I began this book with a question that I had asked myself all those years ago when I first walked into Edinburgh Prison: ‘What is this place we call the prison?’ In the course of the succeeding chapters I have described the daily reality of imprisonment which I have observed over a period of almost 50 years in a variety of countries in different regions of the world. Now I have to attempt to answer my own opening question and also, looking forward, to respond to a further question: ‘What is the future of the prison?’

A brief historical review

Prison systems as they exist today in many countries had their genesis particularly in North America and Western Europe at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. Before that time prisons or jails had existed as places of confinement where the accused awaited trial or the convicted were held until a debt was paid or for execution or transportation, but it was rare that people were sentenced by a court to a term of imprisonment as punishment for an offence or crime (Morris and Rothman, 1995: vii). Over time concerned individuals in Europe and North America, many of them acting out of a sense of religious conviction, began to draw attention to the abysmal conditions in the prisons, most of which were run by local governments and some of which were privately managed, and slowly the conditions in some of these places of detention began to improve (Howard, 1777). One of the unforeseen consequences of these improvements was that courts began to make more use of prison and to sentence offenders directly to prison as punishment for crime.

In many other regions of the world there was little concept of the prison except as a place of short-term detention. In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was colonial powers which brought the practice of imprisonment to many of the nations which they ruled at the time. This legacy persists even today and many prisons in sub-Saharan Africa or South East Asia still have identical layouts which confirm their colonial history.