Jungle Rats

"Let's get one thing straight, baby," said the convict angrily. "I've heard a lot of talk about 'rehabilitation' from you people here, but I've never seen any in jail. I was a laborer when I came in and the only thing I've learned is how to make license plate tags. I'll go out for six months, but I'll come back, baby."

The sobering accusation, directed at a group of policemen, judges and prison officials, was only one of many made last week at an unusual "workshop on crime and correction" in Annapolis, Md.

Sponsored by the National College of State Trial Judges and financed with a $67,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the sessions were also attended by 21 convicts selected to represent a cross section of inmates in Maryland prisons. They were paid $3 per day as "consultants" and allowed to dress in sport clothes like the other participants. Savvy and blunt, they provided another bit of vivid evidence that in most prisons society is wasting time and money on a system that is self-righteous, vindictive and ultimately ineffective (TIME Essay, March 29, 1968).

Coffee in the Face. Two convicts, asked to act out the official version of prison life in one of several psychodramas, played a newly admitted inmate and a prison counseling officer. The "prisoner" complained that other convicts had tried to assault him homosexually, and the "counselor" smoothly assured him he would be transferred to a "safer place." At that, several convicts in the audience sprang to their feet. Safe havens do not exist within most prison walls, one cried. "It's a jungle. Why I could get to that man three times a day because I bring food to the cells. I could dash a pot of coffee in his face . . . anything." Said another, "He'd be worse off than before. He'd be branded a rat for squealing by the whole institution."

To verify the convicts' contentions, three judges volunteered to be admitted as prisoners for a day at the nearby Maryland House of Correction. As extra guards stood by unobtrusively, they were brought through the gates in handcuffs, stripped, showered, and supplied with blue prison shirts and brown pants. Then they were clapped into small cells in the cacophonous main cellblock. Prison officials laid on the full treatment, later declared one white-haired judge to be suffering from "suicidal tendencies" and sent him to an isolation cell. There he was protectively stripped of his belt, shoes, glasses and pen, and was made to eat his dinner of ham and black-eyed peas from a paper plate with a plastic spoon.

Another judge failed to notice that officials had planted a knife in his bed, much as a vindictive inmate might do to retaliate against a fellow prisoner. When it was detected, the judge was hauled before disciplinary officers who were aware of his identity but coolly carried on as usual. "How can I defend myself?" he asked. "You can't," came the reply. He was sentenced to 30 days in solitary.

The judges were outraged, as were other conference participants who similarly masqueraded in the Maryland pris on system. Echoing what a lonely band of prison reformers has argued for years, one judge complained, "Calling this place a house of correction is damn nonsense." Added another: "People in institutions are living in a jungle. If something is not done, we are going to be living in a jungle on the outside too."

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