Chapter 13 Vocab

Prison

A state or federal confinement facility that has custodial authority over adults sentenced to confinement.

Lex Talionis

The law of retaliation, often expressed as "an eye for an eye" or "like for like.

Workhouse

An early form of imprisonment whose purpose was to instill habits of industry in the idle.

Pennsylvania System

A form of imprisonment developed by the Pennsylvania Quakers around 1790 as an alternative to corporal punishments. This style of imprisonment made use of solitary confinement and encouraged rehabilitation.

Auburn System

A form of imprisonment developed in New York State around 1820 that depended on mass prisons, where prisoners were held in congregate fashion and required to remain silent.

Reformatory Style

A late-nineteenth-century correctional model based on the use of the indeterminate sentence and the belief in the possibility of rehabilitation, especially for youthful offenders.

Industrial Prison

A correctional model intended to capitalize on the labor of convicts sentenced to confinement.

State-use System

A form of inmate labor in which items produced by inmates may only be sold by or to state offices.

Ashurst-Sumners Act

Federal legislation of 1935 that effectively ended the industrial prison era by restricting interstate commerce in prison-made goods.

Medical Model

A therapeutic perspective on correctional treatment that applies the diagnostic perspective of medical science to the handling of criminal offenders.

Work Release

A prison program through which inmates are temporarily released into the community to meet job responsibilities.

Warehousing

An imprisonment strategy that is based on the desire to prevent recurrent crime and that has abandoned all hope or rehabilitation.

Nothing-Works Doctrine

The belief, popularized by Robert Martinson in the 1970's, that correctional treatment programs have had little success in rehabilitating offenders.

Justice Model

A contemporary model of imprisonment based on the principle of just deserts.

Prison Capacity

The size of the correctional population an institution can effectively hold. There are three types: rated, operational, and design.

Rated Capacity

The number of inmates a prison can handle according to the judgement of experts.

Operational Capacity

The number of inmates a prison can effectively accommodate based on management considerations.

Design Capacity

The number of inmates a prison was intended to hold when it was built or modified.

Classification System

A system used by prison administrators to assign inmates to custody levels based on offense history, assessed dangerousness, perceived risk of escape, and other factors.

ADMAX

Administrative maximum. The term is used by the federal government to denote ultra-high-security prisons.

Jail

A confinement facility administered by an agency of local government, typically a law enforcement agency, intended for adults but sometimes also containing juveniles, which holds people detained pending adjudication or committed after adjudication, usually those sentenced to a year or less.

Direct-Supervision Jail

A temporary confinement facility that eliminates many of the traditional barriers between inmates and correctional staff. Physical barriers are far less common allowing staff members the opportunity for greater interaction with, and control over, residents.

Regional Jails

A jail that is built and run using the combined resources of a variety of local jurisdictions.

Privitization

The movement toward the wider use of private prisons.

Private Prison

A correctional insitution operated by a private firm on behalf of a local or state government.