Editing Prison reform (section)

====Continental countries====
The first public prison in Europe was ''Le Stinche'' in Florence, constructed in 1297, copied in several other cities. The more modern use grew from the prison [[workhouse]] (known as the [[Rasphuis]]) from 1600 in Holland. The house was normally managed by a married couple, the 'father' and 'mother', usually with a work master and discipline master. The inmates, or [[journeymen]], often spent their time on spinning, weaving and fabricating cloths and their output was measured and those who exceeded the minimum received a small sum of money with which they could buy extras from the indoor father.<ref>{{harvnb|Morris|Rothman|1995|pp=68–72}}</ref>

An exception to the rule of forced labor were those inmates whose families could not look after them and paid for them to be in the workhouse. From the later 17th century private institutions for the insane, called the ''beterhuis'', developed to meet this need.

In Hamburg, a different pattern occurred with the ''spinhaus'' in 1669, to which only infamous criminals were admitted. This was paid by the public treasury and the pattern spread in eighteenth-century Germany. In France the use of [[galley slave|galley servitude]] was most common until galleys were abolished in 1748. After this the condemned were put to work in naval [[arsenal]]s doing heavy work. Confinement originated from the ''hôpitaux généraux'' which were mostly asylums, though in Paris they included many convicts, and persisted up till the [[French Revolution]].

The use of capital punishment and [[judicial torture]] declined during the eighteenth century and imprisonment came to dominate the system, although reform movements started almost immediately. Many countries were committed to the goal as a financially self-sustaining institution and the organization was often subcontracted to entrepreneurs, though this created its own tensions and abuse. By the mid nineteenth century several countries had initiated experiments in allowing the prisoners to choose the trades in which they were to be apprenticed. The growing amount of [[recidivism]] in the latter half of the nineteenth century led a number of [[criminologist]]s to argue that "imprisonment did not, and could not fulfill its original ideal of treatment aimed at reintegrating the offender into the community."<ref>{{harvnb|Morris|Rothman|1995|pp=210}}</ref> Belgium led the way in introducing the [[suspended sentence]] for first-time offenders in 1888, followed by France in 1891 and most other countries in the next few years. [[Parole]] had been introduced on an experimental basis in France in the 1830s, with laws for juveniles introduced in 1850, and Portugal began to use it for adult criminals from 1861. The parole system introduced in France in 1885 made use of a strong private patronage network. Parole was approved throughout Europe at the [[International Prison Congress]] of 1910. As a result of these reforms the prison populations of many European countries halved in the first half of the twentieth century.

Exceptions to this trend included France and Italy between the world wars, when there was a huge increase in the use of imprisonment. The National Socialist state in Germany used it as an important tool to rid itself of its enemies as crime rates rocketed as a consequence of new categories of criminal behavior. Russia, which had only started to reform its penal and judicial system in 1860 by abolishing corporal punishment, continued the use of exile with hard labor as a punishment and this was increased to a new level of brutality under [[Joseph Stalin]], despite early reforms by the [[Bolsheviks]].

Postwar reforms stressed the need for the state to tailor punishment to the individual convicted criminal. In 1965, Sweden enacted a new criminal code emphasizing non-institutional alternatives to punishment including conditional sentences, [[probation]] for first-time offenders and the more extensive use of [[Fine (penalty)|fines]]. The use of probation caused a dramatic decline in the number women serving long-term sentences: in France the number fell from 5,231 in 1946 to 1,121 in 1980. Probation spread to most European countries though the level of surveillance varies. In the Netherlands, religious and philanthropic groups are responsible for much of the probationary care. The Dutch government invests heavily in correctional personnel, having 3,100 for 4,500 prisoners in 1959.<ref>{{harvnb|Morris|Rothman|1995|pp=218–222}}</ref>

However, despite these reforms, numbers in prison started to grow again after the 1960s even in countries committed to non-custodial policies.