The Law: 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.