What Are Prisons For?

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Everything, including the ordinary, seems strange in these fortresses. In the Stateville library, a huge inmate stands and squints at Bing Crosby's memoir, Call Me Lucky. A young, white female history teacher asks her class of ten young black men, "And who won World War II?" In permissive California, San Quentin's main visiting room has the look of a junior high school make-out party where they forgot to dim the lights: dozens of couples, hugging, smooching, oblivious. In Leavenworth's vast mess hall, inmates grab their silverware from a miniature Conestoga and eat off red-and-white checkered tablecloths; the hoe-down amenities seem almost too perky to bear. In one dim passageway leading to an Illinois cellblock, some wry convict has painted a skillful trompe l'oeil escape route, railroad tracks disappearing into a tunnel and freedom.

A prisoner's days can be spent productively—a queer industriousness, to be sure—or endlessly loafing. At Leavenworth, he might do his time making pig bristles into paintbrushes, and earn about 60¢ an hour. In Texas, the director of prisons says he runs "quasimilitary operations," and his close-cropped inmates in uniform white cotton must work for nothing. Rick Sikes was eligible for a parole hearing after his first 120 days at Leavenworth, but he waived the opportunity; a second bank robbery conviction, and its 50-year sentence, await him in Texas. "I don't care nothin' for the way they do business down there," he says, and "since it's all in turmoil, I sure as hell don't want to go."

The legal turmoil in Texas is the doing of Federal District Court Judge William Wayne Justice, who ordered, among other things, that the prisons provide at least 40 sq. ft. of cell space for each convict. The state has partly complied by putting 3,100 inmates in jury-rigged twelve-man tents. The strict prisons of Texas are not, by Southern standards, atypically harsh. In 30 states, prisons are under court orders to end unconstitutionally cruel conditions and practices, whether inadequately treating sick inmates, improperly ventilating cellblocks or simply jamming in too many prisoners.

The men and women managing prisons are generally not sadists, and the ordinary, lawful discipline at their disposal is great. Withholding privileges such as weekly phone calls or Monday Night Football is, amid the blank, shuffling tedium of prison life, no small punishment. For more intractable violators, officials can lengthen prison terms by docking "good time," the sentence-shortening days an inmate earns for obedience. Or they may place troublemaking prisoners in some form of solitary confinement.

Prison overcrowding, like prison riots (which overcrowding helps ignite) and nominal devotion to prison reform (to which riots give a short-lived public urgency), has been a U.S. constant. Today the American Correctional Association, the main organization of prison officials, has a 495-item roster of adult-prison standards. A basic requirement is that each prisoner have his own cell of at least bathroom size, 60 sq. ft., half as large as cells provided in one Pennsylvania prison 150 years ago. But today only about a fifth of U.S. inmates have one-man, 60-sq.-ft. cells.