LOCK 'EM UP

...We can, today, start to let go of the first 90 per cent of the prison population, and figure out what to do with the rest when we have freed up all the mental and financial resources now used to lock the first half-million away...

...Prisons as we know them, however, are not the answer...

...What is going on here...

...The strength of the punitive impulse is demonstrated by what it costs...

...These are billed as "alternatives to incarceration" because they are supposed to be sentences meted out to people who otherwise would be sent to prison...

...Not everyone thought all prisons should be abolished, but many did...

...The female prison population has grown at a faster rate than the male population every year since 1981...

...The status of women in the prison system is changing, however, and the new punitive streak is at work...

...These are often followed by the appointment of Presidential commissions to look into the crisis...

...As public policy, this is insane...

...Crime rates have nothing to do with incarceration rates...

...Racism, however, explains a great deal...

...He seemed to think we were out of our minds...

...And now, after all that, the prison population has tripled...

...But those who study the prison-population explosion blame the extremely conservative ideology that permeates our society, an individualistic, every-man-for-himself ideology...

...There is something absurd, something not really believable, about a society with our wealth and talent that can find no solution but warehouses to its social problems...

...Judges are handing down longer sentences than before because they perceive a public demand for them...

...They watched from a distance...

...If the court has a probation department, however, the judge chooses probation—the more restrictive alternative...

...A task force of the American Friends Service Committee charged with studying crime and punishment in America pointed out with some exasperation in 1971 that ever since Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens separately expressed their condemnations of America's prisons, the experts' prescriptions for change had made no significant progress...

...Criminologist Donald Taft studied the subject more than thirty years ago...

...they only brutalize the violent among their inmates...

...Of the ten states with the highest rates of violent crime, only Nevada, South Carolina, Maryland, and Arizona also rank in the top ten on incarceration...

...All agree that only a small minority of all the present inmates in American prisons—most estimated between 10 and 15 per cent—could be considered to be so dangerous...

...Our society officially expects these mean, gloomy, brutal places somehow to turn criminals into pillars of the community...

...Bunch of religious yippies," muttered a man standing near me...

...Periodically, the prisons explode with riots and waves of violence...

...at more than 700, recently wrote about "The Crime of Black Imprisonment" for the Chicago Tribune...

...The Southern Coalition folks—many of them the same people who gathered eight years ago at the Tennessee prison—are still a bright spot of activism and still opposed to prison construction...

...The top twenty also include the former slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Missouri...

...Research into the nature of the prison population bears this out...

...As much as Pontesso's former colleagues hate to see him take the stand when the inmates are suing them, his opinion is not much different from theirs...

...Their experiment, now copied everywhere in the world, will shortly be 200 years old, but don't expect that bicentennial to be commemorated on your cereal boxes...

...It doesn't and it won't...

...Some of us called to them to join us in the noise-making, but they wouldn't...

...The difficulty arises as the new programs become institutionalized...

...After that, they aren't treated the same...

...And most criminal-court personnel—the probation department caseworkers who do the pre-sentence investigations and supervise probationers—are social workers who think their "clients" are better off not left alone...

...Three are under life sentence...

...It's been a long time since I heard about a demonstration like the one in Nashville, or even a concerted effort to stop a new prison...

...The demonstration was the closing event of an annual meeting of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons...

...The National Moratorium closed its doors this spring...

...She recently told The Christian Science Monitor that the nature of the crimes committed by most women convicts and the backgrounds of the women do not warrant their being in prison...

...In the age of Reagan, it was inevitable that economic programs would also enter the field...

...To take this story one step further: If the wisdom of imprisoning all these women is in question, what about imprisoning all those men...

...Meanwhile, nothing much has happened to the crime rate...

...California is twenty-first...

...This has been a major preoccupation of reformers...

...The commissions always come to the same conclusion: The prisons are a mess and we should not be using them to warehouse people...

...Typically, according to The Monitor's report, women serve time for relatively minor crimes such as larceny, welfare fraud, prostitution, receiving stolen property, and shoplifting...

...A popular experiment is intensive-supervision probation—a program in which probation officers have small caseloads and a probationer has a team of supervisors instead of just one...

...Certainly, he adds, no one whose offense was nonviolent should be imprisoned...

...The violent crimes for which women most often go to prison are murder or manslaughter of men who have abused them over a period of years, according to the American Correctional Association (ACA...

...Now, in 1987, we lock up so many people every week that, at the end of seven days, our state and Federal prisons hold a thousand more than they did the week before...

...The ACA—which, as an association of professionals who work, for the most part, within the system, has never been known as a gang of raving reformers—has just put out a new handbook on public policy for corrections...

...There were like-minded activists in many other places and an umbrella group—the National Moratorium on Prison Construction, a project since the mid-1970s of the Unitarian Uni-versalist Service Committee...

...But prison officials could exercise their credibility as law-and-order types by telling legislatures and judges and every public forum they can find what they seem to tell only inquiring journalists and social scientists...

...When a program is new, it often operates as intended: to keep some offenders out of prison...

...After arrest, Negroes are less likely to secure bail, and so are more liable to be counted in jail statistics...

...Steven Whitman, the researcher who calculated the incarceration rate of blacks Linda Rocawich is an associate editor of The Progressive...

...Are prisons appropriate places even for that 5 or 10 or 15 per cent of the prison population that the professionals think belong there...

...Why are the prisons bursting at their seams if the professionals believe what they say they believe...

...Battered Women and Criminal Justice" is the report of New York State researchers who looked into the cases of twelve women whose physical abuse led them to kill their husbands...

...the others average a maximum term of fifteen years...

...Certainly for as long as our society is as unjust as it is, some people will react in dangerously violent ways to their environment...

...they were trying to make the walls come tumbling down...

...The fast growth in the female prison population is "the result of harsher sentencing" says Nicole Hahn Rafter, author of a history of the women's prison system called Partial Justice...

...The apparent novelty," the group said, "is merely a manifestation of the public's ignorance of the history of penal and legal reform...

...And it will happen again with the new "alternatives to incarceration...

...Their stock answer is that they don't control the number of prisoners...

...We have had 200 years to try to make the prison idea work...

...Ten years ago, critics of our criminal-justice system often said that only the Soviet Union and South Africa, among industrialized nations, imprisoned a larger proportion of their people than the United States...

...But most of them have found it necessary to turn their attention to saving the lives of the thousands of Southerners languishing on Death Rows...

...They took their text from Joshua at the Battle of Jericho...

...Best known for its aid to police departments across the land—gifts of helicopter gunships for crowd control and SWAT teams for terrorist control—LEAA also gave the states millions of dollars in the 1970s and early 1980s to experiment with community-based correctional programs: alternatives to incarceration...

...The President's Crime Commission in 1967 and the National Advisory Commission in 1973 both advocated sentencing based on the principle of the "least restrictive alternative" appropriate to the individual offender...

...In fact, one in every thirty-five adult males in the United States is under correctional supervision...

...While several recent studies show a jump in the number of violent crimes committed by women since the women's movement came to prominence, what is more noticeable is a tendency to sentence women to prison for crimes for which they used to get probation—thus making them more equal to men...

...Other prison deconstructionists burned out or decided other issues were more important...

...What to do with criminal offenders, if not lock them up...

...The crime rate explains nothing, and no one has a tidy answer...

...The number of probationers is eight times what it was twenty years ago...

...When Jessica Mitford was writing Kind and Usual Punishment, her book or...

...But for black Americans, the story is much different: The rate is well over 700...

...None of us expected the walls to crumble, of course, but we did really want to make prisons disappear...

...At a time of extreme fiscal conservatism, Americans spend $9 billion a year just to operate the state prisons...

...The people who know them best, the prison administrators, don't believe very many of their boarders belong behind bars...

...LOCK 'EM UP America's all-purpose cure for crime BY LINDA ROCAWICH In 1790, when Philadelphia Quakers opened the Walnut Street Jail, the first prison in the world to use confinement as punishment for crime, they were following the lead of Cesare Beccaria, the Italian criminologist who advocated imprisonment as an alternative to execution...

...Our present criminal-justice system certainly inspires little confidence in its ability to handle the task fairly—or even rationally...

...So has the number of people on parole...

...The U.S...

...If the wisdom of imprisoning women who have killed is in question, what about the vast majority who haven't lifted a violent finger...

...So the judge lectures him, fines him, and sends him on his way...

...If the perpetrator of a crime is known to be a Negro, the police may arrest all Negroes who were near the scene—a procedure they would rarely dare to follow with whites...

...In fact, the United States' black imprisonment rate is the highest in the world...

...She was on the staff of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency from 1973 to 1976...

...Ten years ago, it was near 300,000...

...And the rest of us need protection from them...

...That was 1979...

...Moreover, correctional policies do affect the size of the population...

...A retired Federal warden who began his career as a guard almost fifty years ago, Pontesso has also been director of Oklahoma's correctional system, running not only the prisons but also the state's parole and probation department...

...In a 1956 criminology text, he summarized what he found: "Negroes are more likely to be suspected of crime than are whites...

...It hit ten in 1977 and has been climbing steadily ever since, to its current rate of seventeen-plus...

...Attorney General Edwin Meese III has even endorsed it...

...There are new wrinkles, of course...

...Fifteen years ago, the population of our prisons was about 200,000...

...Ronald Goldfarb and Linda Singer reached a similar conclusion in their study After Conviction...

...Most of them don't belong there," she said...

...Halfway houses for parolees, designed to let people out of prison sooner than parole boards would have released them to society at large, became halfway houses for troublesome probationers: halfway in instead of halfway out...

...That's true as far as it goes...

...An official of the Texas Department of Corrections once patiently explained to me that not he but judges and juries sentence convicted offenders to serve time in his prisons, and then they stay there until they're paroled or their sentences are up or they die...

...Who should decide, and on what grounds, which individuals should be incarcerated...

...Illinois is twenty-sixth...

...The people carried pots and pans, spoons and spatulas to bang on the pans, and other improvised tools for raising a racket...

...Most judges are people who enjoy exercising power and authority over other people—it's why they wanted to be judges...

...Fifty thousand more prisoners every year...

...He was trying not to stare but couldn't help himself...

...But when the judges and prosecutors and pre-sentence investigators get used to having the program around, they start using it to slap more restrictions on people who clearly shouldn't be jailed...

...He has a stable home and job...

...They are more liable than whites to be indicted and less likely to have their cases nol prossed or otherwise dismissed...

...He was keeping his distance, just outside the circle, snapping pictures...

...And, in the case of the Texas system, officials (including the one who lectured me) often used to testify in favor of legislation, such as bills affecting parole policy, which had the direct effect of increasing the number of inmates...

...About 27,000 women were in Federal or state custody in 1986, an increase of about 15 per cent over the year before...

...It will never be "reformed" into a system we can point to with pride...

...They sang hymns, held hands, walked around the circle, listened to a preacher, and prayed, but mostly they made noise...

...The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals advised the nation in 1973, for example, that prisons should be society's last resort for dealing with its problems...

...Among many other things, the Safe Streets Act created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration...

...Incredibly," Whitman says, "blacks in the United States go to prison more often than blacks in South Africa...

...Probably a few would be that way even in a just society...

...That is about double the incarceration rate in most Western European nations...

...Can we devise a system that protects the individual "offender" as well as the rest of us...

...They are also more likely to be arrested...

...They also kept the issue alive and in the public eye...

...The people trying to stop prison construction didn't always win the individual battles, but sometimes they did...

...The libraries are full of exposes of prison conditions, descriptions of what is wrong with them, why they achieve none of their "purposes" but punishment, which many corrections professionals won't even admit is a purpose...

...others live on as regular components of the system...

...Arnold Pontesso has been among the more vocal...

...He has often testified as an expert witness for the inmates in lawsuits complaining of unconstitutional or unlawful prison conditions, and he is always careful to insist that there are some offenders whom society must lock up...

...This pattern has been repeated time and again, with program after program...

...Both these ideas show some promise...

...On December 31, 1986, the population was 546,659 and growing...

...Who would risk his trustee status to join a bunch of nuts who think they can make prisons disappear...

...A reader later objected to Whitman's conclusion that blacks go to prison because they are black...

...What is "the nature of their crimes...

...Social scientist William Nagel studied the phenomenon in the 1970s and found that states with large nonwhite populations, even those with low crime rates, have large prison populations...

...the nation wasn't listening...

...When it comes to crime, this is manifested in a vicious punitive streak—lock 'em up and throw away the key...

...The proof is in the prison-population explosion...

...On this front, we definitely are Number One, according to Steven Whitman of Northwestern University's Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research...

...Say the judge and the court workers who make presentence recommendations must choose between sending him to jail and a fine or restitution...

...White Americans are incarcerated at a rate of 114 per 100,000...

...No one who has seriously studied the subject since then disputes Taft's findings...

...No more...

...The letter-writer is wrong...

...Negroes are also more liable than whites to be kept in prison for the full terms of their commitments and correspondingly less likely to be paroled...

...Yet the problem, of course, is more overwhelming than ever—the states are building spaces to lock up an additional 100,000 people, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons figures it must be able to accommodate about 100,000 inmates by the turn of the century, almost 60,000 more than today...

...Somewhere between 10 per cent and 25 per cent of 'hard-core' criminals are 'too dangerous' to be loosed on society...

...If tried, Negroes are more likely to be convicted...

...But the spirit was infectious, and his resistance was breaking down...

...Incarceration rates for other states with the highest crime rates are way down the list—New York is twentieth...

...Instead of being a less restrictive alternative to prison, as intended, they become ways to "help" those offenders the system had no way to "help" in the past...

...For about fifty years after incarceration rates were first computed in 1925, the rate for women varied between six and nine per 100,000...

...In 1980, it was 179...

...There is no significant correlation between a state's racial composition and its crime rate," he wrote, "but there is a very great positive relationship between its racial composition and its incarceration rate...

...Blacks commit crimes and whites commit crimes...

...This may no longer be true...

...Billions more go to the Federal system and to capital outlays and construction costs for new prisons...

...It was still too early for flags to be flying...

...They have a better chance of doing the reverse—and probably do, on the rare occasions when they get a shot at a pillar of the community...

...For this reason they are more likely to be included in the count of prisoners...

...Say a man commits a minor crime, a nonviolent misdemeanor, his first offense...

...The wisdom of imprisoning them at all is certainly questionable...

...It was a pretty fall Sunday in Nashville, but threatening rain...

...Coalition staff and sympathizers could be found in the forefront of the opposition any time a Southern state announced plans to build a new prison...

...The reason more blacks go to prison," said this letter, "is that they commit more crimes...

...When pressed for a number—how many ought to be in prison, how many would we do better to handle some other way—Pontesso usually says no more than about 5 per cent of prisoners belong inside...

...The surprise would be if this system functioned other than it does...

...Soon after going back inside, he reappeared along with a few other men...

...Community placement," it says, "can provide the level of structure and support needed by many female offenders...

...If convicted, they are less likely to be given probation...

...America's prisons are an overcrowded mess...

...But so did many of the old kinds of "alternatives to incarceration...

...Aside from more extensive use of probation and parole, "community-based corrections" have been the reform of choice for the past twenty years...

...The ACA handbook, noting that most women in the prison system's net were arrested for property crimes, says that few pose a risk to society...

...About one of every four black men, he says, will go to prison in his lifetime...

...At the same time, community placement considerably reduces the cost burden to taxpayers...

...But we keep building them, and then we fill them up faster than we can build still more...

...The time is long since past when we should abandon the idea and tear down the walls...

...The administration of discipline and the classification of inmates affect both the amount of "good time" prisoners earn (extra credit toward time served) and their parole eligibility...

...For the same reason, they are sending people to prison for crimes that formerly did not merit incarceration...

...incarceration rate—the number of prisoners per 100,000 in the general population—was seventy-nine in 1925...

...The nature of their crimes and the existence of a very low recidivism rate for those who have committed murder and manslaughter provide substantial evidence that these women and others like them are not a danger to society," the study finds...

...in 1985, it was 201...

...A group of people—twenty, maybe a few more—gathered just outside the walls of the Tennessee State Prison around the perimeter of a grassy circular mound of earth with a flagpole in its middle...

...Drug or alcohol abuse is often a complicating factor...

...Obviously...

...Nine of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy are in the top sixteen on incarceration rate...

...in one such, the states offer local jurisdictions financial incentives not to sentence offenders to the state prison but, instead, to figure out something to do with them at home...

...Some of the programs died quiet deaths after a few years...

...The Commission said prisons fail to reduce crime, succeed in punishing but not deterring criminals, provide only temporary protection to the community, and change the offender (but mostly for the worse...

...Something different will be needed...

...In a long tradition of abolitionist thinking, no one has satisfactorily answered these questions, but they do not have to be answered before we begin undoing a great deal, if not all, of the evils of the present system...

...Then an inmate, a trustee, walked out the prison door, broke through our circle, and raised the flags...

...the prison business, she discovered, "Even the toughest wardens of the roughest prisons will quote some such figure off the record...

...Almost twenty years ago, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, in the wake of the reformist prescriptions of the President's Crime Commission...

...And no one knows how many people regularly get sucked into the informal pretrial programs that "divert" offenders, without benefit of conviction, into "voluntary" supervision and treatment programs...

...We have asked every experienced, practicing prison official we know," they said, "how many of the inmates currently held in confinement really need to be incarcerated in order to protect the public from personal injury...

...Some in the crowd, in fact, worked full-time toward that end...