Was imprisonment- like what we have today, long term, sentences

>>1908840

No. No pre-enlightenment society I'm aware of (and damn few of them) used imprisonment as an actual judicial penalty for crimes. You'd have people kept as prisoners of war until ransoms or some other conditions were made, and you would have people held until a trial could be convened, but it was simply a way to keep the prisoner there until some further arrangement could be made.

Punishments themselves were usually either financial, corporal, or capital.

>>1908840
Both Rome and China used long term imprisonments as punishments.

However most of the time you spent incarcerated is done doing government manual labor. Like in mines, quarries, or transporting loads of stone etc. Ergo: outside bars. You are housed in a prison though.

Imprisonment truly is a luxury of centralized organized civilizations, and not tribals or feudalcuck states.

>>1908840

locking people up in boxes, cages, cells, throwing them into holes and so on, was the most normal thing for thousands and thousands of years

justice was ooga booga tier for a long time and mostly based on mob justice and eye for an eye


so no there were no prisons or courts or police if you kill your neighbor in your village everyone else would just kill you

File: 14291641_1247005628705490_2655051920188129182_n.jpg (32KB, 480x389px) Image search: [Google]

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>>1908840

Generally, in the middle ages, common criminals weren't kept that long in prison.

Either they were hanged, beheaded, had their hands cut off, blinded, or whipped beyond recognition. They just didn't keep them around.

That said, if you were a noble of royal blood, you were kept around in a tower. It was bad juju to kill a noble unless he committed treason and it was really bad to kill off royal persons (not that that it happened on occasion it just wasn't official practice).

That said, modern prisons are a good idea for the governments. It reduces the market for labor and therefore reduces unemployment.

Bonus points if you can use prison labor for profit.

>>1908840

You are correct in that older societies rarely had large prison complexes like the one pictured in the OP image. For minor crimes, physical punishments like whipping or humiliation like pillory, etc were normal. For major crimes, you were simply killed. And of course, if you pissed off somebody with wealth, authority, etc then you could potentially be thrown in some kind of dungeon for the rest of your life. But imprisoning large groups of people for extended periods of time has historically been pretty rare.

>>1908856

how do you know people didnt have elaborate customs and autistic rules about such things?

File: Roman Coal Mine.jpg (241KB, 960x570px) Image search: [Google]

241KB, 960x570px

>>1908840
Romans and Ancient Chinese had imprisonment IIRC. but you're basically a government slave for much of your sentence.

China even had frontier postings of convict soldiers along the Steppe Border.

>>1908865
>Reduces unemployment
>Employ prisoners
Thinking emoji.

>>1908880
What were romans mining coal for?

>>1908856
>justice was ooga booga tier for a long time
>was

>>1908888
It's funny cuz there was french rioting on the matter of prison workhouses, cuz they were taking jobs away from non-criminals.

>>1908893
Nigga, coal has always been boss for lighting shit on fire.

>>1909425
Yes but most niggas use charcoal for that. Which is taken from trees.

The earliest switch to using mined coal to fire up furnaces dates back to the 4th Century busy, either in Rome or China when the two empires had problems with deforastation caused by all those charcoal makers.