—Introduction

Corrections, in its most rudimentary form, is approximately 300 to 400 years old beginning, for purposes of American Corrections, in eighteenth-century England. The initial era of corrections offered less than humane conditions of incarceration and included corporal and capital punishment as well as exile to first American and then Australian colonies. Mixing men, women, and children together in overcrowded facilities resulted in hunger, rape, and other forms of degradation and violence. These conditions often created an atmosphere of unrelenting despair and depravity. Persons like John Howard (1726-1790), the Quaker, Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845), Captain Alexander Maconochie (1787-1860), Sir Walter Crofton (1815-1897), and John Augustus (1784-1859) made noteworthy efforts to restore a sense of humanity and create hope in the evolution of correctional process.1 They, and others like them, experienced only limited success, but more importantly, they planted the seeds of hope’s possibilities. Such possibilities have been reflected in the more recent rehabilitation, peacemaking, and restorative justice movements.