Penmanship

THE TREATMENT MAN (325 pp.)--William Wiegand--McGraw-Hill ($4.95).

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) once designed a kind of Orwellian prison called the panopticon, a jail building meant to provide warders with a view into the cells. It was never executed, but audiences have enjoyed panopticonic vision for years. Countless films and TV plays have made the state pen almost as familiar a setting as Tombstone--the hostages with shivs at their throats, the leader in the besieged cell block on the phone to the warden, the Spartacus-in-denims who invariably fails to make it out of stir. Giving the old plot a new twist, Novelist William Wiegand (who teaches creative writing at Stanford) has produced a tale of a prison riot that is at once a violent melodrama, a psychological quiz and a political morality play.

Maximum Security. The story is told by two narrators, Joe Sharon, an alcoholic prison counselor, and Hastel Desai, a diabetic inmate. This method creates a bifocal picture of Southern State Penitentiary at Creighton and its chief inhabitants, the most important of whom is "the treatment man," an assistant warden and psychologist who is symbolically named Pryor. Also called the Messiah, he is a vaguely evangelical figure with a jade ring and an MG, who keeps most of the inmates under his Freudian thumb. As the story flickers between Convict Desai and Counselor Sharon, it is clear that there are flaws in Psychologist Pryor's penmanship. For one thing, what is apparently "the best state-run maximum-security penitentiary in the United States" has a social organization based squarely on the proposition that in prison life all sexuality, unless otherwise perverted, is homosexual. Also, as in any authoritarian society, there is an underground. At S.S.P.C. its leader is Roy Kinney, the "Inmate King," a man of considerable natural ability, convict boss of the hard cases in detention block 16.

Convict Kinney and Psychologist Pryor are in contention for effective control of the prison population. To demonstrate his power, Kinney organizes a prison riot, his pretense being a "good new boy," who has been caught with a potato peeler hidden in a place of maximum security, and been put in solitary. Kinney spreads the word and soon "the less orderly element in this institution" have burned the chapel, organized a tuba and trumpet band around improvised barbecue pits, and taken three guards as hostages.

Back to Abnormal. Authority collapses in the persons of the warden and the chaplain; there is nothing left but the tainted and ambiguous influence of the psychologist, who must bargain for peace and the lives of the guards. Before the insurrection is over, one man has been tortured and two cons are dead (killed by their fellows because they tried to spoil the gratuitous beauty of the riot with an attempt at escape).

"These things happen in all progressive movements," muses the habitual criminal, Kinney, and there is gruesome comedy in Pryor's hypocritical proclamation of "a new era of sound interrelationships between inmate and administration in the prisons of America." Novelist Wiegand has effectively told a prickly parable of power and evil, but offers no solutions. He leaves Narrator Sharon with a new "case load," and with everything at dear old S.S.P.C. back to abnormal.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.