A prison is both a physical container and an institution. A prison contains people, typically those who have violated criminal law and have been sentenced to a period of incarceration. Prisons, also called "penitentiaries" and "correctional facilities," are distinguished from jails in the United States by length of confinement: jails incapacitate those who are charged with but not yet convicted of criminal offense or who are serving shorter sentences, typically one year or less. Prison and jail, along with probation, constitute the corrections component of the criminal justice system. Prisons have also been used as tools of governments seeking to incapacitate critics of their practices, hence the term political prisoners.

Originally used to hold persons before trial, the prison as a penal institution--that is, the modern prison--came into existence by the end of the 18th century. As such, it denies inmates a range of basic personal rights and privileges. Restrictions on prisoners can extend from solitary confinement, in which access to space outside one's cell is held to an hour or less per day, to restrictions on one's movement, as in the case of people who serve sentences in their homes--house arrest--but may be required to wear an electronic sensor attached to their ankle.

Prisons fall into several classifications, depending on the level of custody required for inmates. In the United States there are minimum, medium, maximum, and super-maximum security prisons, with more intensive control and security at each higher level. Prisons and jails also separate male and female inmates. States and local jails maintain separate facilities for juvenile offenders; there are no juvenile federal facilities. For the most serious crimes, prosecutors may sentence youth to prisons as adults.

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, as of February 2005, the rate of incarceration in prison and jail--737 inmates per 100,000 population--ranks the United States as the nation most likely to use imprisonment, with a rate of imprisonment 6 to 8 times higher than other industrial democracies. Following a period of explosive growth in the prison population dating back to the implementation of mandatory, structured, and determinant sentencing policies in the late 1970s, as of 2006, more than 7 million people in the United States were under some form of correctional supervision, including probation, prison, jail, and parole. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,385,213 people were incarcerated by the United States at the end of 2006, including prisoners in federal, state, and territorial prisons; local jails; military and juvenile facilities; facilities of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and jails in Indian country.

U.S. prisons and jails incarcerate black and Latino/a people in numbers disproportionate to their presence in the U.S. population. African/black Americans constituted 12.4 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2006 American Community Survey; whites made up 73.9 percent of the population and Hispanics or Latinos/as of any race, 14.8 percent. At the end of 2006, 42 percent of inmates in prison were black; white inmates were 33 percent, and Hispanics 21 percent. The over-representation of blacks and Latinos/as in jails is similar to prison: whites are 44.3 percent of the 2005 jail population, blacks 38.9 percent, and Hispanics 15 percent.

The BJS estimates that 32 percent of black males will be incarcerated in prison at some point in their lifetime, compared to 17 percent of Hispanic males and 5.9 percent of white males. Males are an overwhelming majority in prisons and jails, yet the rate of incarceration of females in the United States has increased dramatically in the past 30 years. According to the Institute on Women and Criminal Justice, the number of women serving sentences of more than a year grew by 757 percent between 1977 and 2004. Women currently make up 7 percent of all U.S. inmates.

References:

1) Conover, Ted. 2001. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. New York: Vintage Books.

2) Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

3) Mauer, Marc and Meda Chesney-Lind, eds. 2003. Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. New York: New Press.

4) Morris, Norval and David J. Rothman, eds. 1998. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

5) Sabol, William J. 2007. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2006. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.

6) Schlosser, Eric. 1998. "The Prison Industrial Complex." Atlantic Monthly, December, 51-77.

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