The long and winding road: how prisons were born in America[The guards here believe that] the harder, colder, crueler and more inhuman a place is, the less chance that a person returns. This is not true. The more negative experiences a person goes through, the more they turn into a violent, cruel, mean and heartless individual, I know this to be a fact – Anonymous Prisoner, “The Trauma of Prison Rape” (Mode 130) The prisoner described the he experience the truth about prisons as he is experiencing them now, whereas the original intentions of the Quakers had something very different in mind. The Quakers, led by William Penn, were the first group to establish an institutionalized system in the United States that dealt with punishment. Since the original plans for the prison system were developed, the goal and intentions have been reformed over and over again. Although prisons are supposed to be a place of rehabilitation, the reality is that they are actually a hotbed for spurring criminals to become more violent than when they were first admitted. Before prisons were even implemented in America, colonists had quite a different approach to punishment which led to the birth of prisons. The original view of criminals stemmed from the settlers' religious belief that criminals were sinners and workers of the devil. The settlers felt they needed to be protected from the devil's workforce and therefore criminals had to have their name silenced, be driven from the city or, in the most extreme cases, be hanged. Before settlers accepted institutions, they looked to public humiliation as a means of correcting minor criminals. The harshest punishments, such as death, were inflicted on people deemed irredeemable. But as the population grew due to the industrialization of cities, citizens became less and less familiar with each other. With less recognition among citizens, the thought of public humiliation as punishment was weakening as a threat. Beyond that, people were growing tired of the fact that capital punishment may have been too barbaric and overall ineffective. However, the colonists were not yet completely convinced about using prisons. The hesitation was the result of the community's sense that most of the men were unsalvageable and that institutionalizing them would only be rewarding. However, this conception began to crumble in the late 1600s, when Pennsylvania Quakers came up with a plan that would eventually be accepted..