Governing Prisons: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CORRECTIONAL MANAGEMENT by John J. DiIulio Jr. (Free Press: $24.95; 400 pp.)

Our prisons have been passing through a prolonged crisis. They are filled far beyond capacity. Some have higher homicide rates than most inner cities. More than 30 state prison systems are operating under the scrutiny of federal courts because of illegal conditions and practices. With the rapidly expanding prison populations, which are racing ahead of expensive construction efforts, things will probably get worse.

John DiIulio has written a book on how to manage these prisons that will receive a lot of attention because the solutions he offers are simple and inexpensive. He suggests that the violence and other problems that are occurring in the most troublesome prisons are not due to overcrowding, poor training or shortage of staff, or a breakdown of the informal prisoner society, explanations most observers have offered for the turmoil in prisons. Instead it is merely a matter of a failure of prison administrators to impose an appropriate social control regime. “A paramilitary prison bureaucracy, led by able institutional managers and steered by a talented executive, may be the best administrative response to the problem of establishing and maintaining higher-custody prisons in which inmates and staff lead a calm, peaceful and productive round of daily life.”

In a comparison of prisons in three states--California, Michigan and Texas--he offers data that indicate that Michigan and California have been experiencing excessively high rates of the major symptoms of disorder: homicides, assaults and disciplinary actions, while Texas, during the administration of George Beto (1962 to 1972), had very low rates. He suggests that this orderly, and consequently more humane and rehabilitative, regimen was successfully maintained even though Texas prisons had relatively less staff, spent less money, and were more crowded than the other prison systems.

According to DiIulio’s analysis, Michigan operates on a “responsibility model” in which a premium is placed on “measures that maximize inmate responsibility.” California has evolved through a long period of disorganization to a “consensual model,” in which great measures are taken by top management to elicit prisoner and staff conformity by catering to their demands. Texas, under Beto, emphasized “inmate obedience, work and education, roughly in that order.”

His theory of why Texas’ social control approach worked and the others failed is a version of the old conservative political theory stemming back to Thomas Hobbes and Edmond Burke, whom DiIulio quotes several times. According to this theory, what maintains order in society and prisons (and avoids the war of all against all) is a strict normative system enforced by a rigid, hierarchical political system, with an astute autocrat at the top, efficient functionaries below, and an obedient populace.

In asserting this theory of prison management, DiIulio discounts other “social causes” of disorder. First, he examines and rejects the “sociology” of prisons. This includes the major idea in most studies of prisons: that prisoners themselves will inevitably establish their own informal system of order, which prison managers must accommodate. It is prison administrators’ belief in this idea, which DiIulio calls the “sociological perspective” on prisons, that has prevented them from establishing the authoritarian order recommended by DiIulio.

Aside from its organizational problems (e.g. being repetitious), this book is extremely simplistic. Its basic idea, that authoritarian regimes succeed in maintaining order, obviously has some validity. (He fails to note that many democratic regimes also succeed.) But DiIulio leaves the important questions unanswered: How do you establish and maintain authoritarian regimes and at what cost? He suggests that the other values we seek in imprisonment, such as humane conditions and rehabilitation, are an automatic byproduct of order. Not exactly true. As a matter of fact, his own ideal model, Texas under George Beto, could be used as a counter-example.

Other observers, who spent more time talking to prisoners than DiIulio (most of DiIulio’s research seems to have been interviewing top administrators and staff) or have been involved in the extensive litigation against the Texas system, have a different view. A suit filed in 1972 (Ruiz vs. Estelle) eventually resulted in the federal court finding many of the Texas practices cruel and unusual and otherwise illegal.

In 1972, I conducted interviews of prisoners attending the college program at Eastham, one of Texas’ maximum security prisons, and was struck by the cruelty and oppressiveness of the prison, as well as the inferiority of the college education program (as compared to other programs across the country). Most of the convicts worked excessively long hours in the fields under the gun of a guard on horseback (the federal court has since limited the hours) and were threatened with punishment techniques (standing facing a wall for days) that were considered inhumane in most states.

Also, much of the order Texas experienced was accomplished by a convict boss system in which some prisoners were given special privileges in return for keeping control of other prisoners. These convicts bosses (called building tenders ) carried weapons and were allowed to use violence against other prisoners. This system was ended by the federal court. DiIulio argues that it was only after Beto left that the building-tender system got out of hand and Beto didn’t need it anyway. It was his fair, authoritarian, disciplinarian system that maintained the order. Much of the evidence presented to the federal court suggests otherwise.

But this is beside the point. All the prison administrations DiIulio studied would love to establish the system he recommends. The reason they do not is not that they are misled, as he suggests, by the sociological perspective on prisons, but because forces beyond their control prevent them.

If it is not happening already, soon, large numbers of women and minorities will be joining the guard force and they will organize unions which are also inconsistent with authoritarianism. DiIulio argues that all this is happening because Beto left and his successors could not carry on his work. What DiIulio needs is more sociology, not just the narrow sociology of the prisoner society, and some history too. Looking back at earlier authoritarian prison regimes as models for our present difficulties is like looking at Franco’s Spain for answers to our national problems.