What Are Prisons For?

By KURT ANDERSEN

Even U.S. prisons were supposed to be part of the New World's promised land. The first American prisons would not merely punish inmates, but transform them from idlers and hooligans into good, industrious citizens. In 1790 a group of Philadelphia Quakers, brimming with revolutionary optimism, began the experiment in a renovated downtown jail. They were bent on "such degrees and modes of punishment . . . as may . . . become the means of restoring our fellow creatures to virtue and happiness." No other country was so seduced for so long by that ambitious charter. The language, ever malleable, conformed to the ideal: when a monkish salvation was expected of inmates, prisons became penitentiaries, then reformatories, correctional centers and rehabilitation facilities. Those official euphemisms are still used, but they are vestiges, drained of that first noble zeal.

Prisons did not work out as planned. Right now in most states there are individual prisons, and whole prison systems, that courts have condemned. Insurrections and slaughter shock everyone and surprise nobody. There was no bona fide riot among San Quentin's 2,900 inmates last year, yet seven prisoners were murdered, and at least 54 others were stabbed, clubbed or beaten, all in the normal course of prison life.

While heroic plans for imprisonment have shriveled, the Inmate Nation is larger than ever before. The public wants to "get tough" with criminals, and legislators, prosecutors and judges are obeying that diffuse mandate by sending more people away for longer stretches. Prisons have nearly doubled their population since 1970. Last year's 12.1% increase was the fastest in this century. Now the Inmate Nation is growing by more than 170 a day, and during the next few weeks will probably edge over 400,000, not quite half black, about 4% women. At the current rate of growth the number of inmates would double again by 1988. Today more than one out of every 600 Americans is in prison--not jail or reform school, but prison. Only the Soviet Union and South Africa have a higher percentage locked up.

Prisons have failed. But at what? What are prisons for? Punishment. At that, prisons have easily succeeded, all the more so in a country like this one, with its lust for liberty, for room to move. By locking a criminal away, a community achieves retribution as well, a theoretical function of the U.S. penal system. Prisons also keep criminals off the streets for a while. Yet, oddly, this most successfully realized purpose--plain detention--has been usually regarded as almost incidental to prison's higher, far more problematic purposes. The loftiest and most desperately sought of these is rehabilitation, originally to be accomplished by religious conversion, and later by psychology.

Now, suddenly, a new consensus has hardened into shape, radically contrary to the orthodoxy of two centuries. No one has ever figured out a way to impose anything like prisoner rehabilitation. Most ex-inmates do not return to prison, but there seems to be no way to reduce the incorrigible minority, at least 30%, who will return within three years. Thus what prisons have failed to accomplish is a feat that a more modest (or less benevolent) people would not have counted on. "Rehabilitate? What is rehabilitate?" scowls Eddie Meeks, an inmate at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois. "You can't rehabilitate me if I don't want to." Daniel Weil, a former Chicago warden and prosecutor, is clear-sighted.

"No one ever knew what rehabilitation meant," he says. "I'm not advocating an end to the programs of rehabilitation. Education and work programs are important, just as clean sheets and decent food and fair treatment are important. But that's not what prisons are mainly about."

The wisdom of Meeks and Weil only recently seems patent. The remarkable fact is not that prisons proved to be uncongenial places for moral improvement, but that it took so long for the U.S. to recognize and confess the folly. The outlook always should have been grim. Riots have beset American prisons from the beginning. But those manifest failures along the way were only specifically disappointing, not generally disillusioning. A spasm of violence at a particular prison, epidemic madness at another, each was explained away as a technical error: the cellblock configuration was wrong, the recreation policy too lenient. One who saw through to the inherent failure was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous 1831 tour of the U.S. was, first of all, a survey of American prisons. "Nowhere was this system of imprisonment crowned with the hoped-for success," he wrote. "It never effected the reformation of the prisoners."

Today, as never before, thoughtful discussion of imprisonment does not stick to a sweet-sounding party line. It has been discovered, for example, that a small number of criminals commit an inordinate percentage of violent crime. Therefore, many states have introduced "career criminal" programs that successfully concentrate on locking away those habitual offenders. Such clarity of vision is already permitting a careful--and, yes, hopeful--assessment of exactly what prisons can and cannot be expected to do. Prisons are a mess, but they may not be irretrievable. Rather, a new, sober set of hopes is required. Prisons can be made clean and safe and fair, and they can be used more judiciously: decent prisons for society's most indecent members.

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.

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-c- 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.

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.

Space is most often the problem. The Florida department of corrections, under whose auspices a quarter of all U.S. inmate suicides occur, finally agreed with a judge to put no more than four prisoners in space designed to hold three. In Texas, where until a year ago 2,000 inmates had to sleep on the floor, officials for one week in May simply stopped admitting new prisoners rather than flout Judge Justice's order. Illinois is appealing last year's federal court order to house inmates in single cells, which officials estimate would require $400 million in new construction. Michigan (like Iowa and Minnesota) has a law that automatically provides for releasing inmates when overcrowding becomes abject. Twice this year the statutory safety valve was triggered in Michigan, instantly subtracting 90 days from the sentences of most prisoners. By the end of the year 1,400 will have been freed early. Crowdedness has forced Illinois prison officials to lower their standards for giving "meritorious good time" to inmates. Alabama let out 277 surplus inmates last summer on the order of a federal court. Over the past five years, meanwhile, Alabama's prison budget has quadrupled.

Wardens will whisper their private gratitude that courts have finally got money out of legislatures, but the budgets have only begun ballooning. Experts estimate that between $6 billion and $10 billion will have to be spent simply to bring existing prisons up to snuff. Yet states surely cannot expect much help from the budget-cutting Federal Government. In short, there is an upper limit to how much imprisonment citizens will underwrite, despite the talk about cracking down on criminals.

Until the past few years it was all talk, not widely translated into concrete toughness. So why the imprisonment spree now? Essentially, because U.S. citizens reached a critical level of panic and anger at what they feel is a constantly lurking threat. Moreover, prosecutors in some states are winning a lot more cases, in part because they are concentrating their efforts on the career criminals responsible for a disproportionate share of street crime. Between 1972 and 1979 in Chicago's Cook County, felony convictions increased 470%. Many trial judges, roused by fierce, if glancingly focused public rage, have been imposing longer sentences. In New Jersey, the average prison sentence is 40% longer than that given four years ago, and the number of sentences increased in just one year from less than 14,000 to 18,000. Then there is the matter of parole. Four states have done away with it entirely, and in others its use has gone from prudent to stinting. Since 1977, 37 states have passed mandatory sentencing laws for certain crimes, which inflexibly deny judges the right to shorten or suspend sentences.

Exasperation with high crime and chaotic justice does not always produce hasty, broad-brush legislation. Determinate or presumptive sentencing, now the law in eleven states, is a more thoughtful kind of overhaul, a necessary reform of an old reform gone awry. Beginning around 1900, indeterminate sentences--"two to five" or "ten to 20"--became common. As soon as a prisoner could convince a parole board that he had learned his lesson, he could go. Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau says that "prisoners tend to go into rehabilitation programs for the purpose of convincing the parole board that they have been rehabilitated." Prisoners are in a perpetual, anxious limbo and would generally prefer to know their release date from the outset. Time served for identical crimes can vary five-fold or more. Such a routine does little to demonstrate to the lawless the law's evenhanded integrity. Furthermore, says Morgenthau, "if prisoners knew how long they were going to serve, some of them would go into rehabilitation programs because they wanted to be rehabilitated," and not as a ruse to win parole.

Determinate sentencing ends the ambiguity. The plan considered wisest is the one adopted by Minnesota in 1980. Basically, that state's "grid" formula quantifies a convict's criminal past and his current offense, and assigns the appropriate sentence. A judge who occasionally wants to impose any lesser or greater penalty must justify his divergence in writing. Most appealing is the cool simplicity embodied in the guidelines, which help to restore an aura of fairness and strictness to criminal justice. Deterring crime is a murky business, but it can work well only if the sanctions threatened are credible, consistently applied and within society's means. "The certainty of punishment," says Norman Carlson, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, "is more important than the length of punishment."

Longer punishment means more prison crowding. Between January and July, Mississippi's prison population grew at an annual pace of 44%. "If we continue to incarcerate at the same rate," says Morris Thigpen, Mississippi commissioner of corrections, "we will be constantly building new prisons. I don't think we can." Thigpen's prescription is repeated in every state, by hundreds of prison officials, judges and scholars. "We have got to look at prison space," Thigpen says, "as a scarce commodity to be used sparingly." The alternative to a Herculean (not to say Sisyphean) prison-construction jag, agrees Carlson, "is to do a better job deciding who ought to go to prison, and for how long. We have to be more selective."

Selective acceptance of prisoners sounds like a screwy refraction of college admissions, one where only the least promising, the worst and the dumbest, are allowed entrance. But there is, surprisingly, broad expert agreement that a large minority of people going to prison do not deserve that special bruising. Like war, imprisonment should be a government's last resort. It is too precious a resource, too expensive and damaging, to waste on the run of criminals.

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.

The liberals and hard-liners in Zimring's sketch would best go beyond simple sentiment and ideology. A Rand Corporation study suggests, soberingly, to just what degree crime may be reduced directly, and at what human and fiscal costs, by keeping criminals in prison. The findings are like statistical good news-bad news jokes. With a sentencing policy under which every second-time adult felon got a five-year sentence--impossibly tough by the strictest real-life standards--the study predicts a 16% reduction in violent crime. The bad news: the prison population would triple. The national cost would be perhaps $40 billion immediately, $12 billion more every year to keep the new inmates. "Incapacitation" does work. But, too broadly used, it can at most make dents in crime, and those only at a very heavy price. A more sparing, acute application, however, bearing down hard on those who commit dozens of crimes a year, can produce cost-efficient results. Six percent of the criminals commit 28% of the crimes in Manhattan? Get them.

Criminologists Michael Sherman and Gordon Hawkins, in their recent book Imprisonment in America: Choosing the Future, make an erudite, persuasive case that prisons be used exclusively for violent and otherwise hardened criminals. "A substantial fraction of people now incarcerated," they unblinkingly allow, "would not be imprisoned under our proposed principles." There is general, if sketchy, agreement about what to do with the tens of thousands each year who deserve, as Sherman and Hawkins write, "punishments with real content that lie between 'nothing' and 'prison.' " So complete has been the U.S. commitment to imprisonment, however, that comparatively little energy or money has gone to trying out such punishments.

As a result, probation is the penalty routinely imposed. More than 1.2 million people are currently on probation, most of them first offenders. For many, probation could be ideal, but is in practice slapdash: in Los Angeles County, for instance, each probation officer is supposed to keep an eye on 350 "clients." For other offenders, probation is just not severe enough. "There have to be alternatives," says Texas Corrections Director W.J. Estelle Jr. "Take restitution in theft cases. People would have their anger assuaged if you say, 'Hey, we're gonna make this fella pay you back and keep him under strict supervision.' And it brings home to the offender that crime doesn't pay." Really hurtful fines could be used more often in lieu of prison. A smalltown drunk who beats up people in his spare time could be denied free time: house arrest nights and weekends. Unchained chain gangs might be mobilized to do the scut work of local governments.

Here and there, modest attempts are being made. Mississippi, for example, runs five "restitution centers," small and relatively cheap houses where convicted thieves must stay at night but leave during the day to work off their debts to victims. A special task force last winter proposed to the legislature that some first offenders be sentenced to perform community service, and that a sentencing standards commission be established. The measures were defeated, even formally condemned by 23 senators. Says Corrections Commissioner Thigpen: "During the debate all we heard was that we were 'soft on crime' and 'the people back home want us to get tough.' "

The intransigence may be shortsighted, but it is understandable. To be sure, Scandinavian countries are making a go of punishments other than prison. But the U.S. has a murder rate five times that of Denmark, 19 times Norway's. In the U.S., an inmate stands a 1-in-3,300 chance of being killed during a year in prison, but the appalling fact is that the average black man outside prison faces about twice the risk (1 in 1,700). Those data do not argue against figuring out new kinds of punishments. They do explain why people in this country are scared out of their wits.

The prison-population bomb, however, as it consumes ever bigger chunks of austere government budgets, may finally prompt reasoned debate and sensible action. What frustrates wardens most is that while prisons have probably never been more salvageable, they are too overburdened to do their business well. "All I feel we can do," says Stateville Assistant Warden Salvador Godinez, 29, "is to try to avoid debilitating these guys. Look, 95% of them are going to get out."

Perhaps the best that can be hoped is for prisons to become, in one sense, even worse: a higher concentration of head bashers, heroin warlords, child molesters and murderers--malevolence distilled. There would be no more half-believable inmate excuses. Criminals would effectively decide to go to prison. R.L. Pulley, San Quentin's warden, says as much: "There's nothing to ensure that when an inmate gets out and passes by the 7-Eleven, he won't decide to rob it. That's basic to America, the opportunity to make choices." Inmate Marion Chaney does not make lame excuses. He has four more years to serve of his fifth Texas prison term. "If I am dumb enough to get in here again," he says from behind a wall of steel mesh, "boy, I'll tell you, I'll deserve it."

So he will. But it was never supposed to work out so bluntly. U.S. prisons were to be the ultimate social experiment, where lapidaries of the soul would smooth and polish criminals. Under what conditions? Inside locked catacombs, filled to overflowing with inmates wrenched from their families for years, all overseen by men with searchlights and rifles. The contradiction was ignored for 200 years, partly out of earnestness and hope, but eventually because of a squeamish hypocrisy, a refusal to admit that imprisonment is any society's darkest chore.

But miracles should no longer be expected, whether miraculous reformation of inmates or miraculous control of crime. Prisons are for temporarily isolating society's worst marauders. It is as simple and as complicated as that. Still, as a nation's institutions, they may also be made safer and more decent, just as a nation's whole criminal justice system may be made more coherent. Imprisoning people less shamefully is a worthy enough goal. Lowered expectations need not signify a national moral bankruptcy. For the U.S. and its ideas about prison, a deep breath and a sigh may be the beginning of an overdue maturity. --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Jay Branegan/Chicago and Anne Constable/Atlanta, with other bureaus

With reporting by Jay Branegan, Anne Constable, other bureaus

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