What Are Prisons For?

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Here and there, modest attempts are being made. Mississippi, for example, runs five "restitution centers," small and relatively cheap houses where convicted thieves must stay at night but leave during the day to work off their debts to victims. A special task force last winter proposed to the legislature that some first offenders be sentenced to perform community service, and that a sentencing standards commission be established. The measures were defeated, even formally condemned by 23 senators. Says Corrections Commissioner Thigpen: "During the debate all we heard was that we were 'soft on crime' and 'the people back home want us to get tough.' "

The intransigence may be shortsighted, but it is understandable. To be sure, Scandinavian countries are making a go of punishments other than prison. But the U.S. has a murder rate five times that of Denmark, 19 times Norway's. In the U.S., an inmate stands a 1-in-3,300 chance of being killed during a year in prison, but the appalling fact is that the average black man outside prison faces about twice the risk (1 in 1,700). Those data do not argue against figuring out new kinds of punishments. They do explain why people in this country are scared out of their wits.

The prison-population bomb, however, as it consumes ever bigger chunks of austere government budgets, may finally prompt reasoned debate and sensible action. What frustrates wardens most is that while prisons have probably never been more salvageable, they are too overburdened to do their business well. "All I feel we can do," says Stateville Assistant Warden Salvador Godinez, 29, "is to try to avoid debilitating these guys. Look, 95% of them are going to get out."

Perhaps the best that can be hoped is for prisons to become, in one sense, even worse: a higher concentration of head bashers, heroin warlords, child molesters and murderers—malevolence distilled. There would be no more half-believable inmate excuses. Criminals would effectively decide to go to prison. R.L. Pulley, San Quentin's warden, says as much: "There's nothing to ensure that when an inmate gets out and passes by the 7-Eleven, he won't decide to rob it. That's basic to America, the opportunity to make choices." Inmate Marion Chaney does not make lame excuses. He has four more years to serve of his fifth Texas prison term. "If I am dumb enough to get in here again," he says from behind a wall of steel mesh, "boy, I'll tell you, I'll deserve it."

So he will. But it was never supposed to work out so bluntly. U.S. prisons were to be the ultimate social experiment, where lapidaries of the soul would smooth and polish criminals. Under what conditions? Inside locked catacombs, filled to overflowing with inmates wrenched from their families for years, all overseen by men with searchlights and rifles. The contradiction was ignored for 200 years, partly out of earnestness and hope, but eventually because of a squeamish hypocrisy, a refusal to admit that imprisonment is any society's darkest chore.