Stir-Crazy

By * Melvin Maddocks

KIND AND USUAL PUNISHMENT

by JESSICA MITFORD

340 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

The funeral directors of America, still smarting over The American Way of Death, must now line up behind the nation's wardens in the goodly company of those well stung by Jessica Mitford. "Our great 'know-it-all' on prisons," the American Association of Wardens and Superintendents has muttered through its collectively clenched teeth at the author of what might be subtitled The American Way of Injustice.

The latest Mitford gadflight began three years ago as a quick assignment for the American Civil Liberties Union. But by the time she had finished, the formidable Miss Mitford had visited all the prisons, from California to Massachusetts, that she could get into -jail doors, she discovered, can slam in two directions -and even spent a simulated prisoner's night in the Women's Detention Center in Washington, D.C.

The more she saw, the less she liked. The Quakers who founded the first American prison in Philadelphia in 1790 may have thought that rescuing sinners from a wicked world and putting them in solitary with a Bible was more humane than flogging, branding or the stocks. But Miss Mitford can find no Christian words for the costs, theories and failures of a punitive system that has since swelled into a coast-to-coast community of 1.33 million incarcerated Americans.

As methodically as a prosecutor, she builds her case, attacking one by one the usual arguments in favor of prisons. First argument: prisons keep off the dark streets rapists, drug fiends, and other bogeymen of the American middle class. Nonsense, says Miss Mitford. In 9,000,000 crimes committed in a typical year, only 1 1/2% of the criminals are imprisoned. Second argument: the threat of a prison sentence deters criminals. Miss Mitford cites contrary, though slightly equivocal evidence. Between 1961 and 1966, the penalty in California for assaulting a policeman with a deadly weapon rose from a minimum sentence of one year in jail to a minimum of five and a maximum of life. During the same five years, attacks on Los Angeles policemen rose from 8.4 per 100 officers per year to 15.8.

"Need of Treatment." The greatest part of Miss Mitford's considerable energies are given over to demolishing the third argument: that prisons rehabilitate. On the contrary, she suggests, prisoners may have been better off when they were regarded as sinners in need of salvation than now, when they are judged to be sick individuals in "need of treatment." She tends to agree that "physical degradation is replaced by psychological degradation" -that all the "diagnosis" and "evaluation" are "the catch-22 of modern prison life." A "cure" is pronounced. Miss Mitford suspects, when a "poor/young/brown/ black captive appears to have capitulated to his middle-class /white /middleaged captor."

Worse is to come, she predicts. The current penal-reformist notion of group therapy may be "withering on the vine," but the behaviorists are about to bloom. A $13.5 million Behavioral Research Center is due to open near Butner, N.C., early in 1974. Articles with triumphant titles like "Criminals Can Be Brain washed -Now&" are appearing. In the spirit of 1984, solitary confinement is referred to by some prisons as "the Adjustment Center," and ordinary cells are called "Behavior Modification Units." Beating is known as "Aversion Therapy." Upjohn and Parke-Davis maintain $500,000 worth of laboratories with in the walls of Michigan's Jackson State Prison, chiefly to test new products on the captive population -at least those guinea pigs who will volunteer for a dollar a day or so. "Criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material," one scientist confessed to Miss Mitford, "and much cheaper than chimpanzees."

Yet for the cost of keeping a man in San Quentin the state could be sending him to Harvard. What does this $5,000 (more or less) a year buy? The prisoner's meals. Miss Mitford figures, cost around 300 each. Only 5% is budgeted for that vaunted "rehabilitation." Most of the taxpayer's dollar, the author computes, goes to "security" -i.e., guards and guns. A lot of money also goes into penal bureaucracies, which have supported no law more faithfully than Parkinson's.

Abusive Practice. Characteristically, Miss Mitford weakens her case by sardonic excesses. She is capable of snapping that a man with a dicebox might grant and deny paroles as fairly as most boards. If she has met in her travels an idealistic or even an effective penologist, she neglects to report the fact. "That 'prisons are a failure' is a cliche dating from the origin of prison," she writes, and briskly concludes that it is long past time for Americans to abolish their costly, cruel, and in fact morally corrupting penal communities. But when it comes to specific alternatives for dealing with criminals, she refers vaguely to "a radical change in our val ues ... a drastic restructuring of our social and economic institutions."

Much of this ground has been fought over before. Yet Kind and Usual Punishment is a persuasive tract with a murderous eye alike for delusive penal rhetoric and abusive practice. Eugene V. Debs once stated this ideal: "While there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Jessica Mitford has the sublime un reasonableness to treat that as an imperative.

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