The Pros And Cons Of Prison Camps During The Civil War

After the Civil War, the South’s economy, society, and government were in shambles. Southern state governments struggled to raise money to repair damaged infrastructure and to support new expenses such as universal public education. The prison problem was especially challenging, as most prisons had been destroyed during the war. Previously, African-American slaves had been subjected to the punishments at the hands of their owners. With government ineffectiveness and an increase in both white and black lawlessness, the problem of where and how to house convicts was

The conditions of the camp were unbearable. The prisoners were barely fed, mainly bread and water, and were cramped in small sleeping arrangements. "Hundreds slept in triple-tiered rows of bunks (Adler 51)." In the quarters that they stayed, there were no adequate cleaning facilities or restrooms for the prisoners. They rarely were able to change clothes which meant the "clothes were always infested with lice (Swiebocka 18)." Those were sick went to the infirmary where also there were eventually killed in the gas chambers or a lethal injection. The Germans did not want to have anyone not capable of hard work to live. Prisoners were also harshly punished for small things such as taking food or "relieving themselves during work hours (Swiebocka 19)." The biggest punishment was execution. The most common punishment was to receive lashings with a whip.

A example of a pre-modern camp would be a camp called Sumter prison or more commonly known as andersonville prison due to its location in andersonville, Georgia. From the beginning it opened in the february of 1864, IT quickly began to gain a reputation as the most notorious POW “prisoner of war” camp in the U.S. It was a confederate prison during the Civil war that Imprisoned nearly 45,000 union soldiers over the course of the war. Out of the 10’s of thousands that were “nearly 13,000 died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition,

Historian Watson interviewed a survivor of the Walnut Street Jail some years after the War's end. The veteran, Jacob Ritter, recalled that prisoners were fed nothing for days on end and were regularly targets of beatings by the British guards. The prison was freezing as broken window panes allowed snow and cold to be the only blankets available to the captives. Ice, lice, and mice shared the cells. Desperate prisoners dined on grass roots, scraps of leather, and "pieces of a rotten pump." Rats were a delicacy. Upward of a dozen prisoners died daily. They were hauled across the street and slung in unmarked trenches like carcasses from an abattoir.

Elmira civil war prison originally started out as a training center for Union soldiers. Elmira was chosen because of its key location that has several rail lines running in and out of town. Then the training camp was converted into a prisoner of war camp for confederates. Michael P. Gray tells the stories or many prisoners lives while in the camp in his doctorial dissertation, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison. Gray shows in the book how the poorly managed prison affected the economy of the previously small town of Elmira and the confederate prisoners of wars’ health.

The camp was built by slave labor on 16 acres, later expanded to 26 acres, and was formally called “Camp Sumter” by the Confederacy. Andersonville was designed to imprison up to 10,000 “overflow” prisoners from elsewhere, but its inmate population climbed to 3 times that amount leave to about 33,000 prisoners by the end of the summer of 1864. Furthermore, its physical design was fatally flawed to begin with. In addition to the absence of any system for waste disposal within the camp, a creek flowing through the camp delivered upstream waste from the military camp where Andersonville guards were stationed. By the end of the war, 13,000 Andersonville prisoners (30 percent of the camp’s population) had died from a variety of diseases such as

Union Camps in the Civil War aided the union in winning. Civil war camps are extremely underrated, people tend to focus more on battles and leaders, but, Camps had been just as important, only a short part of a soldier's time was fighting the rest of the time they were in camps.

Robert H. Kellogg, who was a sergeant major, described his entry as a prisoner into the camp on May 2nd, 1864: “As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect; stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness. "Can this be hell?" "God protect us!" and all thought that He alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then.”

After they got to the camps, they were forced to face unsanitary living conditions. People were shocked to see the conditions of the camps. Many people actually died because of the unsanitary conditions. There were also many health issues that were the result of the conditions of the camps, one author says, “Long-term health consequences included psychological anguish, as well as increased cardiovascular disease” (Gwendolyn M. Jensen). One reason that the conditions were so terrible was because of the amount of people that were being stuffed into the camps. There were over 122,000 Japanese Americans being shoved into only ten camps around the country. These camps were located in California, Colorado, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona, and Arkansas.

The prisons we typically think of in modern American society are distinctly and majorly different from the Stalinist labor camp Ivan Denisovich Shukhov presides in the book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but all prisons have four major purposes. These purposes are retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. By rating the prison camp that Shukhov resided in for 3,653 days, a greater understanding of the negative impact placed on Shukhov can be granted. Before stating how well the specific prison camp followed each of these purposes, I will first go into further detail into what each of these purposes includes in order to provide a rubric when grading the Stalinist prison camp.

(Prisoners Of War or POW) were taken to a prison where it’s unsanitary and caused more deaths than proper combat, although you could say that sickness is a battle though. Many terrible treatments varied when soldiers were captured on European battlefields, they might face: ransoms, starvation, slavery, sickness, and possibly execution.

The United States is home to five percent of the world population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoner. There must be a change to the current prison system which is doing more harm than good in American society and must be reformed. Reasons for this claim are that American prisons are too overcrowded with inmates, which creates a dangerous and unhuman environment. The cost to run a prison has gotten too expensive for tax payer pockets, and lastly the prison system is more as a punishment instead of rehabilitation with about sixteen percent of inmates most serious offence being drug charges. Prisons fall short of reforming criminals and the government is obligated to completely reform the prison systems in the United States.

During World War Two both axis and allied powers had prisoners of war. The axis powers were more brutal and abusive then the allies. Prisoners were put in prisons called concentration camps. Prisoners would be packed into building called barracks and many slept in the same space with thin blankets. There were no mattresses and just wood to sleep on. People slept in bunks that were two to three beds high. Prisoners would get few hours of sleep and beds would crash on top of each other in people's sleep due to them being built fast and cheap. The barrack were cold and were heated only by a small coal

Approximately 155 base camps and 511 branch camps were constructed across the United States to accommodate the influx of POWs. Base camps were large compounds established for the duration of the war, and they served as the administrative headquarters for branch camps in a particular area. Wherever possible, existing housing on military installations was used as base POW camps. These camps were located in areas that assured maximum employment for prisoners. Branch camps, usually much smaller in size, existed on a semi-permanent or temporary basis to satisfy a specific work need at sites remote from the base camp.1

“The only place I could listen properly was in our dorm” “it was a sort of rule we couldn’t close dorm doors completely except for when we were sleeping (70, 71)