This review presents one view of what we, as a society, wish to accomplish, and it's not exactly pretty.
In ''Going Up the River,'' Joseph T. Hallinan offers a novel, and
disturbing, explanation for the relentless rise in the prison population. A
reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Hallinan spent four years visiting
prisons -- traveling from one to another, he writes, ''the way some might
travel Civil War battlefields, ticking off the famous sites.'' He visited the
Limestone Correctional Center in Capshaw, Ala., where inmates wearing
iron shackles around their ankles spend their days smashing boulders
with sledgehammers. He visited the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in
McAlester, where 10,000 spectators at a prison rodeo roared as
bronco-riding inmates were thrown to the ground, knocked unconscious
and trampled. He spent much of his time in Texas, which, since 1991,
has undertaken the most extensive prison-building program in United
States history. At its peak, in 1995 (when George W. Bush was
governor), the state was opening one new prison nearly every week.
Hallinan also traveled back in time, in a sense, to some early landmark
prisons, like the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Opened in
1829, Eastern State was created by Quakers. Abhorring corporal
punishment, they believed in not merely confining inmates but in reforming
them. To that end, they stressed work and solitude. Inmates were made
to serve their entire sentence inside their cells, working alone, eating
alone, praying alone. This, the Quakers believed, would lead to penitence
-- hence the name, ''penitentiary.'' Penologists of the day proclaimed the
prison an extraordinarily humane institution, but Charles Dickens, visiting
while on a tour of the United States, found it barbaric. ''Over the head
and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house,'' he
wrote, ''a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the
curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell
from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of
imprisonment has expired.''
Such cruelties seem to belong to some bygone era, but, as Hallinan
discovered, the conditions in today's prisons are no less severe. In
language that is simple and unadorned, he describes scenes that are
graphic and unsettling. At the Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City,
Calif., for instance -- one of a new generation of ultramodern,
ultraexpensive ''supermaxes'' -- the conditions ''press the outer bounds of
what most humans can psychologically tolerate,'' as one judge put it.
About 1,500 of the 3,800 inmates live in a special Security Housing Unit,
or SHU. (Among them is Charles Manson.) Inmates are kept inside their
tiny cells 22 1/2 hours a day. Most have cellmates, but one-third are kept
alone. And their stays can last for years.
''The SHU is designed to deaden the senses,'' Hallinan writes. ''The cells
are windowless; the walls are white. From inside the cell, all one can see
through the perforated metal door is another white wall.'' A Harvard
Medical School psychiatrist who interviewed 55 inmates over a
two-week period found the SHU to be a breeding ground of psychosis.
Nonetheless, Hallinan reports, many inmates sought to be assigned to it,
so pervasive was the violence in the rest of the facility. ''Pelican Bay
inmates,'' he notes, ''have had their arms broken, their eyes gouged out,
their brains splattered.''
Visiting Pelican Bay, Hallinan was struck by its similarities to Eastern
State: ''It has the same fortresslike construction, the same use of isolation
and sensory deprivation, the same resulting mental illness.'' The primary
difference, he observes, is that while Eastern State genuinely sought to
reform its inmates, Pelican Bay ''makes no such pretense. . . . It is
Eastern State minus the hope.'' What's more, he notes, such supermaxes
are proliferating. The same is true of solitary confinement. On any given
day, thousands of inmates nationwide are kept in ''administrative
segregation,'' as it's now called. The experience, Hallinan says, drives
many to the brink of madness.
Each prison Hallinan visits seems to feature its own form of depravity. At
the state prison in Corcoran, Calif., rival gang members were pitted
against each other in ''human cockfights'' while guards placed bets. In
Alabama, a state on the cutting edge of penal punishment, inmates caught
masturbating are required to wear special flamingo-pink uniforms. At the
Ad Seg section of the McConnell Unit in Beeville, Tex., up to a dozen
assaults occur every day, and guards wear safety glasses to protect them
from the feces, urine and food that are regularly hurled at them. nytimes.com
Having cranked up the US prison population to 2 million over the last 20 years, the goal is apparently to add another million or so. It's going against the grain to think about what all those prisoners might be like when they get out. My not very big home state recently built a "super-max", for no apparent reason other than trendiness. It seems that it's mostly being used to house overflow from the other overcrowded prisons. Someday, some visionary politician might have the courage to actually try to wind down the war on drugs instead of building more and more prisons, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. |
