U.S. prisons with mostly nonviolent offenders. However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that, as of the end of 2015, 54% of state prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year were serving time for a violent offense. 15 percent of state prisoners at year-end 2015 had been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious infraction. In comparison, 47% of federal prisoners serving time in September 2016 (the most recent date for which data are available) were convicted of a drug offense. History In the 1700s, English philanthropists began to focus on the reform of convicted criminals in prisons, which they believed needed a chance to become morally pure in order to stop or slow crime. Since at least 1740, some of these philosophers began thinking of solitary confinement as a way to create and maintain spiritually clean people in prisons. As English people immigrated to North America, so did these theories of penology. Spanish colonizers in Florida also brought their own ideas of confinement, and Spanish soldiers in St. Augustine, Florida built the first substantial prison in North America in 1570. Some of the first structures built in English-settled America were jails, and by the 18th century, every English North American county had a jail. These jails served a variety of functions such as a holding place for debtors, prisoners-of-war, and political prisoners, those bound in the penal transportation and slavery systems, and of those accused-of but not tried for crimes. Sentences for those convicted of crimes were rarely longer than three months, and often lasted only a day. Poor citizens were often imprisoned for longer than their richer neighbors, as bail was rarely not accepted. One of the first prisons in America was founded in 1790 by the Pennsylvanian Quakers. The Quakers wanted something that was less cruel than dungeon prisons. They created a space where prisoners could read scriptures and repent as a means of self-improvement. In 1841, Dorothea Dix discovered that prison conditions in the US were, in her opinion, inhumane. Prisoners were chained naked, whipped with rods. Others, criminally insane, were caged, or placed in cellars, or closets. She insisted on changes throughout the rest of her life. While focusing on the insane, her comments also resulted in changes for other inmates. After the Civil War and really gaining momentum during the Progressive Era of America, new concepts of the prison system, such as