The Prison Nightmare

By Ed Magnuson

A crisis of overcrowding spawns riots and meaner convicts

The circle is not only vicious, it breeds violence. As crime rates rise, state legislators react by passing stiff laws requiring longer minimum prison sentences. Result: more prisoners stay longer in prisons that are already crammed well past their planned capacity. Tensions rise as up to five inmates crowd into one-man cubicles. Gang rule prevails, as the toughest convicts abuse and torment the meek or nonviolent, and guards on undermanned correction staffs fear to intervene. When an inmate is finally freed, he is equipped for only one thing: to survive in the ways of the walled jungle. More often than not, he returns to a life of crime.

That dreary cycle is one of the most prominent and distressing features of the U.S. prison system. Last week, as Chief Justice Warren Burger lamented that most inmates "go back into society worse for their confinement," three of Michigan's state prisons were shaken by bloody rioting. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court neared a landmark decision on whether putting two prisoners into one cell is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution. If, as seems likely, the court decrees that it does not, prison authorities fear that the crowding will get worse and the rioting may spread.

Public outrage at the prevalence of violent crime, especially on city streets, has been growing. In a notable commencement address at the George Washington University National Law Center, Burger boldly argued that society's concern about a convict should not end when the cell door clangs shut. Declared Burger: "When society places a person behind walls and bars, it has a moral obligation to take some steps to try to render him or her better equipped to return to a useful life."

Burger urged that at the least, every inmate should be taught to "read, write, spell and do simple arithmetic." He asked: "Without these basic skills, what chances does any person have of securing a gainful occupation?" He also proposed that vocational training be expanded for longer-term prisoners and that language and craft courses be mandatory. Sentences, he suggested, could be shortened for those inmates who "cooperate by learning."

At the same time, the Chief Justice asked that "a national academy of corrections" be created to help train prison personnel "for the sensitive role they should perform." Burger admitted that his proposals might not, in the end, really succeed in helping more released prisoners go straight, but, he pleaded, "we must try." Burger's proposals clash with the experience of most penal officials, who have virtually abandoned rehabilitation as a practical possibility in prisons.

Nonetheless, the riots in Michigan seemed to emphasize the urgency of Burger's plea. They began in the State Prison of Southern Michigan in Jackson, a dreary, 57-acre fortress built in 1926 to hold 4,000 inmates, but currently filled with 5,600 convicts. Most are hardened criminals serving long sentences for crimes ranging from arson to rape and murder. Jackson's undermanned staff --there is only one guard for every 100 inmates--admits that it cannot cope with the heavily armed prisoners; according to one estimate they hone and hide more than 50 knives a day in the workshops.

The prisoners buy weapons from each other; a gun with ammunition can be had for $500, a 10-in. dagger for $10, a 14-in. bowie knife for $20. The arms are not acquired primarily to attack guards, but to protect the prisoners from one another. Notes one inmate: "In here, not having a knife is a death sentence."

In the first four months of the year, 51 stabbings were reported in "Jacktown," but there undoubtedly were more. Some prisoners have become skilled at stitching up cuts, often with plain needle and thread; prisoners are afraid to report assaults, lest they be singled out as snitchers.

The trouble began at Jackson on May 21, when two guards were attacked by inmates, apparently without provocation. The next day, representatives of the guards demanded that the prisoners be locked up and shaken down to collect the illicit weapons. Both Warden Barry Mintzes and State Corrections Director Perry Johnson vetoed the plan as unnecessarily provocative, but the guards began a lockup anyway. Fearful that they might be confined to their cells over the long holiday weekend, prisoners in four of Jackson's 14 cellblocks refused to be caged. They turned on the guards, who fled to safety, and began setting fires. After rampaging for several hours, the inmates agreed to start negotiating with the warden. One surprising demand: they wanted more guards on duty, contending that the correction-staff shortage had led to cutbacks in their recreational activities. Eventually, the prisoners yielded to orders through loudspeakers that they return to their cells.

On the same day, inmates at the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia, 70 miles away, learned by radio of the Jackson troubles; they went on a sympathetic rampage for more than six hours. They were finally forced back into their cells by police and guards using tear gas, but not before 18 inmates were injured in clashes with each other. One had an ear cut off, another survived a wooden splinter driven into his skull, yet another was bound and gang-raped.

After a tense holiday weekend, the Jackson inmates once more began looting and burning. They destroyed some of the prefabricated dormitory units that had been put into service to relieve overcrowding in cells. Just as that uprising began to subside, 200 convicts in the maximum-security prison at Marquette, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, started another sympathy riot. They set their vocational school on fire, as well as a garment factory and store. Fourteen inmates and eight guards were injured before gun squads could restore order. Total damage in all three prisons was estimated at roughly $10 million.

Michigan's prison troubles are not unique. A Justice Department-sponsored study reports that nearly two-thirds of all state and federal prisoners live in facilities that are considered overcrowded. That is, they afford each prisoner less than 60 sq. ft. of living space; the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association consider that to be a minimum standard if serious mental and physical problems are 1 to be avoided. Conditions in the nation's city and county jails are even worse; another federal study says that 80% of the inmates in these institutions have less than the minimum space.

The main cause of overcrowding has been a spectacular rise in the prison population--from 195,000 to 320,000 nationwide in the past decade. That growth reflects both an actual increase in crimes and the fact that more than half of the states have passed minimum or mandatory sentencing laws since 1970. The new laws, enacted to placate a public demanding tough sentences, often make little distinction among crimes; for example, judges are forced to lock up shoplifters and forgers along with murderers and armed robbers. Contends Norman Carlson, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons: "The knee-jerk response of many legislators in passing harsher sentencing statutes threatens to overwhelm our corrections system."

South Carolina's prison system, designed to hold 4,800 prisoners, is now trying to contain 8,200. In Texas 2,650 of the state's 32,000 inmates last week were sleeping on floors rather than in beds. There are plans to construct new cellblocks; meanwhile, tents are being set up to house 1,320 prisoners. Claims Texas Governor Bill Clements: "If tents are good enough for the Army, Marines and National Guard, they are good enough for the inmates." At Joliet Correctional Center in Illinois, 1,205 prisoners compete for space in a prison built to hold 640. Observes Michael Mahoney, director of a prison-reform association: "The only place in this state where you can be guaranteed a single cell is on death row."

Overcrowding has led to a batch of protest lawsuits by prisoners and prison-reform groups. Judges are increasingly sympathetic to the argument that the conditions add up to cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Nine entire state prison systems-- are under court orders to clean up; in some cases judges have ruled that prisoners with little time remaining in their sentences or who pose minimal danger to the public must be released if more space is not provided. More than 4,000 inmates have been released early in Illinois, for example --nearly one-third of all the state's prisoners. Individual prisons in an additional 22 states are under court orders to reform, and prisons in twelve more states face similar lawsuits.

The basic legal question in all this litigation is something that the Supreme Court is about to answer. It will rule on a suit, Rhodes vs. Chapman, filed in 1975 by Kelly Chapman, an armed robber held at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. He contended that the one-man cell he shared with another prisoner gave him only 32 sq. ft. of personal space.

That was less, he complained, than what the state of Ohio requires for five-week-old calves in feed lots. U.S. District Judge Timothy Hogan agreed that double-celling violated the Eighth Amendment and ordered Lucasville to reduce its inmate population. Governor James Rhodes filed an appeal for the state, but has ordered the transfer of some prisoners from Lucasville pending a final decision.

The nationwide cost of modernizing and expanding antiquated prisons, or building new ones to provide each inmate with his own cell, is estimated by the Justice Department at $10 billion. The current public attitude favors locking criminals away for as long as possible. Yet prison experts contend that the certainty of punishment, rather than the length of a sentence, is a better deterrent to crime. Thus, money might be better spent on the police and court systems than on prisons. Moreover, they insist, many nonviolent prisoners--those convicted of crimes involving no physical threat to people--need not be confined in maximum-and medium-security prisons.

Allen Breed, director of the National Institute of Corrections, contends that courts have been both too lenient with violent criminals, who tend to repeat their offenses, and too harsh on all the others. Breed argues that many of these nonviolent convicts should be living in halfway houses and serving in work programs, in which they would be required to reimburse the victims from whom they stole or perform community services. Minnesota last year passed a law under which the nonviolent convict who endangers no one can be assigned by judges to these work programs. It is considered a model, and it seems to work. The state's prison population dropped 7% last year.

--By Ed Magnuson.

Reported by Christopher Redman/Jackson and Evan Thomas/Washington

*In Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Missis sippi, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Texas.

With reporting by Christopher Redman/Jackson, Evan Thomas/Washington

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