What Are Prisons For?

(5 of 11)

Southern prisons are particularly overcrowded. Georgia last year admitted 1,600 more inmates than it discharged, and 700 convicts, for whom there is absolutely no more prison space, are being held in Georgia's jampacked county jails. In the past year Florida's inmate population had a net gain of 4,457, and the prisons remain overcrowded despite the completion of a new Florida prison every eight months, on average, since 1974. "The South has been punitive all along," says the Rev. Joe Ingle, a Southern penal activist. With its currently teeming prisons, "it is in the process of affirming how punitive it can be." But many Northern prisons have impossible overcrowding problems of their own. During just the first eight months of 1982, California's inmate population grew nearly 12%. Illinois prison officials plan to build space for 1,500 additional inmates by 1985; unfortunately, they expect by then to have 3,500 additional inmates to house.

Prisons are extraordinarily expensive to build and operate. At a recently opened medium-security prison in Nevada, the price comes to $37,000 a cell, and a new, state-of-the-art maximum-security complex has cost Minnesotans $78,300 a cell. It takes about $15,000 to feed and guard an inmate for a year. National averages, though, can obscure almost freakish disparities between states. Inmates in Texas, at one extreme, build their prisons and grow 70% of their food, and so each prisoner costs the state only $3,577 a year. (Despite the free labor, the Texas legislature was forced to allot $96.5 million for prison-building for this year.) At Delaware's new maximum security facility, the annual cost per inmate is upward of $30,000.

Even if a state's citizens and leaders decided that it was fine to cut costs by giving inmates gruel and just enough space to brood lying down, the federal judiciary's notions of decency would no longer permit them to do so. During the past ten years, a conservative Supreme Court affirmed, and then cautiously circumscribed, the range of prison conditions deemed unconstitutional, and the discretion of lower federal judges to order remedies. In its 1976 decision in the Texas case Estelle vs. Gamble, and even more powerfully two years later in Hutto vs. Finney, a case involving sickeningly bad conditions in Arkansas, the Supreme Court effectively reversed the two-century policy of keeping prisons virtually immune from judicial intervention. In last year's Rhodes vs. Chapman, however, the Justices substantially narrowed the circumstances under which a court may order prison improvements.