What To Expect Fromprisons
No longer rehabilitation, but to punish-and lock the worst away. Even U.S. prisons were supposed to be part of the New World’s promised land. The first American prisons would not merely punish inmates, but transformed them from idlers and hooligans into good, industrious citizens. In 1790 a group of Philadelphia’s Quakers, brimming with evolutionary optimism, began the experiment in a renovated downtown jail. They were bent on “such degrees modes of punishment …as may…becomes the means of restoring our fellow creators to virtue and happiness.” No other country was so seduced for so long by that ambitious charter. The language, ever malleable, conformed to the ideal: when a monkish salvation was expected of inmates, prisons became penitentiaries, then correctional centers and rehabilitation facilities. Those official euphemisms are still used, but they are vestiges, drained of that first noble zeal. While heroic plans for imprisonment have shriveled, the Inmate Nation is larger then ever before. The public wants to “get tough” with criminals, and legislatures, prosecutors and judges are obeying that diffuse mandate by sending more people away for longer stretches.
Prisons have nearly doubled their population since 1970. Last year’s increase was the fastest in this century. Now the Inmate Nation is growing by more than 170 a day, and during the next few weeks will probably edge over 400,000, not quite half black, about 4% women. At the current rate of growth the number of inmates would double again by 1988. Today more than one out of every 600 Americans is in prison-not jail or reform school, but prison. Only the Soviet Union and South Africa have a higher percentage locked up.
Prisons have failed. But failed at what? What are prisons for: punishment? At that, prisons have easily succeeded, all the more so in a country like this one, with a...
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