One of the main reasons they say torture or hanging was used is because crime rates were rising and there was not enough space in prisons …show more content…
There have been many articles stating this way of punishment is inhumane and that is the reason we do not use it anymore, and look at it as a dark time in our past.”The now-dominant revisionist theory of penal change posits that the penitentiary, as a paradigmatic bureaucratic institution, arose due to a dramatic change away from inefficient punishments, such as public executions and torture, toward a sensibility of effective control and widespread surveillance”. ( Willis 3) . they thought this would work and it lasted for a while, “The evidence for this view of the penitentiary (and bureaucracy) lies primarily in the observation that this institution developed between 1780 and 1840 in conjunction with new ideas about discipline, inspection, and expert knowledge-ideas that were animated by prominent and zealous prison reformers.” ( Willis …show more content…
One reason they were treated different was because men were the only people in the government. In eighteenth-century England, government was in the hands of a small group of men with enormous economic and political power. Less than 3 percent of the adult male population were rich enough to be legally entitled to act as justices of the peace, or even to hunt game, another prerogative of gentlemen. An even smaller proportion of the most wealthy, the two hundred families of the peerage, dominated both houses of Parliament.( Hay 3) Having less than 200 families controlling all of the government caused some of these issues and also taught younger people to be just like them and to keep the tradition going. They enacted a very extensive capital code in the eighteenth century, and replaced it by the penitentiary in the nineteenth. The rest of the population, the majority, were known simply as "the labouring poor" when they were quiet, and as "the mob" when they were not. Without political rights, they were also the object of the abundant criminal legislation of the period.(Hay 3)
Another problem in the 1800s was the views people had, they thought it was ok to do this, so they continued doing it. It is easy, if unwise, to assume consensus about the criminal law in a modern society,