This is what my professor said about it: Per classroom discussion, it is very normal and common for college students to write a generalization for the first sentence that does not add anything to the point they are making

This is what my professor said about it:

Per classroom discussion, it is very normal and common for college students to write a generalization for the first sentence that does not add anything to the point they are making. Just delete it.

Next sentence: You know very well prisons were not introduced in nineteenth-century Europe. There are prisons in the Bible.

Prisons are not in every town, though even the smallest town has some kind of holding cell.

You have a good Works Cited list and once you get into the cited material, this improves. Luckily you have time to make the first couple of pages better. Try not to make general statements: get right into the concept of torture in prisons. I think you are talking mainly about political prisons. Try being as specific as possible as soon as possible--lok at your sources, and see how many of them get into cited material within the first paragraph. You can do the same thing--it is better than generalization that gets you into trouble with the reader.