What Are Prisons For?

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 transform them from idlers and hooligans into good, industrious citizens. In 1790 a group of Philadelphia Quakers, brimming with revolutionary optimism, began the experiment in a renovated downtown jail. They were bent on "such degrees and modes of punishment . . . as may . . . become the means of restoring our fellow creatures 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 reformatories, correctional centers and rehabilitation facilities. Those official euphemisms are still used, but they are vestiges, drained of that first noble zeal.

Prisons did not work out as planned. Right now in most states there are individual prisons, and whole prison systems, that courts have condemned. Insurrections and slaughter shock everyone and surprise nobody. There was no bona fide riot among San Quentin's 2,900 inmates last year, yet seven prisoners were murdered, and at least 54 others were stabbed, clubbed or beaten, all in the normal course of prison life.

While heroic plans for imprisonment have shriveled, the Inmate Nation is larger than ever before. The public wants to "get tough" with criminals, and legislators, 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 12.1% 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 at what? What are prisons for? Punishment. At that, prisons have easily succeeded, all the more so in a country like this one, with its lust for liberty, for room to move. By locking a criminal away, a community achieves retribution as well, a theoretical function of the U.S. penal system. Prisons also keep criminals off the streets for a while. Yet, oddly, this most successfully realized purpose—plain detention—has been usually regarded as almost incidental to prison's higher, far more problematic purposes. The loftiest and most desperately sought of these is rehabilitation, originally to be accomplished by religious conversion, and later by psychology.