The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 publication, Surveiller et Punir, to describe the modern penal system of the 1970s, embodied by the well-known penal institution at Mettray in France. The phrase combines the adjective "carceral", which means that which is related to jail or prison, with archipelago—a group of islands. Foucault referred to the "island" units of the "archipelago" as a metaphor for the mechanisms, technologies, knowledge systems and networks related to a carceral continuum. The 1973 English publication of the book by Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago referred to the forced labor camps and prisons that composed the sprawling carceral network of the Soviet Gulag.
Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which an incarcerated person lives in a single cell with little or no contact with other people. It is a punitive tool used within the prison system to discipline or separate incarcerated individuals who are considered to be security risks to other incarcerated individuals or prison staff, as well as those who violate facility rules or are deemed disruptive. However, it can also be used as protective custody for incarcerated individuals whose safety is threatened by other prisoners. This is employed to separate them from the general prison population and prevent injury or death.
Parole is a form of early release of a prison inmate where the prisoner agrees to abide by behavioral conditions, including checking-in with their designated parole officers, or else they may be rearrested and returned to prison.
False imprisonment or unlawful imprisonment occurs when a person intentionally restricts another person's movement within any area without legal authority, justification, or the restrained person's permission. Actual physical restraint is not necessary for false imprisonment to occur. A false imprisonment claim may be made based upon private acts, or upon wrongful governmental detention. For detention by the police, proof of false imprisonment provides a basis to obtain a writ of habeas corpus.
Incarceration in the United States is one of the primary means of punishment for crime in the United States. In 2023 over five million people were under supervision by the criminal justice system, with nearly two million people incarcerated in state or federal prisons and local jails. The United States has the largest known prison population in the world, it has 5% of the world’s population, and 20% of the world’s incarcerated persons. China, with four times more inhabitants, has less persons in prison. Prison populations grew dramatically beginning in the 1970s, but began a decline around 2009, dropping 25% by year-end 2021.
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Incapacitation in the context of criminal sentencing philosophy is one of the functions of punishment. It involves capital punishment, sending an offender to prison, or possibly restricting their freedom in the community, to protect society and prevent that person from committing further crimes. Incarceration, as the primary mechanism for incapacitation, is also used as to try to deter future offending.
A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where people are confined against their will and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state, generally as punishment for various crimes. Authorities most commonly use prisons within a criminal-justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those who have pled or been found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment.
Compassionate release is a process by which inmates in criminal justice systems may be eligible for immediate early release on grounds of "particularly extraordinary or compelling circumstances which could not reasonably have been foreseen by the court at the time of sentencing". Compassionate release procedures, which are also known as medical release, medical parole, medical furlough, and humanitarian parole, can be mandated by the courts or by internal corrections authorities. Unlike regular parole, compassionate release is not based on a prisoner's behaviour or sentencing, but rather on medical or humanitarian changes in the prisoner's situation.
Punishment in Australia arises when an individual has been accused or convicted of breaking the law through the Australian criminal justice system. Australia uses prisons, as well as community corrections. When awaiting trial, prisoners may be kept in specialised remand centres or within other prisons.
As of 2013, across the world, 625,000 women and children were being incarcerated in correctional facilities, and the female prison population was increasing in all continents. The list of countries by incarceration rate includes a main table with a column for the historical and current percentage of prisoners who are female.
A prisoner is a person who is deprived of liberty against their will. This can be by confinement or captivity in a prison, or forcible restraint. The term usually applies to one serving a sentence in prison.
The alternatives to imprisonment are types of punishment or treatment other than time in prison that can be given to a person who is convicted of committing a crime. Some of these are also known as alternative sanctions. Alternatives can take the form of fines, restorative justice, transformative justice or no punishment at all. Capital punishment, corporal punishment and electronic monitoring are also alternatives to imprisonment, but are not promoted by modern prison reform movements for decarceration due to them being carceral in nature.
Imprisonment began to replace other forms of criminal punishment in the United States just before the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed as early as the first sovereign states. In colonial times, courts and magistrates would impose punishments including fines, forced labor, public restraint, flogging, maiming, and death, with sheriffs detaining some defendants awaiting trial. The use of confinement as a punishment in itself was originally seen as a more humane alternative to capital and corporal punishment, especially among Quakers in Pennsylvania. Prison building efforts in the United States came in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian Era and led to the widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, bringing a number of new mechanisms—such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing—into the mainstream of American penal practice. Finally, since the early 1970s, the United States has engaged in a historically unprecedented expansion of its imprisonment systems at both the federal and state level. Since 1973, the number of incarcerated persons in the United States has increased five-fold. Now, about 2,200,000 people, or 3.2 percent of the adult population, are imprisoned in the United States, and about 7,000,000 are under supervision of some form in the correctional system, including parole and probation. Periods of prison construction and reform produced major changes in the structure of prison systems and their missions, the responsibilities of federal and state agencies for administering and supervising them, as well as the legal and political status of prisoners themselves.
Wong Wing v. United States, 163 U.S. 228 (1896), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court found that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution forbid the imprisonment at hard labor without a jury trial for noncitizens convicted of illegal entry to or presence in the United States.
Criminal justice reform seeks to address structural issues in criminal justice systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism. Criminal justice reform can take place at any point where the criminal justice system intervenes in citizens’ lives, including lawmaking, policing, and sentencing.
The First Step Act, formally known as the Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person Act, is a bipartisan criminal justice bill passed by the 115th U.S. Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in December 2018. The act enacted several changes in U.S. federal criminal law aimed at reforming federal prisons and sentencing laws in order to reduce recidivism, decreasing the federal inmate population, and maintaining public safety.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Decarceration in the United States involves government policies and community campaigns aimed at reducing the number of people held in custody or custodial supervision. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, also entails reducing the rate of imprisonment at the federal, state and municipal level. As of 2019, the US was home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. possessed the world's highest incarceration rate: 655 inmates for every 100,000 people, enough inmates to equal the populations of Philadelphia or Houston. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated the discussion surrounding decarceration as the spread of the virus poses a threat to the health of those incarcerated in prisons and detention centers where the ability to properly socially distance is limited. As a result of the push for decarceration in the wake of the pandemic, as of 2022, the incarceration rate in the United States declined to 505 per 100,000, resulting in the United States no longer having the highest incarceration rate in the world, but still remaining in the top five.
Prisoners' Justice Day is a solidarity movement that takes place annually on August 10. The movement began in Canada in 1974 in support of prisoners’ rights and to remember all the people who have died of unnatural deaths while incarcerated. The first Prisoners' Justice Day was held at the Millhaven Institution on August 10, 1975, on the first anniversary of Edward Nalon's death. In addition to a day of mourning, six prisoners took part in an eighteen-day hunger strike. In 1976, August 10 was recognized as a memorial day where prisoners would strike in opposition to the use of solitary confinement and to protest inmate conditions within the Prison System by going on a one-day hunger strike and refusing to work.
