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 what we would consider to be "house arrest," that is, he was confined to a specified area beyond which he might not go. And if you’re thinking that this shows a remarkable degree of leniency, you are quite wrong. Prisons were seldom needed because justice was executed on the spot - and execute is the right word for what frequently happened.

However, by New Testament times, prisons are mentioned as holding persons who are awaiting trial or execution, and also as punishment by itself. In these cases, when there was a considerable number of prisoners, one of the jailers served as a warden. He either combined the duties of guard and warden, or he served in only a supervisory role. In either case, he was responsible for the prisoners, as we see from our text. Because he thought his prisoners had escaped, the jailer was about to kill himself, rather than stand trial for negligence.

The comparison to today is obvious - the jailer or prison guard or warden of our modern penal institutions. And to an extent, this could also include others on the staff of these institutions who are responsible for punishing the guilty, and, hopefully, rehabilitating them into good citizens. Incarceration has been man’s only recourse from the criminal for many centuries now, and still human nature hasn’t changed. Perhaps there is a better way!