Talk:Imprisonment

Clerk and Lindsell
Clerk and Lindsell says that the definition from Termes de la Lay was approved in Bird v Jones. Upon inspection of the English Reports (115 ER 668), I cannot find anything that I recognise as reference to that book. Is the report referring to that book by another name, or is what is written in Clerk and Lindsell a mistake? James500 (talk) 15:07, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

What is the article topic here?
I'm not sure what this article is about. I edited it down to a simple definition and was reverted, (and I reverted back hoping for a discussion). Obviously the common definition of imprisonment is putting someone in prison. Why is a 1527 definition there at all? This statement is meaningless without context- This passage was approved by Atkin and Duke LJJ in Meering v Grahame White Aviation Co.[2]. Also there were terrible formatting problems, inline references and pdfs. We are supposed to be writing prose in wikipedia not a list of notes. Bhny (talk) 05:45, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

This article is, at the moment, about English law, and is likely to be applicable to Anglo-American law in general (ie the United States and the Commonwealth). In English law, the definition of "imprisonment" appears to be the one given by Rastell, because it has been approved by the courts. A number of law books set it out in full. See, for example, these and "Clerk and Lindsell".

The assertion that imprisonment "usually" consists of "placing" a person "in jail" is original research. The sources offered do not say that. We would need statistical evidence of the worldwide frequency of false imprisonment versus detention in a prison. It is not clear whether a lawful arrest or other forms of custodial sentence count as "imprisonment" so we might need statistical evidence on their frequency as well.

As for "the common definition of imprisonment is putting someone in prison": This article isn't about the common definition. It is about the legal definition, which, in England at least, includes detaining a person elsewhere than in the type of institution that is called a prison. The ordinary meaning of "imprisonment" as an ordinary English word is not encyclopedic. James500 (talk) 13:35, 20 March 2014 (UTC)


 * OK, I will edit this as a law term then. Bhny (talk) 14:19, 20 March 2014 (UTC)


 * We seem to be making progress. I still don't understand what This passage was approved by means. I guess it is legal jargon. Would you be able to translate it into everyday English? Bhny (talk) 14:52, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I assume that, roughly speaking, it means that the two judges quoted it and said that it was an accurate statement of the law. The implication is that the passage now has the force of law by reason of doctrine of precedent. I'm not convinced that it is jargon. If you search GBooks for "cited with approval" and "cite with approval", you will find, in particular, works apparently about music, history, philosophy and psychology, in addition to law books. James500 (talk) 15:29, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Imprisonment vs detention
As I understand it, in English law "imprisonment" only refers to derivation of liberty as a sentence in punishment of a crime. The term usually used for temporary deprivation of liberty without formal process, e.g. by police on the street in order to answer questions, is "detention". There's also a legal difference between being arrested for interrogation and "voluntary" co-operation, the latter of which may be de facto involuntary detention due to the threat of arrest. Hairy Dude (talk) 13:58, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Clean-up
Over the years (Aug 2018, Jan 2019, Jun 2019, Oct-Nov 2021, Dec 2021) this article's been extensively edited by to advocate that the term "imprisonment" has been wrongly applied by US agencies to justify deportation on the grounds that someone's a criminal who's been sentenced to/subject to imprisonment (broadly speaking), or as the article said in Wikipedia's voice, "courts in the United States have been illegally turning petty offenses into aggravated felonies for the purpose of sending a specific group of Americans to Afghanistan so they could be tortured". The editor has adjusted the definition of "imprisonment" in the lead to further this argument and used court judgments (ie primary sources) extensively to develop it, so that much of the article and all the United States section is original research focused on this one aspect. At Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1086 it emerged that several articles were edited in this way, the editor seeing it as their moral duty to help deportees like this, and they received "an indefinite topic ban on all law-related articles, broadly construed".The History section is also theirs. It does use secondary sources, particularly the introductory history from a journal article about present-day prisons in Africa. Indeed, it sometimes quotes but also very closely paraphrases that article and at first glance might be a WP:COPYVIO. The thrust of the Africa and Australia sections is that imprisonment is a colonial evil. There may be some truth in this, but it may also have been written for advocacy purposes without NPOV.I'll do some clean-up, but how should the article develop? NebY (talk) 21:21, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Hi, I've been very slowly going through all of LC's contribs, and just saw this post. Thanks for helping to clean this one up--just wanted to agree for the record that the removals were entirely valid. Alyo  (chat·edits) 05:00, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Imprisonment as punishment
Common and broad use of imprisonment as punishment for offenses, rather than use as holding areas for those awaiting trial or execution, is fairly new in the history of civilization. 71.28.252.179 (talk) 16:16, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Redirect?
This article is really terrible. The article on Prisons is much better. Shouldn't we just delete this and send readers there? Ironic sensibilities (talk) 12:05, 21 October 2023 (UTC)


 * It has been a week. I'm going to redirect this page. Ironic sensibilities (talk) 22:42, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
 * @Ironic sensibilities: You can't just redirect articles. You need Consensus from others. If they don't think it's a good idea, you should not do it. Also, we have a link to Prison in the See Also section. Rusty4321  talk contribs 01:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi @Rusty4321, thanks for the comment. Sorry I didn't get consensus first! It seems like your objection and also @Discospinster's are that I didn't go about this the right way. Do you also have material objections to the redirect aside from just the way I went about it? Is there a difference between the scope of this article and the article on "Prisons"? What information would a reader expect to find here that wouldn't be covered by the other article? If you don't want to redirect it, I could clean this article up, but I would need to understand why this article has a different scope. Thanks! Ironic sensibilities (talk) 13:47, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * The difference is that imprisonment is variously an action, a condition, a process, a power or a sentence, which may use the physical structures described in our prison article or may not, as described in this article. We have articles on the specific forms life imprisonment and indefinite or indeterminate imprisonment; this is the more general article. NebY (talk) 18:07, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Ok. I don't think what you just said is quite what the article says, but I hear that people want to keep this article. So maybe I'll try to clean it up some. And thanks NebY for the clarifications here. Ironic sensibilities (talk) 21:28, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Indeed, not everything I said is in the article at present - it might have been more precise to say "or (as described in the article) may not", but you get the idea anyway. The article took a wrong turn a while ago, which has been reversed but may have stymied development, so it'll be great if you take an interest in developing it. NebY (talk) 00:21, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Also, if there was a better way to get people's attention than what I did, please let me know what it is! Ironic sensibilities (talk) 13:48, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Just as one of the common outcomes at WP:AFD is redirection, so also the venue can be used to propose redirection (see WP:ATD-R); nomination there will gain the attention of editors who monitor that noticeboard and of course you'd place a notice on this article directing readers there. Also, if you had not decided that none of the content here was worth keeping, you might have proposed a merge; that process includes tagging source and destination pages with Merge Request Banners, which will automatically place the proposal in Category:Articles to be merged and on the Proposed article mergers noticeboard. NebY (talk) 18:06, 29 October 2023 (UTC)