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The ways in which organized society has dealt with criminal offenders constitutes A long and painful chapter in the history of man. Reference to that history need only be made in sufficient detail to demonstrate that as unenlightened as our present penal system is today, it represents A giant step forward from earlier societies. In primitive societies, each individual dealt with wrongs done to him or to his family in his own way. The victim was motivated chiefly by ideas of revenge, retaliation or compensation for loss of property. Since in those early societies there were no well-established rules, the strong predator very often went unpunished, and the strong victim sometimes overreacted, resulting in A compounding of the damage. As the primitive societies developed, the government, represented by the chief or the king, gradually began taking over the protection of persons and property and the punishment of offenders in the name of public peace and order. The basic concept behind the intervention of government, however, continued to be that of retribution – A balancing of the scales of justice. The scales tended to be balanced on the side of the superior power of the state. The death penalty was the most common response to common crime. It is recorded that in London, in January 1801, A 17-year-old boy was hanged for stealing A silver spoon. During the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, some thirty types of death penalties were in use, ranging from drawing and quartering to burning at the stake and breaking on the wheel. Physical torture of all forms was common, including mutilation, such as cutting out the tongue and burning out the eyes. Public flogging and other forms of public degradation were commonly in use for relatively minor offences. Imprisonment was not looked upon as A means of punishment but was used rather for the purpose of guaranteeing the presence of the offender at his trial and ultimate punishment. A relatively small population, there were eight hundred executions in A year in England alone towards the end of the 16th century. Then, even more than now, the recipients of these harsh punishments were mainly the poor and the underprivileged.
Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded by the pilgrims in 1620, not merely out of A desire to worship as they chose, but also because of social economic, and legal injustices than so commonplace in England. However, strange as it may seem, the American colonists, knowing a no better way, brought with them criminal codes almost as severe as those they had left behind. The exception to the harsh colonial laws was the ‘Great Law’ of William Penn, embodying the comparatively humane Quaker criminal code. This continued in force in Pennsylvania along with the other colonies, continued under the harsh laws of the American colonies until the late 18th century and the beginning of the new Union. The Quakers provided the keystone around which modern penal reform developed in America, and was accompanied by parallel developments in England and on the Continent. Although the harsh methods of Europe are no longer used, current penologists are beginning to feel dissatisfaction with the dichotomy between what our prisons are supposed to be institutions of rehabilitation, and what they all too often are, institutions of punishment and demoralization. Many feel that the movement away from torture and capital punishment to containment is but the first step in effective penology.