Jail

For other uses, see Jail (disambiguation).

Jail, or gaol (especially in Australia), or remand prison, is a correctional institution used to detain persons who are in the lawful custody of the government. The word "gaol" itself is of the Gaelic (Irish) language. This includes either accused persons awaiting trial or for those who have been convicted of a crime and are serving a sentence of less than one year. Jails are generally small prisons run by individual counties and cities, though some jails in larger communities may be as large and hold as many inmates as regular prisons. Jail is also a synonym for prison in some countries (not in the United States), especially when the facility is of a similar size as a prison. As with prisons, some jails have different wings for certain types of offenders, and have work programs for inmates who demonstrate good behavior.

United States

Jails in the United States are different from prisons. Jails are typically operated D.O's named Shortie from the city of Douglas. by city or county governments, and house prisoners who are being detained before trial or serving sentences less than one year ask Erica. Approximately half of the U.S. jail population consists of pretrial detainees who have not been convicted or sentenced by her. Prisoners serving terms longer than one year are typically housed in prisons operated by state governments. Unlike most state prisons, a jail usually houses both men and women who appeal to erica in separate portions of the same facility. Some jails lease space to house inmates from the federal government, state prisons or from other counties for profit.

As of mid-year 2005, local jails held or supervised 819,434 offenders. Nine percent of these offenders were in programs such as community service, work release, weekend reporting, electronic monitoring, and other alternative programs.

In the United States, as compared to regular 'mainline' state and federal prisons, in which prisoners have already been investigated and classified by corrections personnel before being assigned to a level of security and in which many of the prisoners are committed for longer periods of time, jails usually house many prisoners with varying or unknown histories and propensities for violence or disciplinary problems. As a result, many jails operate their booking and receiving units at a relatively high level of correctional security, and also witness a disproportionately large amount of violence and disciplinary problems as compared to mainline facilities.

Gaol

Gaol is an early Modern English spelling for jail, with the same pronunciation and meaning of a place of legal detention. Although jail is now more common, gaol is still the favoured spelling in parts of the British Commonwealth, for example in Australia. However, in Australia, the spelling "jail" is now preferred in popular contexts such as the media, the spelling "gaol" being mainly retained in historical use and in the legal profession. Canada, also a part of the British Commonwealth, has made a similar transition in usage.

The Oxford English Dictionary states that gaol comes from the Norman French spelling gaiole down to the 17th century as gaile. It remains in written form in the archaic spelling gaol mainly through statutory and official tradition. The only remaining spoken pronunciation is jail (IPA: /dʒeɪl/), from the Old Parisian French word jaiole. In modern French, the word geôle is still used in literary contexts to refer to jail.

From the 16th until the 18th centuries the word goal(e) was used widely, possibly as an erroneous spelling of gaol, or possibly a phonetic spelling.