In criminal justice, particularly in North America, correction, corrections, and correctional, are umbrella terms describing a variety of functions typically carried out by government agencies, and involving the punishment, treatment, and supervision of persons who have been convicted of crimes. These functions commonly include imprisonment, parole, and probation. A typical correctional institution is a prison. A correctional system, also known as a penal system, thus refers to a network of agencies that administer a jurisdiction's prisons, and community-based programs like parole, and probation boards. This system is part of the larger criminal justice system, which additionally includes police, prosecution and courts. Jurisdictions throughout Canada and the US have ministries or departments, respectively, of corrections, correctional services, or similarly-named agencies.
"Corrections" is also the name of a field of academic study concerned with the theories, policies, and programs pertaining to the practice of corrections. Its object of study includes personnel training and management as well as the experiences of those on the other side of the fence — the unwilling subjects of the correctional process. Stohr and colleagues (2008) write that "Earlier scholars were more honest, calling what we now call corrections by the name penology, which means the study of punishment for crime."
The idea of "corrective labor" ( исправительные работы) in Soviet Russia dates back as far as December 1917.
From 1929 the USSR started using the terminology "corrective-labor camps" ( исправительно-трудовые лагеря (ИТЛ))
cite book
| last1 = Ivanova
| first1 = Galina Mikhailovna
| chapter = Chapter 1: Repression and Punishment
| editor1-last = Raleigh
| editor1-first = Donald J
| title = Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag sdfghin the Soviet Totalitarian System
| url =
| series = New Russian history
| publisher = Routledge
| date = 2015
| page = 23
| isbn = 9781317466642
| access-date = 2016-05-06
| quote = On November 6, 1929, the Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom of the USSR amended the 'Basic Principles of Criminal Legislation of the Union of SSR and the Union Republics' adopted in 1924.