What Are Prisons For?

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Now, suddenly, a new consensus has hardened into shape, radically contrary to the orthodoxy of two centuries. No one has ever figured out a way to impose anything like prisoner rehabilitation. Most ex-inmates do not return to prison, but there seems to be no way to reduce the incorrigible minority, at least 30%, who will return within three years. Thus what prisons have failed to accomplish is a feat that a more modest (or less benevolent) people would not have counted on. "Rehabilitate? What is rehabilitate?" scowls Eddie Meeks, an inmate at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois. "You can't rehabilitate me if I don't want to." Daniel Weil, a former Chicago warden and prosecutor, is clear-sighted.

"No one ever knew what rehabilitation meant," he says. "I'm not advocating an end to the programs of rehabilitation. Education and work programs are important, just as clean sheets and decent food and fair treatment are important. But that's not what prisons are mainly about."

The wisdom of Meeks and Weil only recently seems patent. The remarkable fact is not that prisons proved to be uncongenial places for moral improvement, but that it took so long for the U.S. to recognize and confess the folly. The outlook always should have been grim. Riots have beset American prisons from the beginning. But those manifest failures along the way were only specifically disappointing, not generally disillusioning. A spasm of violence at a particular prison, epidemic madness at another, each was explained away as a technical error: the cellblock configuration was wrong, the recreation policy too lenient. One who saw through to the inherent failure was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous 1831 tour of the U.S. was, first of all, a survey of American prisons. "Nowhere was this system of imprisonment crowned with the hoped-for success," he wrote. "It never effected the reformation of the prisoners."

Today, as never before, thoughtful discussion of imprisonment does not stick to a sweet-sounding party line. It has been discovered, for example, that a small number of criminals commit an inordinate percentage of violent crime. Therefore, many states have introduced "career criminal" programs that successfully concentrate on locking away those habitual offenders. Such clarity of vision is already permitting a careful—and, yes, hopeful—assessment of exactly what prisons can and cannot be expected to do. Prisons are a mess, but they may not be irretrievable. Rather, a new, sober set of hopes is required. Prisons can be made clean and safe and fair, and they can be used more judiciously: decent prisons for society's most indecent members.