Rehabilitation v. Revenge

The most tragic irony of the American judicial system is the difference in treatment meted out to the accused and the convicted. From presumption of innocence to free legal aid, the rights of the defendant are guaranteed. Once convicted and sentenced, however, the individual becomes society's unwanted stepchild. He is allowed to waste away --and prepare for a continuing life of crime--in that charnel of cynicism and despair, the American prison.

No one is more aware of the contrast between judicial precaution and penal carelessness than Chief Justice Warren Burger. Some find Burger's vehemence on the subject rather odd; he is often seen as a strict law-and-order jurist whom President Nixon appointed to lead the nation's highest bench away from the liberalism of the Warren court. In fact, Burger is a vocal advocate of reforming the penal system to stress rehabilitation rather than revenge. Last week he reaffirmed his concern with prison reform in two tough speeches--to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the American Bar Association in Atlanta. He declared that the nation must "do something about the most neglected, the most crucial and probably the least understood phase of the administration of justice."

Intolerance. According to Burger, what is needed is a thorough rethinking of the American concept of justice. "We find lawyers and judges," he said, "becoming so engrossed with procedures and techniques that they tend to lose sight of the purposes of a system of justice. We should stop thinking of criminal justice as something which begins with an arrest and ends with a final judgment of guilt."

Burger believes that a quirk in the American character is at least partly responsible for deplorable prison conditions. In the long view of history, he notes, America became a superpower practically overnight, a fact that he feels has engraved a sense of intolerance toward failed people on the national soul. Said Burger: "Few things characterize our attitude toward prisoners and prisons more than indifference and impatience with the failure of the prisoner to return to society corrected and reasonably ready to earn an honest way in life." Burger looks to psychiatrists and psychologists to shoulder much of the burden of rehabilitation. "A large proportion of criminal offenders are seriously maladjusted human beings," he argued. "And those who are not maladjusted when they go in are likely to be so when they get out."

Burger also scored the nearly total lack of worthwhile vocational training in American prisons. "It is no help to prisoners," he said, "to learn to be pants pressers if pants pressers are a glut on the labor market." His two basic solutions: breaking down large institutions into smaller units that separate first offenders and teen-agers from older repeaters, and eliminating popular prejudices against ex-prisoners.

Price of Crime. Burger, of course, is not alone in his concern. President Nixon recently ordered Attorney General John Mitchell to map a ten-year plan for a complete redesign of the federal penal system. In a year of belt-tightening budgets, Nixon even asked for an additional $9,000,000 for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, raising its total allocation to $88 million. Much of Nixon's concern was prompted by a report published by the President's Commission on Law Enforcement. The commission noted that the U.S. now has 200,000 prison inmates, and at least 40% of them can be expected to return after their release. At the same time, the commission predicted that the prison population will rise 7% by 1975, adding that the price of crime is virtually incalculable. Said Myrl Alexander, recently retired director of the Bureau of Prisons: "Revamping the system is going to cost a lot of money. But the people we're turning out of prisons are costing us a lot more."

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