What is "house of correction"

Correction \Cor*rec"tion\ (k?r-r?k"sh?n), n. [L. correctio: cf. F. correction.]

1. The act of correcting, or making that right which was wrong; change for the better; amendment; rectification, as of an erroneous statement.

   The due correction of swearing, rioting, neglect of God's word, and other scandalouss vices.
   --Strype.

2. The act of reproving or punishing, or that which is intended to rectify or to cure faults; punishment; discipline; chastisement.

   Correction and instruction must both work Ere this rude beast will profit.
   --Shak.

3. That which is substituted in the place of what is wrong; an emendation; as, the corrections on a proof sheet should be set in the margin.

4. Abatement of noxious qualities; the counteraction of what is inconvenient or hurtful in its effects; as, the correction of acidity in the stomach.

5. An allowance made for inaccuracy in an instrument; as, chronometer correction; compass correction.

   Correction line (Surv.), a parallel used as a new base line in laying out township in the government lands of the United States. The adoption at certain intervals of a correction line is necessitated by the convergence of of meridians, and the statute requirement that the townships must be squares.

   House of correction, a house where disorderly persons are confined; a bridewell.

   Under correction, subject to correction; admitting the possibility of error.

n. A residential penitentiary facility, an institution where criminals or wayward people (notably youth) are sent to have their ways 'corrected' trough a penal regime officially intended to reeducate them

n. (formerly) a jail or other place of detention for persons convicted of minor offences

The house of correction was a type of establishment built after the passing of the Elizabethan Poor Law (1601), places where those who were "unwilling to work", including vagrants and beggars, were set to work. The building of houses of correction came after the passing of an amendment to the Elizabethan Poor Law. However the houses of correction were not considered a part of the Elizabethan Poor Law system because the Act distinguished between settled poor and wandering poor. The first London house of correction was Bridewell Prison, and the Middlesex and Westminster houses also opened in the early seventeenth century.

Due to the first reformation of manners campaign, the late seventeenth century was marked by the growth in the number of houses of correction which were often generically termed bridewells established and by the passage of numerous statutes prescribing houses of correction as the punishment for specific minor offences.

Offenders were typically committed to houses of correction by Justices of the Peace, who used their powers of summary jurisdiction with respect to minor offences. In the Middlesex and Westminster houses of correction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the most common charges against prisoners were prostitution, petty theft, and "loose, idle and disorderly conduct" (a loosely defined offence which could involve a wide range of misbehaviour). Over two-thirds of the prisoners were female.

More than half of offenders were released within a week, and two-thirds within two weeks. In addition to imprisonment in a house of correction, over half of the convicted were whipped, particularly those found guilty of theft, vagrancy, and lewd conduct and nightwalking (prostitution).

Virtually all the prisoners were required to do hard labour, typically beating hemp.

In 1720 an act allowed the use of houses of corrections for pretrial detention of "vagrants, and other criminals, offenders, and persons charged with small offences". By the 1760s and 1770s, prisoners awaiting trial accounted for more than three-quarters of those committed to the Middlesex and Westminster houses.

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the term house of correction remains synonymous with state jails. The same is true for the State of Maryland.