People’s interactions are what drives the evolution of language, and the things that are common in a society tend to be the things that generate new words. The beginnings are often found as slang in a particular segment of the population, then some of the slang is adopted more widely. Incarceration is a more prominent part of US society than of any other in the world (the US prison population is the biggest in the world, and since we have far fewer people than some other nations, the US per-capita incarceration rate is by far the highest). So, as you might expect, US English has a lot of words for the places you’re going to get locked up.
One of the more colorful names for jail is “hoosegow.” According to Google it’s also spelled “hoosecow,” a variation based (like many) on a spelling error. “Hoosegow” first appeared in the western US in the 1800s; it’s derived from the Mexican Spanish word “juzgado,” which means “jail” (recall that in Spanish the “j” would be pronounced the way English speakers say “h”). Although there’s evidence it was in use in the 1800s in spoken English, “hoosegow” first appeared in print in 1908.
Another good name for jail is “pokey.” This one goes back to the early 1900s and is a US variant of a British English word from the 1800s: “pogey.” “Pogey” meant “poorhouse” (a concept that seems to be starting to return in the US). Nobody knows for sure where “pogey” originated, but it MIGHT be derived, ironically enough, from how “poky” was used in England in the 1700s. “Poky” originally meant “something that pokes.” It was first used in describing a kind of hat with a large brim: a “poky bonnet.” But then “poky” acquired another meaning in relation to interior spaces; a small room would be called “poky” because it was cramped or confining. This might be because in a small space you’re more likely to be “poked” by whatever furniture or fixtures you’re sharing the room with — but really that’s just a guess. So “pokey” as a US term for jail might have an ancestry that begins with “poky,” proceeds to “pogey”, and finally circles back again to “pokey,” having collected a silent “e” somewhere in its travels.
There are any number of other US terms for jail and prison, from “slammer” to “cooler,” “joint,” “big house,” “clink,” “stir,” “inside,” “cooler,” and even “the graybar hotel.” You can also find some reuse of the more formal term “department of corrections.”
The “department of corrections” is both a euphemism for the official carceral bureaucracy and, in corporate technical publications departments, a list of errors in printed publications (in the days when publications were printed) that would be updated in the following edition. The list might be maintained in a manila folder, a three-ring binder, or a database, but it’s called a “department” anyway. Which isn’t quite as precise as you might expect a technical publications department to be.
