Acts 16:27 - "When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped."

As a legal punishment, imprisonment is not found in ancient law, and it does not appear in the Bible until the Persian period. Of course, now we are talking about prisons such as we know them today. To a degree, we can say that the forced-labor camps to which the Israelites were sent by the Egyptian rulers, or those of Solomon, were prisons, and that, therefore, the overseers of these camps would correspond to the jailer.

But, in general, if a man were detained on any charge, he would have wha…