What is the difference between a timeout for a child and the incarceration of an an adult?

I don't have any experience with children or crimnals but I have this gut feeling that any advice or argument in the article about timeout should apply equally well to incarceration for an adult.

For example: "Using more and longer timeouts might seem proportional, and it might even conceivably teach a lesson about justice, but it won't help change the behavior that's causing you to give timeouts in the first place." Shouldn't the statement be equally true for incarceration?

Which period of judicial incarceration are you speaking of? The period in England with debtors prisons? The Period of "being sent down [to Australia]"? The initial period of incarceration in the USA under the leadership of the Quakers? The current period of judicial incarceration?

The reason I ask is because initially in the USA - and the period in England where exile to the USA or Australia was in use, "incarceration" was most similar to "timeouts". The Quaker founded use of Sing Sing was exactly a "time out". Their idea was that individuals who had committed crimes would be removed from society to a place where they would tend to themselves and spend time in private meditation and contemplation. Once they had come to a sense of true contrition they would be re-admitted to society.

So they built the Sing Sing prison about a 2 hour sail up-river from New York in what was then the middle of the wilderness. The "prisoners" would grow their own food, but spend most of their time in their monk-styled cells reading the bible and meditating.

Of course the retributive desire to abuse those we are angry at quickly took over and when the next Superintendent was installed in Sing Sing, he took to forcing the prisoners to wear shoes too small for them and march in formation in the rain.

The other issue is that the brains of children are significantly less neurophysiologically developed. In particular the Orbitofrontal Cortex which mediates cognating consequences of our actions doesn't even BEGIN to develop until after puberty and takes until the mid 20s to finish developing.

IOW any child under puberty cannot truly connect real consequences to their impulse to act. So "punishing" a child in a timeout (which is actually itself an oxymoron) affects their brain very differently than that of an adult (settng aside the very interesting OFC research on prison populations).