Prison Reform Essay

Reform was a major issue in early 19th century America because it was a time when more middle-classed Americans were able to devote time to social causes and issues that they saw that concerned them. One of these important social movements was prison reform, and how men and women in prison were treated. In the early 1800’s the United States was regarded as having the best penal system in the world. This is why during the early 1800’s Alexis de Tocqueville was sent from France to the United States to study the penal system there. What he was coming here to study was how the system of prisons had been reformed already by Americans. Many individuals, in particular religious advocates who took up the cause of prison reform, had established themselves as the voice of prisoners. They felt that while prisoners needed to do time for their crimes and be punished accordingly, they also had the right to have good conditions within the prisons themselves. These people had a goal of creating prisons that were conducive to not only punishing individuals, but reforming them became an important part of their time in prison. These religious reformers felt that prisoners should be reformed to become good citizens and, if they never left jail, then at least they could be religious individuals.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The successes of these reformers were that they did create a great amount of interest in reform. Many new prisons began to be built that would be more conducive to reforming prisoners. These successes were shortly lived, however, because sadly the prisons did not go up as quickly as the prisoners were going in and therefore old prisons that were not good conditions were still in use, and many prisoners still languished in them, in even worse conditions than before.