The Nation: 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.

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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.