prison

a place of confinement for persons sentenced to the penalty of deprivation of freedom. Prisons are also used for the detention of persons under investigation.

While incarceration—in dungeons, for example—has been practiced since earliest antiquity, the modern bourgeois prison system came into being with the establishment of capitalism; previously, under the slaveholding or feudal system, the usual punishment was mutilation or, alternatively, compensation for damages in the form of an equivalent amount of property. The practice of incarceration in a dungeon or fortified enclosure or tower was relatively rare. More commonly, deprivation of freedom took the form of a term of penal servitude, which consisted of such hard labor as mining, road construction, or rowing on galleys.

Prisons were first used for confinement in Europe in the 16th century (a prison called Tuchthuis was founded in the Netherlands in 1595). The original purpose of isolation by imprisonment was to deter criminals and render them harmless. With the growth of the prison population, men were separated from women and adult convicts from minors; prisoners were also separated according to the type of crime committed and the length of sentence.

A special discipline has been developed in bourgeois criminal law—namely, penology, which includes the study of prison systems and such aspects of imprisonment as its effect on criminals. Over time, the penalty of imprisonment has changed in its institutional forms and conditions, as represented by the various existing penitentiary and prison systems. In the modern capitalist countries, the penalty of deprivation of freedom predominantly takes the form of confinement in prison.

In the USSR, persons sentenced to deprivation of freedom customarily serve their terms in correctional labor colonies.