François Baillairgé's ( see Baillairgé family) plan for the prison at Québec City (opened 1809) was dominated by communal living spaces but offered some individual cells and a measure of classification by sex and type of crime. The principles behind penitentiaries, promoted by late 18th-century English prison reformers under the leadership of the High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, John Howard, affected British prison architecture for 150 years and began to affect Canadian design early in the 19th century. It was expected that penitentiaries would act as deterrents to crime. These institutions had to accommodate labour programs (which taught work habits and helped to maintain the institution), the classification of inmates by sex, age and level of criminality, and the principle of individual cellular confinement (one inmate per cell). Buildings were designed to be supervised by paid staff.
#Prison architect regime windows#
An early example, at Trois-Rivières, Québec (1822), is a national historic site whose classical Palladian appearance is belied by the iron bars on the windows that announce its function.Īfter the passing of Britain's 1779 Penitentiary Act, which made imprisonment an alternative to traditional sentences, a new type of prison emerged - the penitentiary. Strong-box jails, whose purpose was primarily the secure holding of individual prisoners, were designed into the 19th century, mainly to serve municipalities. Often placed in existing facilities such as military works, which offered appropriate levels of security, pre-1800 prisons usually consisted of large open rooms where inmates lived communally in unsupervised and unsanitary conditions. In 18th-century England, transportation to penal settlements in the thirteen colonies (and, after American independence, Australia) became an increasingly popular penalty because it removed the guilty from local society length of sentence and destination reflected the severity with which the court viewed the offence.īefore 1800, prisons in the North American colonies, like those in the motherlands, were used for short-term detention. Courts, following English and French practice, imposed sentences including fines, personal mutilation such as flogging or branding, and death. Throughout the French regime and in the early decades of British rule, imprisonment was a means of detaining debtors to ensure payment, the accused before trial, or the guilty before punishment. Prisons have evolved from simple places for incarceration (where protection of the public is paramount) to instruments of punishment (where deprivation of liberty is the penalty for breaking the law), to settings for reform (where attempts are made to mould the guilty to conform with society's norms). Prison architecture reflects society's changing attitudes toward crime and punishment.
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