Alternatives to Prison

The south block of San Quentin prison, once the largest cell block in the world, now houses only a few dozen sparrows. The prison's clothing factory has shut down, and so has the mattress plant. San Quentin today contains only 1,500 convicts, as compared with 6,000 ten years ago; by 1975 the century-old fortress will be closed forever.

The decay of the antique buildings provides part of the reason, but San Quentin is also the victim of a spreading view that prisons simply do not work. Over the past two years, judges in Arkansas, California and Pennsylvania have ruled that certain local jails are so bad they violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. One federal judge in Wisconsin, taking a slightly bolder view, recently wrote, "I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end." At last month's meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General, California Deputy Attorney General Nelson Kempsky gave a prosecutor's reaction: "Every time a judge starts thinking about due process for prison inmates, we're in trouble."

Aside from the question of "prisoners' rights," a growing number of penologists believe that prisons have proved unable to reform or rehabilitate their inmates. A task force for the Governor of Wisconsin recently recommended that all adult prisons in the state close by 1975. Says Harvard Law Professor James Vorenberg: "You just have to close prisons down, but you've got to develop some real alternatives."

In fact, several imaginative efforts to establish alternatives are under way:

HOMES AND BUDDIES. The treatment of youthful offenders is a particularly fertile field for experiment, and Massachusetts is leading the way. When Jerome Miller became commissioner of the state's department of youth services in 1969, a reformatory official asked him what his position was on "gagging and binding." He answered that he wanted such practices stopped. Says Miller: "Training schools are so bad that the average kid would be better on the street." Accordingly, he began closing prison-like training schools, which housed about 1,000 youngsters up to 17 years old. Next month he is shutting the last major one, in Lancaster, leaving only 20 juveniles locked away.

Some of the former inmates have been moved to group homes, where eight to twelve youths live with an adult couple under supervision by local agencies. Such a home for twelve delinquents costs the state $85,000, compared with $250,000 for the same number under the old system. Other juveniles have been placed in foster homes. Still others live in their own homes under a buddy system, in which a college student spends 20 to 25 hours a week with the delinquent. This year 600 young offenders are participating in a program of cleaning up parklands and going on pack and survival trips.

JOBS AND COUNSELING. Five years ago in Manhattan, the private Vera Institute of Justice got official permission to help a certain number of offenders before they came to trial. Now known as the Court Employment Project Inc., and funded by New York City, the program gives counseling to accused criminals (and usually their families) and finds them jobs (some 400 employers are cooperating). If all goes well for 90 days, the agency recommends that criminal charges be dropped. "The question of guilt is not relevant," says Director Ennis ("Joe") Olgiati, 42. "Only behavioral change matters." The program excludes heavy drug users and those accused of major crimes (a separate program for 300 addicts will be tried experimentally next month), but Vera representatives in city courtrooms pick any other offender they think might respond.

"The guts of the program is group counseling," says Olgiati. Each arrested person has two counselors--all ex-addicts or ex-cons--at least one of whom is available all week round. "In the first year, we really didn't know what the hell we were doing," admits Olgiati. Now three-fifths of those in the program succeed in having the charges against them dropped; only 6.6% of the "graduates" during one ten-month period have been rearrested. The project has prompted imitation in "around 20 other states," says Olgiati, and a Senate subcommittee will start hearings this week on a bill to establish a federal version of the program.

COMMUNAL CENTERS. The converted Southern mansion near downtown Atlanta looks like a good boardinghouse, but the 61 residents are all convicts involved in the most controversial of the proposed alternatives to prison. On the theory that the isolation of prisons is one of their biggest weaknesses, many critics have proposed putting groups of convicts into relatively small quarters in ordinary residential areas. Florida now has 28 such community corrections centers--and has had a predictable difficulty in adding others. "Everybody likes the program," says Community Services Administrator Don Hassfurder. "They think there should be community corrections centers--some place else." Washington, D.C. now has 15 such centers, but the program nearly foundered initially because of local resistance. A center is scheduled to open in September near Bethlehem, Pa., and the summer is being spent in persuading neighbors that it presents no threat.

The community centers have a relatively relaxed atmosphere, and officials help the inmates get full-time jobs. In the Atlanta experiment, the men average $3.49 an hour at jobs ranging from heavy-equipment operator to gas-station manager, and they each pay $4 a day for their room and board. Every man participates in group-therapy sessions, shares the clean-up chores and lives in a double room, most of which have air conditioners and TV sets. Visitors of either sex are allowed every evening until 10 p.m., and all day on weekends. The idea may seem to some like "coddling criminals," but the centers can point to a long-term success: North Carolina pioneered in such centers 15 years ago, now has 63, and they boast a recidivism rate of less than 2%.

There are other, less radical alternatives. Furloughs, for example, are becoming common. Pennsylvania has granted 6,200 of them in the past 18 months. Last year California sent only 549 of 11,688 first-conviction felons to state prisons or juvenile facilities; the remainder were fined, sent for a time to local jails, or put on probation.

Total abolition of prison still remains somewhat fanciful. As Illinois Psychiatrist Marvin Ziporyn observes, "We have some wolves among the human population. The prison system still contains 50% aggressive criminals." Some would quarrel with his percentage, but no expert argues that all the walls should come down. The point, says Harvard's Vorenberg, is that the emphasis should shift; every prison administrator ought to be saying: "How many of them need to be here?"

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