Incarceration and Imprisonment in The Orbis

The Khazigiri and most of the civilized world follows the same model as the Cumaeans did when it comes to dealing with criminals, for its simplicity, practicality, and relative finality. Punishment is meted out within days or hours of sentencing, and only political prisoners and similar criminals spend any punitive amount of time in a formal prison. This is very different from the modern western model by which a length of time is itself the punishment, and criminals are held for a long period and then released at the end of a term, or are in other cases held for the rest of their natural lives.
In Toz, the Empire, and the West, long-term prison is mostly reserved for political prisoners - either foreign spies who have been kept alive because of their knowledge of the enemy, or internal agitators who would only become more popular as martyrs. Common crimes like pick-pocketing, petty theft and other misdemeanors are given a professional beating to a degree commensurate with the crime, and released, often to a hospital; or they are executed at the earliest possible opportunity after being declared guilty of a serious crime. Incarceration as a stand-alone punishment is mostly unknown on the Orbis - with the exception of debtor's prison.
Debtor's prison is the equivalent of a short term servitude to the state, and in almost all cases this takes the form of working in the public workhouse for no additional pay beyond your meager room and board. At the end of the term you are awarded your tax lien amount x2, which may add up to as little as 5 gold lions, or 5 days average wage, if you are at the bottom of the economic ladder, with the tax lien amount retained to pay the debt, and the additional payment intended to pay off your other debt as well. The inability to pay taxes is technically the only crime for which a person would suffer this punishment, with the length of indentured service longer or shorter relative to the amount of the default; but in actual practice, the inability to pay any legitimate debt to a private party, for a loan, a gambling debt, or what have you, would automatically imply that taxes can also not be paid, and therefore, even private debts can easily land a person in debtor's prison. The paucity of the awarded wage means that for people of low means, it is very hard to get out, and at the same time, the city commands a large work force for the maintenance of infrastructure, sewers and the like.
Larger cities in the realm may have multiple workhouses, and under ideal conditions they also provide a basic subsistence wage to people who have no other employment or source of income, as a person can normally elect to serve in debtor's prison if they can show their lack of means; but the work is universally unpleasant and sometimes dangerous, so it also serves as a strong incentive for people to come up with their own means of income.
Unintentionally it also serves as a great motivator for criminal incomes; better to steal the payment for taxes, than to work it off in a mine or a slaughterhouse, or cleaning rivers of human waste in the sewers of the great cities of the world.