IN the course of each week, TIME correspondents are accustomed to covering everything from concerts to Cabinet meetings, from labor strikes to society soirees. Seldom have they been faced with an assignment as grim as that demanded of them by this week's cover story on prisons: to provide nation's editors in New York with an inside look at some of the nation's jails and penitentiaries.

The experience left many of the correspondents shaken and disturbed by what they had seen. Strangely -- or perhaps not so strangely -- they found themselves identifying with the prisoners rather than with the custodians. "If a man should need to have that banal word freedom redefined," said San Francisco Bureau Chief Jesse Birnbaum, "let him spend an hour behind the walls of a prison like Soledad or San Quentin. New have his definition the moment he walks out." Entering New Orleans' of Paris Prison reminded Chicago Correspondent Sam Iker of being and into an ancient submarine: "A combination of heat and smell, stale air, kitchen aromas and perspiring bodies." Washington's Dean State found it easier to enter than to leave the Missouri State Penitentiary. "It takes a while to adjust to the fact that you're outside," he says."You breathe deeply, you think of the old homily,' There but for the grace of God go I,' and you wonder how in hell the men cooped up in their cages day after dreary day retain their sanity."

In talking with convicts, guards, prison officials and penologists, the correspondents were driven to personal reflection on potential alternatives to the present system. Karsten Prager of the New York bureau, who toured Car Manhattan's infamous Tombs detention house and North Carolina's progressive Wake Advancement Center, was struck by "the differences between what there is and what there might be." So was Senior Editor Robert Shnayerson, who wrote the cover story with the assistance of Contributing Editor James Simon and Researcher Erika Sanchez. "It seems more shocking and irrational in 1971 than ever before that these conditions can exist," says Shnayerson. "But the problems are enormous -- the bureaucracy, the inertia of the administrators, the high cost of change. I feel more pessimistic than I expected to feel."

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