The authors' interpretation of the rationale for and the conditions of prisons in England and Europe are based in the development and dynamics of capitalism, the goals of capitalists in relation to the workforce, and the role of the state in helping capitalists achieve their goals. In Elizabethan England, houses of correction were established throughout the country so that refractory or unemployed workers could be put to work. As in Bridewell, the prototype, their population was mixed: paupers' children, so that youth could be trained to be laborers; those looking for work; petty offenders; prostitutes; and poor people who refused to work. In Holland during the first half of the 17th Century, the new institution of the workhouse reached its highest form in the period of early capitalism. Dutch workhouses became widely known as Rasp-huis, because the type of work mainly performed was the pulverization with a multiple-blade saw of a certain wood for use in dyeing textiles. Regarding later developments in England, the aim of the workhouses was to make the poor accept any conditions imposed by an employer. One of the main aims to be achieved by coerced labor since prisons first began was the decrease in wages on the outside. The organized working class' attitude toward prison work is in a history that begins where this history finishes. The further history of the prison is the history of a crisis that, like the history of the organized working class, already belongs to a different sort of capitalist society. 201 notes