Editorials

...It is wrong...

...So what's stopping negotiation...

...One direction that we hope will be changed - though we do not have much hope that Justice O'Connor will help do the changing - is that taken in one of the Court's last decisions before its summer adjournment, a ruling on prison life...

...That is why three of the Supreme Court justices, while agreeing on the decision in this particular instance, nonetheless in their separate opinion made a strong case for judicial intervention...

...Autonomous, intermediate bodies are the best basis for making workers part-owners of "the great workbench" on which they work with everyone else...

...And there should be no mistake about it: violence is what such overcrowding breeds, from forcible assault and rape to the kind of rioting that took place recently in Michigan and Hawaii and last year in New Mexico where thirty-three persons were killed...

...cowboys so far insist on "going all the way...

...We concur, heartily...

...it does not require meeting "an aspiration toward an ideal...

...Should this continue, there will be no winners...

...The double occupancy involved in the case occurred in a cell that is approximately eight feet by eight feet with hot and cold running water, a 36-by-80-inch bed, heating and ventilation, a shelf, a flush toilet, a cabinet-nightstand, and a built-in radio...

...Today's decision should in no way be considered as a retreat from careful judicial scrutiny of prison conditions," wrote Justice William J. Brennan Jr...

...This encyclical is long and quiet in tone...

...But "On Human Work" cuts even deeper and wider than these particular items might suggest...

...For these reasons, the initial attention given to any major papal statement may soon subside, leaving...

...We cannot simply devise ways of getting more things into the production process in order to get more things out of it-with the worker as an intermediary factor, as "human capital," at best, in the process...

...Work not only supports family life...

...In effect this "economistic" outlook treats work as "solely an instrument of production" and thereby gives priority to capital-a "capitalism" in the literal sense, a repetition of the fundamental "error of early capitalism," regardless of the label under which such "a reversal or order" currently parades...

...This is the "gospel of work," a phrase recurring throughout the encyclical...

...It would seem, though, that both sides, not to mention the war-weary populace caught in between, are coming round to the idea of negotiation...

...It involved the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, an institution found by the federal District Court to be "unquestionably a top-flight, first-class facility," with adequate food, medical care, sanitation, and library resources...

...for himself and two colleagues...

...By implication the pope is saying that workers' rights would be no less compelling even if a benevolent corporation or commissar provided for their material needs...

...It is expensive...

...It is in the most explicitly theological portions of the encyclical that John Paul II becomes eloquent...

...But the magazine's prime years were the decade before and the decade after the Vatican Council...

...So far, he has delayed producing on promised military aid...

...Opposed to both these affirmations is what the pope calls "materialistic economism," an outlook that treats work as just another thing ("labor power" or "work force") to be bought and sold like "merchandise...

...Senate recently, church sources report that the reign of official terror continues unabated...

...This is a standard more violated than observed...

...On Human" Work" is a rich and thoughtful document in which the present popegives his own special emphasis and elaboration to the ninety-year tradition of papal teaching on the "social question...

...The larger society and the nation provide the human identity and cultural values that inform the worker's efforts and are, with the whole global family, the setting for understanding the "common good" to which all work should contribute...

...For if the U.S...

...The second, and related, theme is "the priority of labor over capital...

...Unions are not only needed to secure and defend workers' rights but to encourage and implement workers' training and education, so that "union members will not only have more, but above all be more...

...The Constitution does not mandate comfortable prisons," Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr...

...Well, not quite...

...Thus the ruling sets new limits on the power of federal judges to order sweeping prison reforms, as they have done in many states...

...And the level of comfort in prisons should be determined by state legislatures and prison administrators, he said, not the courts, although the courts have the duty to "scrutinize claims of cruel and unusual punishment...

...Despite Duarte's denials before the U.S...

...Seemingly, Washington's veto...

...The guerrilla campaign of economic sabotage, striking at power plants, railroads, communications, and transportation, is taking a severe toll on an economy already badly damaged...

...Stating that' 'harsh'' conditions are the price of crime, the justices voted 8-to-1 that prison overcrowding per se is not forbidden by the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment - specifically that two prisoners may be confined in a cell designed for only one as long as the overall prison conditions do not violate a "contemporary standard of decency...

...They will surely prove to be right if this Court decision in any way serves to lessen the pressure for change on state legislatures and prison administrators...

...For the pope, the primary way of viewing labor is from the point of view of the laborer-how it allows him or her to realize personal dignity as someone who can act upon the world ("subdue the earth") in a creative, conscious, and free way...

...On this at leat we agree with the Chief Justice...

...Three of the encyclical's themes stand out: ' The human person is an image of God, and human work is an image of God's creativity...

...Indeed, it ought to please those sitting in the Kremlin...

...Echoing Marx's image of capital as congealed labor, John Paul II points out that the modern means of production are themselves "the historical heritageof human labor...

...As Chief Justice Burger said last december: "To put people behind walls and bars and do little or nothing to change them is to win a battle but lose a war...

...It is stupid...

...But to the extent to which such conditions are restrictive and even harsh, they are part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offense against society...

...It was essentially a magazine of transition from one kind of church to another, and future scholars will discover that at least in one place that difficult transition was carried off with intelligence, grace, and wonderful good humor...

...Consider the current concern with productivity, a concern central to the administration's case for giving breaks to corporations and the wealthy and for rolling back government regulation of the environment and workplace...

...President Romeo Lucas Garcia has systematically and sadistically assassinated virtually every potential opposition spokesman or union leader in sight, including Christian Democrats...

...Duarte and his Christian Democratic survivors in the regime have been unable to stop it...

...T.S...

...In this consists its social power: the power to build a community...

...And it suggests that ideological fanaticism against domestic liberal rivals has more to do with shaping foreign policy than any realistic appraisal of, in this case, Central American realities...

...Such uprisings testify to the horror of life inside America's prisons, and experts predict there will be more in the days ahead...

...These two themes also lead the encyclical through a subtle discussion of ownership...

...Secretary Haig's authoritarian friends should be causing him sleepless nights...

...wrote in an opinion joined by four others...

...It recalls the vengeance for "losing China" of the fifties...

...Rejecting both an absolute right of private property and a system of bureaucratic centralization, the pope strongly endorses efforts to extend the role of workers in owning and managing their enterprises...

...family life is the "first school of work," where education and industriousness begin...

...The Washington Post contrasted the pope's insistence on the obligations of the rich nations with the administration's efforts to limit World Bank economic aid...

...Haig is in a bind here...

...Federal standards call for a prison capacity of sixty square feet per inmate-about the size of three doors laid flat...

...The simple skills or scientific knowledge that workers bring to their tasks, the technology they use, are all inherited from past generations...

...And that's something to please those running things in Guatemala-and Chile, and Bolivia, and Argentina...

...Many of the cells have windows...

...On Human Work" to the exegetes, the Vat-icanologists, and the professional churchpeople...

...The pope is not unconcerned with problems of remuneration and the maldistribution of the goods produced by labor-in other words, of the problems faced by workers as consumers-but he always returns to the notion of the worker as active agent...

...It is almost devoid of ringing phrases, the kind that can decorate a Banner or be slung against an opponent in a debate...

...The problem, however, is that the decision is likely to be taken as a sweeping invitation for courts to keep their hands off prison conditions, and the prison in Ohio that was considered in this case is one of the best in the United States...

...The prison is equipped with gymnasiums, workshops, school rooms, chapels, a hospital ward, recreation field, and a library...

...Current estimates are that eighty-five percent of all prisons in this country are seriously overcrowded...

...Eliot, John Courtney Murray, Ivan Illich, Arthur Koestler, Flannery O'Connor, Martin Luther King Jr., Fran-pois Mauriac, Andrew Greeley, Daniel Berrigan, Brian Friel, Tom Wolfe, Agatha Christie, Frank O'Connor, Wilfrid Sheed, Walter Kerr, Hans Kung-one could fill an entire page simply listing the distinguished writers who populated the pages of The Critic magazine during its heyday...

...In trying to determine what in fact would constitute cruel and unusual punishment the majority opinion rejected the argument of prison reformers that overcrowding and harsh conditions are unconstitutional because they go far beyond the punishment mandated by the prisoner's jail sentence...

...To prove a debater's point, U.S...

...From this flows the right of workers to join together, to protect themselves, to make decisions about their own work and their futures...

...THE CRITIC, RIP...

...OLIGARCHS...

...That "On Human Work" is no abstract philosophical exercise can be seen by the way various contenders in the American debate over our national and international economic policies have seized upon parts of the pope's message...

...The purge itself, we think, is deeply disturbing...

...For the generals haven't had it all their way...

...Others noted as immediately relevant the pope's concern with the ravages of unemployment, the need of workers for medical assistance, sufficient pensions, and a safe workplace...

...As for Duarte himself, he's more than ever the generals' window-dressing...

...those sitting in the Kremlin...

...Work is toil and suffering, but it is the way in men and women collaborate in God's creation and Christ's redemption of this human world...

...The third theme running through the encyclical is that work is a social endeavor and can only be rightly understood and organized in the context of social groupings...

...The good news of work-for how many people is that "good news" still so far from being a personal reality...

...Like previous popes, John Paul rejects the Marxist elevation of class conflict...

...On Human Work'' warns against conventional ways of thinking about and measuring productivity...

...His likely replacement, to be elected in 1982, is sure to be either Mario San-doval, a self-proclaimed fascist, or Arana Osorio, a former president who is notorious for fixing elections and for his cruelty...

...That spirit was the creation of Dan Herr, president of the Thomas More Association, which sponsored the magazine, and Joel Wells, The Critic's editor...

...OLD & NEW "The day the Administration decided to support the government of Guatemala," said former ambassador to El Salvador Robert E. White recently, "was, in effect, the day it wrote 'finish' to any serious reform in the rest of Central America...

...The country is potentially rich in oil and nickel...

...Fidgeta, the patron of twitchy, itchy children, or the cartoons puncturing religious pomposities of all sorts...

...even the much praised Southern Correctional Facility involved in this case was thirty-eight percent over its intended capacity at the time the suit was brought...

...investment there is substantial, to the tune of $221 million...

...Twenty-three other states are under court orders to relieve comparable conditions in their own prison systems and in ten more states similar court challenges are pending...

...One suspects that its faithful readers much sooner forgot what Arnold Toynbee wrote there than the pages devoted to St...

...White is of course one of many Latin American front-line diplomats quietly purged by the Reagan team in recent months...

...Even more than El Salvador, Guatemala may be the test case of U.S...

...But thanks in part to a C.I.A...

...The Critic was born as "Books on Trial" in 1941 and finally died, another victim of rising expenses, this summer...

...It marks no sharp break in papal social teaching...

...The Critic was thoughtful, serious, and impudently mischievous...

...They can then turn back the clock...

...If conditions breach "the contemporary standard of decency," Powell wrote, they may be cruel and unusual...

...GOOD NEWS OF WORK Reading papal encyclicals is an acquired taste, and John Paul IPs "On Human Work" will not make it any easier to acquire...

...In Texas, for instance, three thousand prisoners were forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded cells until the state finally had to put up tents to house some of the overflow...

...Far worse overcrowding can be found in state after state, usually in prisons where the primitive environment offers a striking contrast to conditions at the modern Ohio institution...

...It is hard to fault the five-man majority opinion about the details of the particular case they were considering...

...Central American policy...

...Conditions there are unfortunately a long way from being typical...

...Indeed, according to Lionel Gomez again, Duarte now possesses less authority among his military allies than the opposition Democratic Front possesses with the guerrillas-so that when the Front comes out, as it did last May, for a negotiated'settlement there's actually more chance of believing them than that Duarte speaks for the junta when he says that they too are now willing to negotiate...

...That would"be a shame...

...Unlike Salvador, U.S...

...But a journal is more than the sum of its parts, and no list of authors can evoke the special spirit of The Critic...

...Putting a bunk bed and a second man into such a cell is not ideal, but surely the Court had reason to say that it hardly violated constitutional standards...

...overthrow of the reformist Arbenz government in 1954, Guatemala enjoys not even the semblance of economic or social reform...

...In many prisons, cells built for one prisoner hold as many as five, and this without the amenities found in Ohio, forcing many of them to sleep on the floor as in Texas and immeasurably increasing the potential for violence...

...Reform has made them the new oligarchs, free of their former masters...

...At least for foreign consumption, he lends legitimacy...

...openly supports Guatemala's reigning right, it will signal the Salvadoran generals that U.S.-imposed land reform was mere window-dressing...

...No, the most important product of work is the worker, and only with that in mind can a society really judge whether it is improving or degrading "productivity...

...In the past ten years the prison population has increased by sixty-three percent, straining what Chief Justice Warren E. Burger has described as the "nineteenth-century penal institutions" that exist in this country...

...As Lionel Gomez, the former chief advisor to the assassinated head of the land reform agency tells it in the summer issue of Foreign Policy, the generals have seized control of most of the nationalized banks and export market...

...In doing so, he notes, "It is characteristic of work that it first and foremost unites people...