Warehousing sounds very much like the verbing of a noun - seems to come from North America
It's tied to a string of ideological and practical changes.
"Penal welfarism" is often used (certainly contemporaraneously) to refer to a period running from (erm, 1920s?) until the '70s. Domain of the experts, psychologists and psychiatrists assessing criminal behaviour as pathological, various psychotherapeutic interventions seen as one way of curing crime. Indefinite detention until "cured" one consequence of this. Obvs this underplays the scarcity of meaningful support and the extent of brutality, but ay.
Martinson then published a
1974 sort-of-systematic-review of penal interventions. Tbf, it sort of showed that some interventions had some effects for some people, but his oft-cited conclusion was basically that nothing in the field of penal corrections works, or has any impact on recidivism. Attributing all subsequent changes to one paper is probably a bit much; but
Cullen and Gendreau do a pretty good job of exploring how this tapped into a broader episteme / readiness to change.
Which led to a good decade or three of penal nihilism, characterised as 'nothing works.' This, in turn, led to the development of alternative strategies of crime control, and of punishment. If interventions don't work, then there's no point in interventions. So e.g. situational crime prevention, deterrence, and just desserts sentencing arose. (None of these relies on engendering change in the individual; you just make it a lot harder for them to commit crime, make it a lot more painful to commit crime, or give up on it all and just allocate prison sentences according to the severity of the crime, with no regard to how someone might change during the course of their sentence).
'Humane warehousing' fit within that model, as it was effectively arguing that there's no point trying to change prisoners with interventions / therapy / whatever, so the best use of resources is to keep 'em stacked high with little or no purposeful activity, but - at least - in a humane environment.
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