What Are Prisons For?

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Prisons effect punishment, of course. But the punishment provided by the roughly 800 U.S. prisons ranges from the purgatorial to the hellish. In a well-designed, progressive place like Michigan's Huron Valley Men's Facility, a five-year term is with luck just that: five years of life terribly circumscribed, with all but a few personal choices and pleasures denied. But in many other prisons, implicit in the same nominal term are five years of extortion and knives; bodies grabbed and ransacked; a sour, filthy cell shared for most of a day with a hothead who wouldn't mind killing again. The experience of a given prison is indiscriminate: the car thief endures the same, day by day, as the angel-dust wholesaler and the habitual stomper of schoolchildren.

Punish criminals by putting them in prison? It is simple only to say. Which criminals? For how long? In what kind of prison?

Any prison will punish. Some people fear that prisons are now too cushy, so spiffed up that chastisement is nullified. But the "country club prison" is as unreal as the prison cum treatment center. A plain deprivation of freedom—the average prisoner serves two years or so—is quite severe all by itself. Conjugal visits between inmates and spouses, the innovation so often cited as alarmingly humane, are permitted in only nine states. More typical of prison permissiveness is allowing Playboy pinups in cells and unlimited seconds on Wonder bread in the chow lines.

Jeanette Blakes, 28, was given a 20-to 60-year sentence for shooting to death an acquaintance who, Blakes says, attacked her with a knife. She has served six years in the Dwight Correctional Center, Illinois' women's prison. "What do I miss most here? My freedom," Blakes says. The abstraction sounds palpable. "Just my freedom. Not so much being caressed, or anything like that. You take away a person's freedom, you take away everything."

Rick Sikes, 47, has been in just one prison, the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kans., where he went nearly eleven years ago after a bank robbery conviction. Unlike many inmates, he can compare prison life only with life in "the free world," where he was a country and western guitarist, and not to regimens in other joints. "For a prison," he figures, "Leavenworth is all right. It's not at all like home, and nobody likes being here. But I believe this is as good as prison gets." Still, "you got all kinds of foolish people in here who do crazy things. There's lights on all the time. There's no such thing as quiet."

The essence of prison life is that it is boring, boring by definition and by design. Yet there are accidental Expressionist stage-set touches: Stateville's round, four-tier cell houses, each with its all-seeing gun tower at the hub; in a prison shop, a row of machine tenders, each man in a khaki shirt with WORK painted on the back; on a guard's desk a canvas bandoleer, in every numbered pouch a safety razor for daily distribution on death row; a jarring, hand-lettered sign, NO SNICKERS, that in fact refers to the commissary's candy-bar supply.