Prisons: The Way to Reform

ATTICA is certainly not the worst of the 4,770 American prisons and jails. It has too much competition. But it is, nonetheless, fairly typical of a penal system that almost everyone agrees is a disgrace. Almost everyone, that is, but Vice President Spiro Agnew, who, in a spasm of Podsnappery, argued on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times last week that "our penal system remains among the most humane and advanced in the world." By and large, the penologists--not to mention the prisoners and ex-convicts--would go along with Senator Edmund Muskie, who told the Governors Conference in Puerto Rico that the prisons are "monstrous, inhuman dungeons, schools for crime and centers for sexual abuse."

The range of quality in American prisons is wide. At Louisiana's scabrous New Orleans Parish Prison, six men at a time are crammed into a 71-ft. by 14-ft. cell. Most are unsentenced prisoners awaiting trial. They exercise one hour every week and spend much of the rest of their time fighting off roaches, rats and homosexual rapists. "A good day," says one prisoner, "is when I get up, have three squares and don't get wounded or raped."

At the opposite extreme is the Middlesex County House of Correction in Massachusetts. Since he took over two years ago, County Sheriff John Buckley has turned the chapel into a gym, encouraged a black studies program (5% of the 300 inmates are black, as are 5% of the guards), moved his office into the prison and learned almost all his prisoners' first names. He hired two lawyers to give the inmates legal advice and turned the sheriff's house over for inmate use, including overnight visits with families.

Between the two poles is a vast, hidden world, a nonsystem of isolated societies with more or less of the totalitarian qualities evident aboard the Neversink in Melville's White Jacket. With some encouraging exceptions, the principal distinction of the prisons is failure. More than $1 billion a year is spent to produce results that would swiftly doom any other enterprise.

Eighteenth century Quakers introduced the American concept of prisons as a humane alternative to mutilation and other corporal punishments. Today the presumed goals of prisons are various, and sometimes they conflict. The aims are to wreak society's vengeance on a criminal, to deter other men from violating the law, to rehabilitate a prisoner so that he is fit to return to the open world. Yet far too many institutions make no effort to rehabilitate; they are simply zoos for human animals that society wants out of the way. As a result, criminals are thrown into precisely the environment guaranteed to ensure they will emerge brutalized, more criminally expert and less fit to live lawfully than when they entered. A bleak spirit of damnation hides criminals behind walls, cancels their identities, meanwhile anticipating some moral regeneration and repentance.

Some experts simply despair of ever resolving the dilemma. Says Dr. E. Kim Nelson, director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Southern California: "The idea of correcting anyone in prison is bankrupt. You can't mix punishment and rehabilitation. Prisons should be used for punishment." Enough liberal, enlightened solutions have failed in many fields to make this a rather tempting thought. Besides, the arithmetic of the situation is depressing. Fully 95% of all inmates in the nation's jails will eventually be released. If past patterns are followed, 40% of these will be repeaters, returning to prison for other crimes.

But it can also be argued that rehabilitation has not failed, rather it has not been adequately tried. This view is supported by many isolated successes. The rate of recidivism is down in many areas. Surprisingly, the absolute number of Americans in prison has been declining in the past ten years, principally because of broadened parole and probation programs. Yet the social damage still wrought by prisons that merely train professional criminals remains an overwhelming argument for reform.

Professionals--criminologists, sociologists, penologists and many judges and police chiefs--are nearly unanimous about what the approach should be:

REFORM THE NATION'S CRIMINAL LAWS. Studies indicate there are 6,000,000 non-traffic arrests of adults annually in the U.S. Almost half of those arrests are for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, gambling and minor morals charges. If the laws under which these arrests are made were eliminated, conclude Authors Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins in The Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control, "the consequent reduction of pressure on police, courts and correctional services would have a massive impact on the criminal justice system." It would free police to concentrate on serious crimes, unclog the courts and ease the overcrowded conditions in the nation's prisons.

REPLACE LOCAL AND COUNTY JAILS WITH REGIONAL CORRECTION CENTERS. Once arrested and charged, a defendant is either released on bond or his own recognizance, or he is sent to jail to await trial. A defendant normally faces a lengthy wait, especially traumatic for a first offender, spending months or even years in jail with seasoned criminals, perhaps being corrupted even before he is judged innocent or guilty. Authorities should, instead of locking up prisoners indiscriminately in jails, provide modern correction centers, with diagnostic services, staffed by psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers, with gradations in security.

ABOLISH FIXED SENTENCES. "It takes a Superior correctional counselor to inspire in an inmate a desire for self-improvement when he faces several hundred years of confinement," observes Fred Wilkinson, Missouri's Chief of Corrections, with some hyperbole. Indeterminate sentences have been used in California for years. Sometimes, as in the case of George Jackson, they have had the effect of absurdly prolonging prison terms because parole examiners did not like a convict's attitude. But the system would work, it has been argued, if inmates were regularly reviewed by a panel of psychologists as well as parole officers. Some reformers would like the original sentences fixed by correction officers and psychologists instead of judges. If fixed, sentences should be shorter --on the average, those in America are longer than comparable prison terms in a western European democracy.

DESTROY EVERY AMERICAN BASTILLE BUILT BEFORE 1900. These gray, gloomy, antiquated maximum-security fortresses --Ohio State Penitentiary, for instance, opened in 1834--remain the principal repositories of the nation's convicted criminals. Embezzlers live cell by cell with rapists, first offenders with incorrigibles. Although the cost would be enormous, the great pens should be replaced by a wide variety of institutions: some for minimum-security risks, some for medium security, others for the 10% to 20% of prisoners who are regarded as dangerous or violent. No institution should house more than 500 inmates.

DEVELOP ALTERNATIVES TO PRISONS. Prisons should, after all, be reserved only for truly dangerous criminals. The majority might be better off if they never spent a night inside a cell. It is a moot question whether society would be safe; but it is difficult to imagine that it would be less safe than it is now, since most inmates are still more hardened when released. There are numerous alternatives: halfway houses, in which small groups of inmates sleep but leave for work each day; work-release programs, in which those convicted live in prison but work outside; or as a more limited alternative, furloughs that allow inmates to spend weekends or evenings with their families.

Every one of these reforms has been tried somewhere in the U.S.--and some cases have achieved notable success. Penologists insist that humanizing the prisons is not incompatible with maintaining strict discipline. But they also admit that there is no guarantee that the changes would drastically lower the crime rate or cut down recidivism. There is also the problem that these programs would consume billions of dollars. Merely to destroy the nation's obsolete prisons and to build new facilities would cost from $10 billion to $12 billion.

In addition, there would be the cost of providing thousands of trained psychologists, parole and probation officers, all of whom would be necessary for an effective rehabilitation effort. According to one study, only 15% of corrections employees are engaged in community programs; 80% have custodial duties. Too often, the guards display the same mentality as the prisoners, regarding inmates as enemies to be tensely watched. The present shortage of psychiatrists and psychologists is appalling--one to every 4,000 prison convicts in the U.S. compared to one for every 100 in some Danish prisons.

In addition to a reform of prison practices, penologists and lawyers are seeking possible changes inspired by a largely unexplored question: What legal rights should prisoners have? Constitutionally, the question is murky. For the most part, the law does not regard convicts as human beings with the same rights as other citizens--only with privileges dispensed at the pleasure of wardens.

In 39 states, a felon permanently loses the right to vote; in 27 states, the right to hold public office, in twelve states, the right to serve on a jury. A felony conviction is grounds for divorce in 36 states. For all the elaborate constitutional safeguards provided the accused, once the jailhouse door slams behind the convicted, prison officials are their only protection.

In almost all states, inmates have few legal rights to freedom of speech and assembly. One of the 28 concessions that Commissioner Russell G. Oswald offered to the Attica rebels was that convicts would be covered by minimum-wage laws for their work. Yet courts have consistently ruled that prisoners have no right at all to wages. Nor are they entitled to compensation for injuries on the job. "Prisons have been such a garbage can of society," says Buffalo Law Professor Herman Schwartz, "that they have been a garbage can of law as well."

Most black prisoners would welcome prison reforms. But for those growing numbers who are becoming intransigently ideological, reforms may seem irrelevant, even a dangerous distraction from their goal of eliminating the "racist system." After George Jackson's death at San Quentin and after Attica, penologists wonder whether any reforms within the current prison framework would mollify such prisoners. "Their anger is not directed toward the prisons but toward society," says Peter Preiser, New York State's Director of Probation. "The problem of the militant inmates festers beneath everything we are trying to do."

Attitudes toward Attica are still so divided that it is uncertain whether this tragedy will help or hinder the cause of prison reform. James V. Bennett, the former director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, is one who thinks the uprising will "harden attitudes" against change. "That's the backlash," he says. "The public is going to believe that the uprising in and of itself was a manifestation of revolutionary protest." Oth ers say that Attica will inspire nothing more than an increase in the quantity (but not the quality) of prison guards.

On the other hand, wardens and other prison authorities are warning that pure and simple repression without improvements will simply lead to other, and more desperate uprisings. These cautionary words should find some receptive ears in Washington. Richard Nixon has devoted more money and attention to the problem than any previous President. The Bureau of Prisons' budget has increased from $69 million in 1969 to $194 million for 1972; the corrections slice of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration's budget has grown from $2 million in 1969 to $178 million this year. More than that, both the President and Attorney General John Mitchell have spoken out several times about the need for humane prison reforms, and next December the White House will sponsor a major national conference on corrections.

Reforms, of course, will not solve the large social problems of racial prejudice, inadequate housing, poor schools and lack of jobs, which breed so much of the nation's violent crime. With its cultural gaps between white and black, poor and middle class and affluent, the U.S. has very special problems that do not afflict other countries--Sweden or Denmark, for instance--where prison life seems more civilized. The problems are further complicated by a widespread and partly plausible belief that all of the nation's crime and prison troubles result from some fundamental loss of discipline or morality in the society.

But reforms might at least prevent more prisons from becoming ugly, brutalizing battlegrounds where the tensions of society, racial and political, redouble in the claustrophobic air.

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