In one sense they are right, since prisons
existed 2000 years before Jesus was born. "The beginning of prisons can be traced back to the rise of the state as a form of social organization. Corresponding with the advent of the state was the development of written language, which enabled the creation of formalized legal codes as official guidelines for society. The most well known of these early legal codes is the Code of Hammurabi, written in Babylon around 1750 BC. The penalties for violations of the laws in Hammurabi's Code were almost exclusively centered on the concept of
lex talionis ("the law of retaliation") where people were punished as a form of vengeance, often by the victims themselves. This notion of punishment as vengeance or retaliation can also be found in many other legal codes from early civilizations, including the ancient
Sumerian codes, the Indian
Manama Dharma Astra, the Hermes
Trismegistus of Egypt, and the
Mosaic Code." So, one could also note that prisons were part of the Judeo Christian tradition.
It was actually Plato that first came up with the idea of using prisons as reformatories. But it was
Christians of the 18th Century that promoted the idea of "Penitentiaries", "based on religious ideas that equated crime with sin, and saw prisons as a place to instruct prisoners in Christian morality, obedience and proper behavior. These later reformers believed that prisons could be constructed as humane institutions of moral instruction, and that prisoners' behavior could be "corrected" so that when they were released, they would be model members of society." So, in the larger sense, as with so many things espouse on the extreme right, they are diametrically wrong.
