Sentencing was immediate and usually public. However, in the 19thcentury, the rehabilitative ideology emerged with the concept that convicts themselves were victims of social and environmental conditions out of their control (Coy 989). .

             Early prisons that developed in the 19thcentury as permanent detention centers were constructed on that premise, held by early reformers. Rehabilitation developed out of the predominant cultural and religious ideals of those reformers and social activists (Sullivan 56). Since then, rehabilitation has been a part of the American justice system. To point, incarceration has developed in the intervening years into the predominant form of social correction (Coy 992). Rehabilitation is built partly on the idea that individuals are not fully to blame for their circumstances and thus deserve another chance to get it right. More so, however, is the legal concept of intent that is intimately tied up with rehabilitation. This is the idea that an act is criminal if the individual willfully commits the act. Rehabilitation assumes that if one can change the intentions of a prisoner, then the prisoner can be changed as well. In this way, prisons have become a social mechanism by which re-socialization is touted as an ideal (Coy 1014). Within a prison, guards and wardens can reinforce social norms and break down anti-social and criminal behavior. That is the theory behind rehabilitation as an ideal in America, at least. Whether or not the prisons are up to this significant task is unclear.

             On the matter of the effectiveness of modern prisons as rehabilitators, there is little debate that the current system is not working. An ex-felon turned lawyer named James Hamm concluded that prisons are run on economies of scale that have the effect of producing recidivism. Additionally, Hamm points out that the mission statement of American prisons is woefully limited.