- Coined
- American penal administration, mid-twentieth century, as "penitentiaries" became "departments of corrections"
- Protects
- The state from a sentence that describes what it is doing to the person inside.
A prison is a building where people are locked up. A correctional facility is a building where people are corrected. The second phrase makes a claim about results, and the claim is not supported by the results. The rename proceeded anyway, state by state, until “Department of Corrections” was the standard name for the agency that runs the prisons.
Notice the pattern, which is the Department of Defense pattern exactly. A name that described the activity was replaced with a name that asserted its justification. War became defense; confinement became correction. The justification is now built into the letterhead, and anyone who questions it must first argue with the sign on the door.
The dialect is rich: “inmate” for prisoner, “administrative segregation” for solitary confinement, “restrictive housing” for the same, “justice-involved individual” for someone who has been to prison. Each one moves the sentence a little further from a person in a cell.