CRUMBLING WALLS

...There were 13 "counsellors" at Jackson, which makes it seem enlightened, but there were 6,000 prisoners, so the caseload of each counsellor was fantastically beyond his powers...

...Their caliber can be imagined...

...But must our present prison system be eternal...

...Guards in some Southern states even today get only $100 or $150 a month...

...Former editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, he has written numerous magazine articles under his own name and in collaboration with Albert Einstein, Harold C Urey, and the late Sen...

...Prisoners are not the cream of society—and only years of contact with them can reveal the depths of depravity and chicanery to which the human personality can descend...

...Half the men going through the gate depart only to return...

...Our main initial mistake is that we send to ordinary prisons all sorts of criminals to undergo identical treatment in an indiscriminate mob...

...Jones expressed belief that in the near future "a more humane method of penology will be evolved," and "it will not then be necessary to lock thousands of men in cells and permit them to rot their days away in idleness...

...In many prison-fires, blind rage has bubbled up from the depths of desperate personalities...

...II Most citizens know nothing and care nothing about what happens to a man after the prison gates close behind him...

...This brings up another sweeping error at the heart of the present system...

...V It is society's—our—failure to observe the principles of common sense, decency, and psychology which has resulted in the current revolution of lawlessness...

...As a practical problem, prisons are overcrowded—many of Michigan's prisoners were in outmoded buildings intended to hold half the number they housed...

...But this very idea has worked well in England, Mexico and, it is said, in Russia and is practiced informally in some of our own Southern states, notably Mississippi...

...The psychologist's explanation after the riot ended, that his speech of approbation was designed to appeal to the desperadoes' delusions of grandeur, never made the front pages...

...Robert Lindner makes the acute observation that just as the inmate population of a prison is selected by social processes which collect people who can not get along in the competition of free society, so are the guards selected from the incompetent who have failed to operate in competitive society...

...But today we still needlessly torture our criminals, physically and emotionally, and turn them back again to society—and to crime...

...Punishment and reformation cannot be made twins in any system...

...This is exactly what we have where we have tried to pay lip-service to re-form—to graft some semblance of an intelligent approach onto the body of a prison system which is still hopelessly built around basic principles of restraint and repression...

...But California is already trying a system in which courts do not even decide whether a man should go to prison...

...The two things can not be done together...

...Pronouncing a 60-day sentence on some youthful offenders...

...The approach in modern penology is to classify newcomers and segregate them so that they can receive selective treatment...

...Critics of "soft-headedness" do not realize that their picture of "the criminal" is far more sentimental than that of a prison staff struggling with old problems and new ideas...

...When they get out what good will they be to humanity...

...This is not to say that prisons are the major cause of crime...

...hopeful cases, people on the borderline who can be helped...

...Of course not...

...In many states these positions at the bottom of the government-employe scale are still considered political plums...

...Such attitudes have to be seen firsthand to be believed...

...But today, as modern psychology and case work have attempted to penetrate the mediaeval darkness of our dungeons, prisons are in transition...

...Others will commit incredible outrages...

...They occur in border states, or in cities where islands of one kind of people are surrounded by another kind of people, and an ambiguous border territory is created...

...Many advanced students believe most sentences should be almost completely indeterminate, from 90 days to life...

...and harmless cases, people who need no help, serve their time, and go out and are never heard of again...

...they decide only that he is guilty...

...To open the doors a little is to create a draft which ultimately blows up an explosion...

...Thus it accorded the same treatment, without hearing, to the innocent and the guilty, and reinforced the resentment which had set the prison and its annex ablaze with violence...

...Is the criminal possessed of a de'Ohio, I Am A Product of Your Prisons' From an Associated Press dispatch from Columbus, O., Mar...

...No palliative, halfway applications of lip-service to modern social science can cope with prisons in which the hopeless, the hopeful, and the harmless are mixed in together...

...What gets me is the future of idleness you face...

...But had there been 300 counsellors, they could not have made much headway where the warden, as was the case at Jackson, still believed in putting desperate cases in solitary, chaining men to the floor, and putting them in strait-jackets...

...A man is not sure how he is going to be treated —one moment he is equal and human, the next moment he is a second-class citizen or a beast...

...Or is he a human being who is more abnormal than the rest of us...

...For all its repressive cruelty, the prison as an institution is a failure...

...Down South, where Negroes 'know their place,' in the immemorial phrase, you have other injuries and violence done, but you do not have race riots...

...He goes and st^ys until competent authority makes an educated guess that he is well enough to function again...

...Robert Lindner of Baltimore is a psychologist and analyst who has served several prisons as adviser...

...The penitentiary is just as bad...

...Now a prominent author and lecturer, he writes out of Washington for a number of publications which are serviced by the North American Newspaper Alliance, and is special consultant on public relations to the American Psychological Association...

...Prisons do not work...

...The outbreak into violence comes when a person is deeply unsure of his role in a given situation," he says...

...Does a man go to a hospital or a psychiatric ward for a specific "sentence," even after a doctor has examined him...

...More study is given the case before it is even decided that he should be put away, and for how long...

...So, these riots are not the desperation of hopeless men, but the desperation of men to whom constant talk and tentative practice of reform have provided a recurring measure of hope...

...They are as hybrid as prisons themselves...

...It only is the good in man Which dies and withers there...

...But the population of Alcatraz is about one per cent of the total federal prison population—and it may be that some few prisoners, not insane by ordinary standards, are still hopelessly anti-social...

...26, 1938: A convict who admittedly "never had the courage to live decently" has left behind a 650-word indictment of society and the penal system which sent him to the electric chair...

...Who can blame...

...I felt that society had treated me rottenly...

...But the social problem, more important, is that only the staff which gets to know prisoners in the years of their sentence realizes that far too many men go to prison, and many are held far too long...

...Neither are there riots in the very few socially intelligent prisons which treat prisoners as men and not as lepers...

...Whatever he is, is imprisonment meant to be a punishment, or a reformation...

...The judge says, "two to five years," or "five to 20 years," as if after a few days' acquaintance with the prisoner he could possibly know even within those limits what the sentence should be...

...The latter is an institution for young offenders and the disturbance amounted to little more than a collegiate type of rebellion, which occurred when the boys refused to go into their dormitories at the end of their evening recreation period...

...Judge Richmond said: "I want you to know what you have to look forward to...

...The striking thing is that this judge knew anything about the reformation rate of the reformatory, and the unemployment situation at other state institutions...

...Today our attempt to do bqth has brought prison after prison to the explosion point...

...Prophets of humanity from Christ to the Quakers, prophets of science from Freud to Lewis Lawes, have told us over and over what our hearts already know: you do not teach a man how to get along in society by removing him to an artificial and cruel world where he is denied hope of normal human contact...

...Even many enlightened prisons build into their mess-halls an overhead tear gas system, to douse riots just as sprinklers stand ready in factories to douse fires...

...We still try to combine two irreconcilable methods...

...The federal service does this with a system of many different prisons—Chillicothe for young offenders, New Orleans and other places for adult but short term criminals, Atlanta and Leavenworth for more major crimes, Springfield, Mo., for mental cases, Alcatraz for "hopeless" desperadoes...

...Crime is an eternal problem of society— any society...

...The robberies I committed outside were moral protests...

...This does not count one occurring at this writing, nor a so-called riot at Chilli-cothe, Okla., in a federal reformatory...

...In the last generation the "indeterminate sentence" has been adopted in nearly every state, but it does not go nearly far enough...

...Kate Richards O'Hare, in her famous autobiographical book In Prison, wrote, "So far as I have been able to study them, I have found court bailiffs, jail turnkeys, prison guards, and prison matrons industrially unfit and generally illiterate human scrubs, mentally defective, morally perverted, and very often of much lower type than the prisoners whom they handle...

...they are inadequate to cope with what sometimes seem to be the limitless capacities for evil of the human personality gone wrong...

...Quoted in Ashley Montagu's On Being Intelligent mon, merely a mad dog, as a few FBI men and attorneys-general have implied...

...Theft are no riots on slave-ships, in Siberia, nor in Georgia chain gangs...

...War is making billionaires, and we haven't enough money to give you boys a job...

...Prison jobs are prized by some politicians as the place to stow some feeblewit who may be a brother-in-law of somebody—for "all you have to do is turn a key, keep your club ready, and keep from falling asleep...

...To propose such a sensible idea as letting wives of prisoners visit them and cohabit overnight with a view to keeping men normal and holding families together, would be considered almost subversive...

...some advanced penologists feel that Alcatraz itself is a concession to the barbarism of the past...

...Most judges know practically nothing of prisons...

...it is the last place in the world in which to expect reformative influences to be created and applied...

...There are few better evidences of the resilience of the human spirit than the man who survives imprisonment, and of more satisfying work than that of the prison staff-member who sometimes rescues a "hopeless" case, giving back to society a human being who can lead a useful life...

...The very fact that I hated these things showed that I was fundamentally deceit...

...Wherever men have opened the cell-doors and let in the light, they have found that the majority of "criminals" are human beings who respond to humanity even as you and I. The lesson of the prison riots is that we must lock and bar cell-doors ever more tightly—or else open them wide and establish an atmosphere of hope...

...Asked for the why of the present wave of riots, he said they are breaking out in the same social situation and for the same reasons which produce race riots...

...Every prison psychologist and social case worker, many wardens and judges, and even a few guards, know this overwhelming fact about these multi-million dollar monuments to social lag...

...I'm going to send you to the reformatory...

...Icy K. Teeters put it in their encyclopedic classic...

...Can psychology and case work reform all criminals...

...An even more pungent expression came recently from a Superior Court judge, W. A. Richmond, in Tacoma, Wash...

...Neither the Old School deputy nor the New School deputy felt that his advice was being followed to a logical conclusion and each was right...

...The cell-block where the trouble exploded contained a motley crew, including criminally insane who were not receiving proper treatment...

...men need not always attempt to solve crimes against society by committing crimes against criminals...

...It will take more than a few hours of "counsel" to rehabilitate such men...

...All criminologists know it...

...The essence of the present outbreak in prisons lies in this: today too many o/ the prisoners know itl Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they always knew it, but now they know our prison system is not absolutely eternal...

...Some experts say the convictions are only two per cent as compared with offenses committed...

...Then he calmly seated himself in the electric chair and received the penalty for shooting to death Robert Lindsey, pool-room proprietor, in a hold-up on July 4. "Ohio, I am a product of your prisons," read Jones, who spent 19 of his 33 years in penal and correctional institutions...

...The Pennsylvania State Board of Parole has stupidly refused without hearing all applications before it from the Western State Penitentiary and its Rockview Branch— after both prisons had ceased rioting...

...I hate like hell to send you fellows to the reform school...

...When disaster strikes a prison, or when a riot runs berserk, some prisoners rally courageously to rescue fellow-prisoners, or even guards...

...They attempt to treat crime with methods about as intelligent as putting witches in the pillory—and one measure of failure can be drawn merely from observing the traffic at the main gate of a prison anywhere...

...the electricity has long been there...

...The blind lead the blind, as these lazy, stupid, corrupt, and ignorant men turn to sadism out of sheer boredom and resentment of their lot...

...New Horizons in Criminology, "The basic question is whether we desire to punish conr victs or to reform them and train decent citizens...

...That people should know a great deal more about their prisons has been evident for years in the rising homicide rate, the increased costs of prisons, courts, and police forces, and the apparent increase in the number of crimes committed which are not followed by the arrest of the criminal...

...Hardened criminals" — hardened by the prison system, among other things—can be very hard, indeed...

...Fifty years ago a revolutionary understanding of human emotions began its ferment...

...Lindner believes the guard—not the warden and not the social worker—is the key to the prison problem...

...If one looks only at the 50 per cent of men who will return to prison, there is no more depressing failure than these secret sinkholes where society buries its living mistakes...

...By failing to act on what we know science and humanity can do, we have built a prison system resting uncertainly upon the sentimentality that lip-service to reform and "economy minded administration" will prevent the spread of crime...

...There is no more mystery about these riots than there is about hunger riots in India or race riots in Chicago...

...We hardly know what to do with them...

...This sensing of a coming change is precisely what has blown the fuses...

...But his speech ended the riot and saved lives...

...And one must beware of the curious quirk in human nature which can be excessively hard on a criminal at the time of his arrest, and then excessively loose-minded about him after his imprisonment...

...One of the first answers is that there are many kinds of criminals...

...The distinction is important, for otherwise the entire federal prison system has had no riots during this revolutionary period—for the simple reason that it has intelligently managed to be ahead of the revolution...

...There are 1,650 men in there, and 1,150 of them aren't doing anything...

...Prison riots most often start in the mess-halls...

...As Harry Elmer Barnes and NegMICHAEL AMRINE was raised in and around prisons where his father served as Warden...

...If only I had had a single understanding friend when I was young...

...But what are we judges to do...

...IV There are many unnecessary immediate causes of prison riots—idleness, brutality, vexations and nonsensical rules, and—no doubt the greatest single immediate cause —poor food...

...Everett Jones, of Springfield, Ohio, amazed a score of witnesses in the Ohio Penitentiary death house last night, when, in a subdued and firm voice he read for five minutes from a statement...

...Over 1,200 were rotting in idleness—a living death...

...Thus what we see are not riots, but revolution...

...Oscar Wilde, in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" NO SOCIAL institution of our day has failed so miserably, so tragically, and so cruelly as our prisons...

...Seven out of ten of the young men in the reform school graduate to the penitentiary...

...This is a revolutionary concept, and it may be difficult to win public support...

...The Federal Bureau of Prisons agrees, and New York state and the federal system both have decent pay rates, constant educational advancement for their "custodial" officers, and a morale which indicates that men on their staffs look on their jobs as careers...

...The federal prison service can not be described as sentimental...

...But if one looks at the 50 per cent who do not return, there can be found moving faith to keep trying new techniques and old humanities...

...As some prisoners labor to get fire hoses in position on a cell-block, others cut the hoses which would save the lives of their fellow-men...

...Brien McMahon...

...Ill Most prison guards are underpaid...

...Sentimentality" has been the cry against every prison reform ever made, from the time when some "softheaded reformer" decided it was not necessary to keep prisoners silent throughout their day...

...At Jackson, Mich., where riots and fires involved 2,000 prisoners, one deputy warden belonged to the old school, and one deputy warden was the much-maligned psychologist who "congratulated" the prisoners...

...Today prisoners sense that something can be done...

...Such incidents have been reported over and over again...

...One hundred years ago the Quakers and others started "prison reform...

...A hopeless parole policy can be a contributing factor, but there is not space here to outline the complexities of the present parole systems...

...The counter-brutality of guards, who are chosen initially from almost the same dregs of society which produce much crime, can be understood...

...There are 650 young men up there with nothing to do . . . about 60 of them have jobs, and the rest of them sit around and sniff benzedrine and tell dirty stories...

...The present prison is an admirable place to inflict brutal punishment...

...But, as criminologist Robert Lindner says, prisoners might well be divided into the hopeless cases— those we do not know enough to help...

...Beneath an overlay of "modernism," most prisons (with the shining exception of the federal prison system) remain essentially what they were a thousand years ago...

...By this writer's tabulation, there have been 22 riots at prisons since March 30, 1952, when 23 convicts at a New Jersey prison seized guards and held out for two days...

...In saying we did not have enough money to give offenders jobs, the judge was not talking about outside conditions of employment but the fact that the prison system was not socially planned to give useful employment to inmates...