penitentiary
 
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[ U ]
the system of keeping people in prisons: 监禁，关押;关押制度
the prison system监狱制度
Do you think prison works?你认为监禁有用吗？
Prison (= the time he had spent in prison) hadn't changed him at all.服刑丝毫没有让他改变。
[ C ]
a situation or relationship from which it is difficult to escape: 樊笼；禁锢
She felt that her marriage had become a prison.她觉得自己的婚姻变成了牢笼。
He was sent to prison for a crime that he didn't commit.他蒙冤入狱。
He was sent to a high-security prison.
If you spend any time in prison, you're labelled as a criminal for the rest of your life.一旦入过狱，“罪犯”的帽子就会一辈子扣在你的头上。
The release from prison of two of the terrorists has provoked a public outcry.释放两名恐怖分子激起了公众的强烈抗议。
He served a year in prison and was then let out on probation.他在监狱里服了1年刑，然后被处以缓刑。

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Prisons & parts of prisons
approved school
Bastille
boot camp
borstal
brig
gaol
gaoler
halfway house
HMP
nick
open prison
panopticon
penal colony
penitentiary
straightjacket
straitjacket
the gulag
warder
young offender institution
youth custody

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Putting people in prison
Difficult situations and unpleasant experiences

prison | American Dictionary

prison
noun[ C/U ]
us/ˈprɪz·ən/
a building where criminals are kept as a punishment:
[ U ]He was sent to prison for life.

Examples of prison

prison
Most commentators believed that many ' incorrigibles ' had to be interned in security confinement after their prison or penitentiary sentence, in order to protect society.
Many prison officials agreed that, as long as security confinement had not become law, ' incorrigible ' inmates should at least be excluded from most benefits.
In contrast, the corporations operating private prisons inflict sanctions whose severity is determined by the state.
While he was in prison, two of his brothers died, one of a drug overdose.
Three senior medical officials were convicted of criminal negligence and fraud and were sentenced to prison.
It now mainly manufactures prefabricated building modules for schools, hospitals and prisons.
Confiscating and reading through his manuscripts, the agents decided to send him to a prison psychiatrist.
This may reflect the absence of patients with heart disease in some prisons, though all are likely to have some patients at some time.
Most of the increased risk associated with tattoos appeared to result from acquisition of tattoos in jail or prison.
But a brief foray into prison literature suggests to me that the conceptual difficulties can easily be exaggerated.
A further eight cases were identified in four other prisons within the state.
Included were questions about the provision of services applicable to prison populations but not usually to mainstream general practice.
But how did this affect the lives of individual inmates inside prisons and penitentiaries?
Less than a quarter of prisons had audited any of their chronic disease services in the last two years.
But such policies were not fully implemented in other prisons, not least because of resistance by local prison officials.
See all examples of prison
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withprison

prison

These are words often used in combination with prison.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

adult prison
That happens now in the adultprison system.
From the
Hansard archive