Description
A prison, jail, or gaol, is a facility in which individuals are forcibly confined and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state. The most common use of prisons is as part of an organized governmental justice system, in which individuals officially charged with or convicted of crimes are confined to a jail or prison until they are either brought to trial to determine their guilt or complete the period of incarceration they were sentenced to after being found guilty at their trial. Outside of their use for punishing civil crimes, authoritarian regimes also frequently use prisons and jails as tools of political repression to punish political crimes, often without trial or other legal due process; this use is illegal under most forms of international law governing fair administration of justice. In times of war or conflict, prisoners of war may also be detained in military prisons or prisoner of war camps, and large groups of civilians might be imprisoned in internment camps.