Gilded Cages

Last New Year's Day, Boston's Sheriff Robert Rufo gave 935 hardened criminals a present: a postmodern pink concrete-and-brick high-rise home -- a new designer prison, with a colonnaded inner courtyard where the inmates, clad in bright orange jackets, could stroll in pairs. Inside, brightly colored dayrooms equipped with televisions, butcher-block tables and cushy chairs completed a picture of serenity. For inmates and their watchers alike, it was a far cry from the dank, forbidding, Victorian-style Suffolk County House of Correction they had left behind on the banks of Boston Harbor. Gone were the five tiers of cages, the earsplitting clash of...