Pubdate: Thu, 29 Mar 2001
Source: Salon (US Web)
Copyright: 2001 Salon
Contact:  http://www.salon.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/381
Author: Maria Russo
Note: Maria Russo is associate editor of Salon Books

Psycho Factories

Nonviolent criminals go in and sadistic thugs come out, but with military 
spending down, America's small towns are hooked on prisons.

"Going up the River" has a central idea so intuitively convincing, you 
wonder how it ever escaped our attention: In the aftermath of the Cold War, 
Americans have replaced military spending with spending on new, high-tech, 
ever-more-punishing prisons.

Prisons are now seen primarily as sources of jobs and revenue, rather than 
as places for rehabilitating criminals.

Those who run prisons have abandoned penal theory -- that troublesome 
business of figuring out what best helps inmates, most of whom will 
eventually return to the outside world, clean up their acts. Programs for 
inmate education and counseling have been steadily disappearing. We no 
longer want to reform criminals; we simply want to punish them -- and, not 
incidentally, to make as much money as we can off of them in the process.

Across the country, this shift in strategy has saved a few economically 
desolate rural towns that have become homes to the new prisons.

It has also lined the pockets of corporate giants such as AT&T, which 
controls the lucrative pay phones in prisons. (Inmates now spend an 
estimated $1 billion a year on long-distance phone calls.) And it has made 
millionaires out of many savvy, and quite a few plainly unscrupulous, 
wardens who have jumped ship from public prisons to new private ones, where 
they can cash in on stock options and take home free-market salaries and 
huge "consulting fees." These corporate ventures, with names such as CCA, 
the Corrections Corporation of America, often build prisons on spec, then 
rent their cells to state systems at bargain prices, snipping a few dollars 
a month off the cost of keeping an inmate at a public prison.

Just as the prison boom has kicked in, the national crime rate has dropped. 
Yet we've continued to build new prisons -- because we like them, not 
because we need them, argues Joseph T. Hallinan, author of "Going up the 
River." It's a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, he says. To do 
this, we've had to persuade ourselves to believe about crime "what 
Americans had believed about communism in the 1950s: that its threat lurked 
everywhere at all times, and could be stemmed only by the creation of a 
vast military-industrial complex -- only now it was a prison-industrial 
complex."

There are, of course, other factors at play in the prison boom: The crime 
rate may have fallen steadily in the last decade, but the length of the 
average prison sentence has gone up. Hallinan, a journalist who has been 
writing about the criminal justice system for almost a decade, shows how 
the rise of mandatory-sentencing laws, in particular those for drug 
offenses, took discretion away from experienced judges, eliminated mercy 
and stuffed prisons with nonviolent offenders serving long terms with no 
possibility of parole.

In 1995, the average prison term served for homicide was six years; for 
selling crack cocaine, it was 11.

Life behind bars, meanwhile, has become all the more degraded, Hallinan 
reports. In some maximum-security units, inmates regularly pelt guards with 
feces, urine and food; the guards wear safety glasses.

In several state systems, such as Illinois', well-organized gangs 
effectively run prisoners' daily lives, terrorizing and raping the weak, 
even controlling cell and work detail assignments, all the while overseeing 
the drug traffic back home from their phones while guards look the other way.

In part thanks to those mandatory drug-sentencing laws that treat crimes 
involving crack cocaine much more harshly than those involving 
standard-issue cocaine or other drugs, inmate populations are 
disproportionately black.

But new prisons are almost always built in white, rural areas, far from 
inmates' homes.

Politicians claim this is because these areas suffer from high 
unemployment, but as Hallinan points out, the nation's inner cities aren't 
exactly hotbeds of employment opportunity, either. While studies have shown 
that regular contact with family and close friends in the outside world is 
a key to prisoner rehabilitation, most inmates are now housed across entire 
states from their homes, in places with little opportunity for job programs 
or other community involvement as their sentences near completion.

Hallinan shows how racial tension between white guards and nonwhite inmates 
is almost inevitable; the symbolism alone is enough to drive up the stakes 
in the slightest confrontation between the two sides.

In Texas, armed white guards patrol on horseback while the mostly black and 
Chicano inmates do field work, singing work songs passed down from the days 
of slavery.

The problem is that while building new prisons near the areas that most 
inmates come from makes a certain kind of rational sense, it doesn't make 
emotional sense at a time when the public wants to see criminals punished, 
not just locked up. The result, Hallinan writes, is that regardless of the 
severity of the average prisoner's crime, his time behind bars has become 
"pointlessly punitive." Being far from home and not likely to receive 
visits has become just another psychic dimension of the punishment that the 
public demands.

Humiliations large and small are thought up for prisoners: In some Alabama 
prisons, an inmate caught masturbating is made to wear a pink uniform.

It's as if prisons have become a stage on which to play out our lust for 
vengeance and our rage about the toll that violent crime has taken on our 
national psyche.

Florida, for example, recently debated a bill to require its prisons to be 
"no-frills" -- no TVs, no weights, even no air conditioning. "Our objective 
is to make prison life intolerable," as one supporter summed it up.

But as Hallinan shows again and again, brutal, dangerous prisons that give 
their prisoners nothing meaningful to occupy their time produce brutal and 
dangerous inmates.

What happens, then, when these prisoners return to the outside world?

Today's prisons, "Going up the River" suggests, regularly turn 
garden-variety, low-level criminals into violent, sociopathic thugs who are 
much more dangerous when they come out than when they went in. Higher 
education for inmates is "on the verge of extinction." Many prison units 
become sick, self-enclosed dystopias. "You can't create and maintain a 
climate where people want to change," as one former corrrections 
commissioner puts it, "where every day when they open their cell door ... 
they're preoccupied with their survival that day."

Rehabilitation, though, appears to be the furthest thing from the minds of 
prison officials dealing with extreme discipline problems.

Restoring order and taking the system back from the gangs are the first 
priority of the prison officials Hallinan quotes, and the solution most 
have embraced is the new breed of "supermax" prisons, the "handful of 
ultramodern, ultraexpensive, increasingly popular prisons designed to 
deprive the men in them of human interaction."

Illinois, for example, sees its new supermax as the only way to break the 
stranglehold of gangs on prison life; 80 percent of its supermax prisoners 
are gang leaders.

Supermax inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in windowless cells, with an 
hour of daily exercise in a caged-in yard. Most are allowed either no phone 
calls or one 15-minute call a month, with no cafeteria visits, no library 
privileges and only an occasional, brief "noncontact" visit. These 
supermaxes are, in short, "incubators for psychoses," in one psychologist's 
phrase, yet many of the prisoners here are eventually returned to the 
general prison population.

But like all new prisons these days, supermaxes have been greeted with 
universal excitement -- they are, after all, a boost to any local economy. 
If the notion that we've put a smiley face on prisons sounds far-fetched, 
consider Polk County, Texas, where, Hallinan reports, a new prison was 
greeted with great cheers.

Three days before the prison's opening, the prison held an "open house." 
For $25, members of the public got to eat real prison food, wear real 
prison clothes, even spend the night in a real prison cell. The town's 
mayor strummed a guitar from a bunk in one cell, and a judge sang 
appropriate favorites such as "Folsom Prison Blues." Or consider Wallens 
Ridge, Va., where the new supermax was celebrated with a party complete 
with yellow and white tent and barbecue pit. The warden told the crowd how 
proud he was of his town's new prison, which "shows we can make a 
difference. We can create jobs and prosperity and protect people while 
we're doing it."

It has never been easy to keep order in prisons, which are, after all, 
filled with people who have shown themselves capable of antisocial behavior 
and much worse, many of whom have little left to lose. How many resources 
does society really want to invest in them, and just what are prisoners' 
rights beyond food and shelter?

Hallinan shows how over the past few decades, pendulum swings in the 
nation's courts on these age-old issues have played a crucial part in the 
development of the prison-industrial complex.

Prior to the '60s, wardens ruled individual prisons virtually at their own 
discretion; courts rarely intervened. But the Black Muslims succeeded in 
getting the Supreme Court to pay attention to prison life with its ruling 
that Muslim inmates must be given the same religious accommodations as 
Christians. A frenzy of inmate lawsuits followed.

Suddenly, inhumane conditions that had always been a feature of many 
prisons -- such as severely overcrowded Alabama jails in which six inmates 
were crammed into a cell measuring 4 by 8 feet, with only a hole in the 
floor for a toilet -- were ruled unconstitutional. The next decade saw the 
courts ban corporal punishment in prisons and set limits on solitary 
confinement. Rules were eased on everything from inmates' dress codes to 
the number and duration of visits to the censorship of their mail. Prison 
counseling programs flourished. Furlough and early-parole programs were 
begun in several states.

But after the move toward "empowered" prisoners came something else: a 
surge of deadly prisoner uprisings, beginning in 1971 at Attica in upstate 
New York, in which 43 people were killed.

The national mood shifted again, away from sympathy toward prisoners' 
concerns, away from the concept of rehabilitation, and toward the idea that 
prisons exist to be the hell on earth that criminals deserve -- and God 
knows we need more and more of 'em in these corrupt, immoral times.

It's the unseemliness of it all, of the newly acceptable blithe, cheerful 
attitude toward prisons, and of the new opportunities to make millions off 
the misfortunes of others and the most entrenched social problems, that 
most seems to offend Hallinan. And yet that's also what sets him at 
cross-purposes in "Going Up the River." His instincts as a moralist compete 
with his talent for drawing amusing portraits of wacky personalities. He 
lavishes several hilarious pages, for example, on San Quentin's Dr. Leo 
Stanley, who served as the prison's warden in the 1930s and believed that 
crime could be caused by the psychological pain of being physically 
unattractive. Stanley started by giving nose jobs to all crooked-nosed 
inmates, but before long, Hallinan writes, "He was giving inmates face 
lifts to smooth their wrinkles, paring down and pinning back elephant ears, 
even removing blemishes."

Comic relief is a good idea when it comes to a potentially depressing topic 
like prisons, but at times Hallinan gets carried away. Some of his 
portraits, both of prisoners and of prison workers, come close to cruel 
condescension. There's something a bit slimy about his "sympathetic" 
Tobacco Road-esque profile of the hapless, toothless Groves family of North 
Carolina, three entire generations of whom are now in jail for running a 
crack-selling operation out of the matriarch's trailer. (Hallinan patiently 
details how each of the none-too-swift family members realized they were 
being busted, complete with colorful exclamations such as "They done got 
Mama!"). I felt equally manipulated by his subtle ridicule of a tightly 
wound Virginia prison guard named Jennifer Miller (known among the inmates 
as "Killer Miller").

"I loved it from the moment I walked in," she says, beaming. "I loved the 
sound of those doors clanging behind me. It was like a big adventure." When 
she was a girl, her father would take her for a ride on the back of his 
Harley-Davidson. The faster he would go, the more she liked it. Prison, she 
said, is a little bit like that.

Is Hallinan's point that it's wrong to love your work as a prison guard? 
Here's a job that Miller enjoys, one that allows her to utilize her 
seemingly boundless anger toward men and her need for both control and 
adventure. We may have too many prisons in this country, and we may be 
building new prisons like the one she works in for all the wrong reasons, 
but if someone has to be a prison guard, she is an excellent candidate.

Still, "Going up the River" is a good, well-researched trip through our 
national prison culture.

What it needed to be a great book was a little more analytical steam, and 
less reportorial whistling.

He might have contended, for example, with the many conservative 
counter-arguments to his thesis, such as the idea that the crime rate is 
down precisely because we've locked up more of the bad people, and given 
them longer sentences. While he's devoting pages to describing the weirdo 
characters and tragic lost souls he meets in his travels through prisons, 
or recounting some of the alternately kooky and horrifying decisions that 
are made by the people who run individual prisons, Hallinan lets pass with 
too little reflection some truly knotty larger conflicts.

These include problems such as how to keep prisoners occupied and help them 
develop job skills while not exploiting prison labor, and the moral 
question of how we can know whether a coldblooded killer is 
"rehabilitated." He seems only minimally interested in the fact that, for 
the most part, the guards who might seem to be among the main beneficiaries 
of the prison boom themselves live with economic and psychological 
struggles that parallel in eerie ways those of the prisoners they guard.

This is the dark territory that Ted Conover explored in his 2000 National 
Book Critics Circle Award-winning book, "Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing." 
Conover went undercover to work as a guard at the New York state 
maximum-security prison.

The two books strike quite different moods, though they convey many of the 
same ideas and conclusions. Take your pick: Where Hallinan delivers his 
devastating verdict on prisons with an amusing dose of quirky Americana, 
Conover gives readers gritty realism, psychological probing, a total 
immersion experience. Eric Schlosser, author of the expose "Fast Food 
Nation," has his own book about the subject in the works.

With some of our best, most serious-minded writers turning their attention 
to prisons, those of us who haven't yet acknowledged the full implications 
of the prison boom won't be able to ignore it for much longer.

About the writer Maria Russo is associate editor of Salon Books.
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