U.S. Prisons: Myth vs. Mayhem

By Frank Trippett

In the endless effort to cope with one of the world's higher crime rates, the U.S. has long sent more people to prison for longer terms than any other industrialized Western nation except South Africa. Yet the country's penal institutions add up to a national disgrace. Riotous prison disorders have become so common that it was only second-rate news last March when a guard was wounded and several others were taken hostage during a mutiny of 100 or so inmates in a Newark, N.J., jail. In fact, the event seemed trivial only because it came so soon after the epic mayhem that took 33 lives in February at the New Mexico State Penitentiary near Santa Fe. That was a hard act to follow. But such is the condition of prisons, overcrowded and festering everywhere, that penal officials admit that other spectacular explosions could come at any time--and will, sooner or later. The national disgrace, in short, has grown into a combustible scandal.

It is also a very expensive scandal. American governments, from the federal level down, spend some $4 billion a year operating 4,700 penal institutions of all kinds. The cost of housing an inmate runs from less than $7,000 a year in Arkansas through $13,000 in California to more than $26,000 in the jail system of New York City. Other huge chunks of money go for the constant expansion of the system, with some $7 billion in construction now planned or contemplated. At that, the growth of prison plants is not expected to keep up with their population. Between 1968 and 1978 the number of inmates in state and federal prisons grew by two-thirds, to 307,000, and cell space almost everywhere is now scarce. Population exceeds decent (and safe) capacity by 58%.

Given the conditions in prisons, and, just as important, the dubious results that flow from them, it is clearly time to ask some cold-blooded questions about the future of the penitentiary. Does it make more sense, at $50,000 a cell, to cope with overcrowding by adding space? Or should the problem be dealt with by finding alternative penalties for nondangerous offenders, leaving prisons to do the only thing they have ever done well: confine the truly dangerous?

The appalling truths about penitentiaries have been exposed so often and thoroughly that only one real mystery is left. Why does society let these institutions persist as they are? The country's continual resistance to substantial prison reform is not easy to understand. Present building plans alone prove that stinginess does not really explain it. Real reform might save money, but it is as though the public remains somehow blind to the situation. Prison, after all, has become a symbol of society's stern feelings against crime. And most Americans probably carry in mind not an actual institution but a symbolic prison, a mythical place whose forbidding walls somehow protect society from the felons inside while training them for a return to society, a place whose very existence deters people on the outside from committing crimes. Indeed, it is exactly this myth that has led to the development of the U.S. prison system. If the myth is still widely believed, the fact, though deplorable, at least offers an added reason why prison reform comes so hard.

The truth about prisons is something else. Some part of that truth may not be subject to change; so long as prisons are cages for concentrations of violent people, a tendency to explosive and often bloody behavior is to be expected. But the point is that prisons do not do anything very well. They are capable of keeping dangerous people off society's back, but, given parole, probation and other practices of the larger justice system, they do not really do this effectively. They do not even carry out their primary philosophical mission--punishment--in an acceptable way. Society sends offenders to the pen to be punished by the loss of liberty and the submission to harsh discipline. In reality, the prison-bound convict faces not only the officially mandated penalty but grievous mental and physical abuse at the hands of the hardened inmates who are the de facto rulers of life on the inside. Prison officials cannot protect prisoners from prisoners. Rape and brutal hazing are a common destiny for weaker convicts--punishment no court has yet ordered.

Prisons may even add to, instead of subtract from, the total criminality in society. The assumption that they deter crime, though widely preached by politicians and believed by too many of their constituents, is no longer persuasive to most experts. Says President Thomas Reppetto of New York City's Citizens Crime Commission: "Given the present operation of the criminal-justice system, the prospect of imprisonment is too remote to seem a real deterrent." The point is underscored by the fact that the biggest part of the prison population consists of recidivists. Some repeaters were obviously not deterred by any fear of doing time, even though they had personally suffered the fate before. Moreover, all experts agree that the ever high U.S. crime rate has never been provably influenced by incarceration policy, nor by any of the fashions in sentencing, parole or probation. Experts find no correlation between crime rates and incarceration rates.

The notion that people who go to prison return to society as nicer citizens has long since become a bitter laugh. Forced rehabilitation, after a good try, has been an unmitigated flop. The penal system's success at giving convicts useful social vocations has been rare at best. The fact is that prisons generally remain what they have been called since the last century: seminaries for crime. The prison drill in most cases only hardens an inmate's antisocial tendencies and reinforces his motive to act on them.

The penal system is hard to rationalize on practical grounds and even harder to defend on moral ones. Prisons foster inhumanity, brutality and violence. Beatings, stabbings, rape--all are commonplace. Inmates murder inmates in U.S. prisons at the rate of about 100 a year. Wretched conditions just about everywhere have so persisted that the prison expose has long been a hardy perennial of popular journalism. A voluminous genre of literature and drama has grown up around a singular theme of prison rebellions. Prison evils have been documented in thousands of articles, hundreds of books and scores of legislative reports, not to mention innumerable recapitulations by local, state, national and international investigative groups. The tale of Attica's prisoner mutiny and massacre nine years ago, though tragic because of its cost of 43 lives, was only a spit in the dark ocean of the prison chronicle.

It is quite a saga, a tale of horrors seeping forth from a real-life phantasmagoria. Thomas Murton writes of Arkansas' Tucker State Prison Farm as it was before he was brought in for a year as a reform superintendent in 1967: "Discipline was routinely enforced by flogging, beating with clubs, inserting of needles under fingernails, crushing of testicles with pliers, and the last word in torture devices: the 'Tucker telephone,' an instrument used to send an electric current through genitals." In Jail: The Ultimate Ghetto, Ronald Goldfarb records so many atrocities of prison life that the reader is scarcely surprised to learn that in the District of Columbia jail a young white antiwar protester of the 1960s was raped dozens of times by blacks. In a 75-page opinion, Federal Judge John L. Kane Jr. last December held that conditions in Colorado's Old Max prison were so primitive and confining that they were bound to damage the minds of the inmates.

The saga grows all the time. Last year Illinois Corrections Director Gayle Franzen had to mount a shakedown like a military maneuver to wrest control of Stateville Correctional Center from the inmate gangs who utterly ran the place. Says Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz: "One of the major issues on the prison-reform agenda is how to get the prisons back in the hands of the correction people. Too many prisons are in the hands of inmates." Far too many of the abominations associated with prisons turn out to be not flukes but widespread conditions.

Shabby penal operations are so prevalent, in fact, that in the past decade judges have found that prisons in 15 states were bad enough to be declared unconstitutional. Tennessee, Maryland, Rhode Island--these only begin the list. Suits demanding improvement have been filed in 15 other states, and with every chance of success. Court-ordered upgradings are to be welcomed and have already forced the betterment of prisons in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. But this method of progress is slow and not always effective. In most instances, too, it only raises conditions from subhuman to minimally lawful.

Real reform is going to take more, but the resistance to it remains formidable despite glaring proof of the need. The Attica tragedy, for instance, blew up a blizzard of promised changes. Yet a U.N. human rights study group that inspected prisons last year reported that penal administrators seemed to have learned nothing at all from Attica. Did February's Santa Fe explosion produce new resolve? The only notable plan to emerge in the wake of that violence has been New Mexico's decision to build a new maximum-security prison.

New construction has little to do with prison reform. The reform movement today, in fact, generally favors a moratorium on the building of new prisons. Its reasoning is simple. The only sure thing about an added facility is that it will be filled --and given society's policies, will soon enough become just another hellhole. President Milton Rector of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency even contends that if space is "readily available," the rates of incarceration tend to go up even though serious crime may be declining.

Penal institutions, true enough, have improved in some ways over the years. The chain gangs of yore are gone. In some systems, bare-bones medical services have been expanded to include at least token psychological care. Reform movements still trudge along, and some of their programs are promising, at least in intent. The intent is, or ought to be, to remedy overcrowding in prisons not by building more cells but by sending nondangerous offenders into community-based programs.

Alternative punishment is the vogue reform label for such plans. In the past few years they have been experimentally launched in many states, among them Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma and Minnesota. The idea is to penalize offenders by compelling them to make restitution to their victims and the community that they have offended. Mississippi, for example, has set up four restitution centers into which thieves have been released from prisons. They pay the state a nominal $5 a day for room and board while they work to pay back the people they stole from. Success? Says State Corrections Commissioner John Watkins: "We hope ultimately that almost all property offenders will start off at these institutions."

Critics of alternative punishment may imagine that it is not truly punitive. But they underrate the pain of being utterly in the power of the state and closely restricted in personal activity. Under such circumstances, there is a decisive loss of liberty. Perhaps society's main gain from alternative punishment is the elimination of the risk of nondangerous offenders being turned vicious by sheer exposure to prison life. The truth is that a great many convicts would offer no violent risk to society if they were at large. Perhaps half of all prisoners are clearly dangerous, though various experts would argue that the percentage is greater or smaller. In any case, it is plain that a significant number could be set free without endangering the public. To find other ways to punish and treat such convicts would at once ease the problem of overcrowding and alleviate a great many pernicious problems related to it.

Much more will be needed before the penal system can be called even tolerable. That day is not likely to come until the public stops thinking of prison as a symbol and begins coldly assessing what prisons can and cannot accomplish. A good deal of expert thought has already been devoted to the question. In 1973, for instance, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals concluded a sober review with this recommendation: "Prisons should be repudiated as useless for any purpose other than locking away persons who are too dangerous to be allowed at large in a free society."

That idea makes more sense every day. The path to its fulfillment, involving the whole justice system, would no doubt be long, halting and difficult. It might be expensive, but probably less so than building even more prisons. Still, there is no reason to suppose that it would be utterly impossible. After all, America, repelled by bodily punishments such as maiming and branding, invented the penitentiary two centuries ago as a reform. That suggests, if nothing else, that the country might be capable at long last of inventing a sensible use for the thing.

--Frank Trippett

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