that has lasting lockdown status . formally known as a Security Housing Unit ( SHU ) , prisoner simply call it The Hole .
We ’ll examine what life is like inside a prison house next .
