VIEWS FROM BEHIND BARS

Harold MacEwen, 34, was paroled from Stateville prison in Illinois after serving 12 1/2 years for killing an off-duty cop during an armed robbery. "The crime itself was inexcusable," says MacEwen, who is studying for his M.A. in psychology and works for the Illinois Department of Corrections. "But I was 20, and what I was also holds true for most young whites and blacks in ghetto slum areas. We would classify each other, and then we would have to live up to the classification. I thought I was hip, in the know, wise, and umpteen other things."

After serving eleven years, MacEwen was given a three-day furlough. "I visited some places I thought I was familiar with, but they had changed so much that when I got out of my car, I was frightened. I couldn't stay. Then in my mother's house, I was having what I thought was a normal conversation, and it seemed like the room got smaller and smaller and I was suffocating."

MacEwen believes that prisons should be close to home. That would give the prisoner a chance "to formulate in his own mind vivid pictures and concepts of how he will fit in when he gets out." Moreover, as long as penal institutions are in remote rural areas, they are apt to be ignored. "Out of sight, out of mind. The community should have to deal with the problem that brought about the arrest, sentence and conviction in the first place. I believe the more involved the community becomes, the less crime we will have. Volunteers who visit or teach in the prisons are so important for motivation and hope. A great many men and women who are incarcerated need motivation."

MacEwen also believes inmates must be taught to take responsibility. "A man comes home to four kids and a wife, and he's expected to be a provider. He's not been prepared during incarceration to shoulder responsibility. I don't condemn a man who's been out six months and then commits another crime. By returning to prison, he doesn't have to worry about bills being paid or whether his kids are decently clothed."

A convicted rapist in Texas' Huntsville penitentiary, David Stonestreet, 45, agrees that prison can become a habit. "A lot of inmates in this system have grown up through it since the time they were juveniles. These are their friends--the only people they know. Back on the streets they are nobody, so they commit a crime and come back here because this is their home. I can come in here and live and not be hassled. All I've got to do is my job and that's it. I don't have to buy food--nothing. There are inmates in here that are better off than you are because they don't have to worry about anything."

Gary Carter has spent a good share of his 32 years in prisons, most recently in the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. At age seven he was put by his family in an orphanage, where he stayed till he was twelve. At 18, he was convicted of armed robbery and drew five years to life.

"I think when someone is first busted," he says today, "you should just give him enough time so he knows what he has done and he has an idea of what's ahead. When I was sitting there in that cell at age 18, I was realizing what I had done, and knew I was wrong. After three months I was scared. That was when I should have been put on some kind of program outside. If they would have given me a chance then, I could have made it. But when you do all that time, you're not a human being. You're an animal."

Robert Brown believes juvenile halls and training schools only make adult criminals. "There's nobody to love the kids and no one to provide any sort of normal life." Brown should know. His earliest recollection is of being found half-starved in a room at the age of two. He then lived in five foster homes, two orphanages and a reformatory before he turned 18.

At age 19, he was sentenced to state prison at Auburn, N.Y., for killing a desk clerk during an armed robbery of a Manhattan hotel. "I didn't get any help in prison for 20 years, until I met Dan Welty," says Brown. Welty, a prison chaplain who also does psychotherapy, managed to get Brown released after he had served 23 1/2 years. Brown, 47, is now married, has gone through extensive psychotherapy and is a paid official of the Fortune Society, an organization of ex-offenders. Although he was able to profit from meeting Welty, Brown knows that such encounters are rare. "Treatment is of no use to most people in today's prisons. The answer is almost to leave the prisons alone--almost benign neglect," he says. "Then divert massive resources to this society's disadvantaged children, the ones who are going to commit tomorrow's crime."

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