<P> Incarceration as a form of criminal punishment is `` a comparatively recent episode in Anglo - American jurisprudence , '' according to historian Adam J. Hirsch . Before the nineteenth century , sentences of penal confinement were rare in the criminal courts of British North America . But penal incarceration had been utilized in England as early as the reign of the Tudors , if not before . When post-revolutionary prisons emerged in United States , they were , in Hirsch 's words , not a `` fundamental departure '' from the former American colonies ' intellectual past . Early American prisons systems like Massachusetts ' Castle Island Penitentiary , built in 1780 , essentially imitated the model of the 1500s English workhouse . </P>
which was the first prison designed to house sentenced offenders in the united states called
Massachusetts ' Castle Island Penitentiary ,