Guest Feature : THE PRISON - A HOME OR A DUNGEON ?

Prisons are essential parts of our social system and they play a crucial role in the social life as well as political and economic life of every individual. One may ask whether prison existed long time ago or not and what actually it is. 

Prison which can also be called a correctional facility, penitentiary or jail is a facility in which inmates are forcibly confined and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state as a form of punishment.

The beginning of prisons can be traced back to the risk of the state as a form of social organization. The Romans were among the first to use prisons as a form of punishment, rather than simply for detention. A variety of existing structures were used to house prisoners, such as metal cages, basements of public buildings and quarries.

However, the concept of modern prison largely remained unknown until the early 19th-century.

Punishment usually consisted of physical forms of punishment including capital punishment, mutilation and whipping, branding and non-physical punishments such as public shaming rituals like the stocks. The global prison population has risen in the last three decades with about ten million people worldwide now in jails and prisons. Specifically in Ghana, there is an increasing level of inmates in prison due to past government refusal to execute the death penalty since 1993.

Some prisons in Ghana are the Nsawam, Ho, Tamale, Cape Coast, Kumasi prisons to mention but a few. People, who commit crimes, it is widely believed, deserve to be punished. Ordinarily,ideas about public safety have it that sending people to prison enhances public safety: by rehabilitating them and deterring others from doing wrong.

By Ice Breakers