The History of Prison

[Music] it turns out the prisons are relatively modern invention this video will explore the origins of prison how they came to be why we have them today and how they may evolve in the future enjoy

the oldest recorded legal code that we have in the archaeological record is the code of urnamu and it mentions imprisonment it was written by ancient Mesopotamians now modern-day Iraq sometime between 2100 and 2050 easy and it states that imprisonment is the appropriate punishment for kidnapping now to put that time period into context this was

farther away in time between when it was written and when Jesus was alive then when Jesus was alive and today which is to say it's pretty dang old although in another sense it could be considered relatively recent as modern humans are thought to have existed here on Earth anywhere from two hundred thousand to

three hundred thousand years note this number keeps getting pushed back as new evidence is discovered you see for much of our history we ran around as hunter-gatherers in fact some of us still do but roughly 12 000 years ago a grand societies began a pop-off in Northern Africa and it is from this era

and region that we have the first evidence of writing and in case you didn't know history officially means the time after writing began and the time before writing is considered pre-history or prehistoric but I digress while it is impossible to know whether or not prehistoric humans had prison it is highly likely that they did not first

none of the hunter-gatherers societies that still exist today such as the sentinelese off the coast of India or the torimona in South America have prisons it stands to reason that if these tribes don't have presence now then they did it in prehistoric times either also none of the various descriptions of Native American and