<P> Incarceration as a form of criminal punishment is `` a comparatively recent episode in Anglo - American jurisprudence , '' according to historian Adam J. Hirsch . Before the nineteenth century , sentences of penal confinement were rare in the criminal courts of British North America . But penal incarceration had been utilized in England as early as the reign of the Tudors , if not before . When post-revolutionary prisons emerged in United States , they were , in Hirsch 's words , not a `` fundamental departure '' from the former American colonies ' intellectual past . Early American prisons systems like Massachusetts ' Castle Island Penitentiary , built in 1780 , essentially imitated the model of the 1500s English workhouse . </P>
<P> Incarceration as a form of criminal punishment is `` a comparatively recent episode in Anglo - American jurisprudence , '' according to historian Adam J. Hirsch . Before the nineteenth century , sentences of penal confinement were rare in the criminal courts of British North America . But penal incarceration had been utilized in England as early as the reign of the Tudors , if not before . When post-revolutionary prisons emerged in United States , they were , in Hirsch 's words , not a `` fundamental departure '' from the former American colonies ' intellectual past . Early American prisons systems like Massachusetts ' Castle Island Penitentiary , built in 1780 , essentially imitated the model of the 1500s English workhouse . </P>
which was the first prison designed to house sentenced offenders in the united states called
which was the first prison designed to house sentenced offenders in the united states called
Massachusetts ' Castle Island Penitentiary ,
Massachusetts ' Castle Island Penitentiary ,