What Are Prisons For?

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Everyone from conservative William F. Buckley to the American Civil Liberties Union argues that the emphasis must instead be shifted to what is singular about prisons, the irreplaceable nub. It is imprisonment alone that can keep predators off the streets, and that result is what the U.S. must begin chiefly seeking for its $4.5 billion a year.

There can hardly be any quibbling about who should get priority for incarceration. Iola Walker, 28, who until July was serving a sentence for forgery in Illinois, offers the standard: "To go and stick up somebody for drugs or money, to hurt a person," she says, "I don't have no sympathy for that." Some states have already been pressed by high volume toward a strategy of reserving prisons for the most violent. More than 70% of the inmates in Illinois and New York are doing time for homicide, kidnaping, rape, arson, robbery, assault or weapons possession. Nationally, however, just over half of all prisoners are locked up for such crimes, and in Georgia, for instance, the overwhelming majority of prisoners are serving time for non-violent crimes. The rest are not angels with dirty faces but crooks, to be sure—thieves, mostly—stupid or bad or both. Yet they are not generally the outlaws who make it scary even to think about going downtown for dinner and a movie.

How long is long enough for those who ought to be imprisoned? Minnesota's guidelines provide for sentences as long as those ordinarily given in the past. A one-year stayed sentence for first-offense marijuana possession, 27 years for a second-degree murderer with a string of earlier felony convictions. Other jurisdictions will temper justice with less mercy. Jerdell White, 36, a smooth-talking father of five, had been to prison in Texas twice before, for burglary and marijuana convictions. He was convicted in Dallas in 1978 of possessing a sawed-off shotgun, and given a life term. In Minnesota, White would already be free.

"There are two strains in penology now," says Franklin Zimring, a University of Chicago sociologist. "The liberals, stressing equality, draw the sentencing grids. Conservatives say Fine, but let's erase this four years and put in eight.' " Yet, as more nearly equal and certain punishment is achieved, those who blithely double sentences on paper may find them ruinously expensive.