<P> According to social and legal historian Adam J. Hirsch, the rationalists had only a secondary impact on United States penal practices . But their ideas--whether consciously adopted by United States prison reformers or not--resonate in various United States penal initiatives to the present day . </P> <P> Although convicts played a significant role in British settlement of North America, according to legal historian Adam J. Hirsch "(t) he wholesale incarceration of criminals is in truth a comparatively recent episode in the history of Anglo - American jurisprudence ." Imprisonment facilities were present from the earliest English settlement of North America, but the fundamental purpose of these facilities changed in the early years of United States legal history as a result of a geographically widespread "penitentiary" movement . The form and function of prison systems in the United States has continued to change as a result of political and scientific developments, as well as notable reform movements during the Jacksonian Era, Reconstruction Era, Progressive Era, and the 1970s . But the status of penal incarceration as the primary mechanism for criminal punishment has remained the same since its first emergence in the wake of the American Revolution . </P> <P> Prisoners and prisons appeared in North America simultaneous to the arrival of European settlers . Among the ninety or so men who sailed with the explorer known as Christopher Columbus were a young black man abducted from the Canary Islands and at least four convicts . By 1570, Spanish soldiers in St. Augustine, Florida, had built the first substantial prison in North America . As other European nations began to compete with Spain for land and wealth in the New World, they too turned to convicts to fill out the crews on their ships . </P> <P> According to social historian Marie Gottschalk, convicts were "indispensable" to English settlement efforts in what is now the United States . In the late sixteenth century, Richard Hakluyt called for the large - scale conscription of criminals to settle the New World for England . But official action on Haklyut's proposal lagged until 1606, when the English crown escalated its colonization efforts . </P>

When was the first prison built in the united states