Different Factors That Influence People Toward Criminal...

The Unites States has the largest prison population in the world, and it is still growing. Calculated in both raw numbers and by percentage of the population, the United States has the most prisoners of any developed country in the world (Flatow, 2014). It is said that more than 1.57 million inmates sat behind bars in federal, state, and country prisons and jails around the country as of December 31, 2013. It did not start out this way. Up until the 1950’s the functions, components, and actions of carrying out criminal sanctions regularly used the term penal, and penal institutions (prisons) and penal systems (organizations to carry out punishment) emphasized the principal function of implementing punishment in the handling of criminal†¦show more content†¦First was the shift from wergild, or a type of vigilante law, where a victim of wrongdoing (or their family) carries out revenge or retaliation under the assumption that an offender has to pay for their crime (Oâ₠¬â„¢Connor, 2012). Next was the development of lex talionis, which means â€Å"an eye for an eye,† but this actually refers to the switchover in time when the governments got into the THE HISTORY OF CRIME AND CORRECTIONS 3 retaliation business, instead of the families or private individuals (O’Connor, 2012). At first, the â€Å"eye for an eye† was only applied to slaves and people of the lower classes, but eventually it became the dominant form of justice, and still occurs today, to an extent. The second theme was the shift from physical punishment to psychological punishment across the early historical period. This shift evolved from the religious doctrine. In the eighteenth century, during the Age of Enlightenment, an even greater recognition of human dignity came around (O’Connor, 2012). The end result was that prisoners were tortured less (and put to death less), but forced to suffer longer, more psychologically tormenting, stays of imprisonment (O’Connor, 2012). Corporal punishment was very popular in the non-Western nations, although the Western world is no stranger to punishments involving torture, beatings, and execution eit her. Corporal punishment definitely predates the prison system and anything that could compare to one.