A Hopeless Penalty : Prison: Ending conjugal visits furthers the dehumanizing of people who one day will be released into society.

With the interminable sentences being handed down and with positive, productive programs scaled back, convicts in California increasingly have little hope for the future. Now Gov. Pete Wilson wants to undo the program that allows overnight visits between prisoners and their spouses, children, parents and siblings.

Begun more than 20 years ago by Gov. Ronald Reagan, the program aims to reduce recidivism by helping prisoners maintain family ties and especially marriage bonds and thus retain a foothold in their home communities. It has come under attack in recent years by some victims’ groups and politicians eager to appear tough on criminals.

Citing public safety, Wilson has issued an emergency directive to prisons chief James Gomez to disqualify from such visits anyone found guilty of a long list of mostly violent crimes and any “lifer” who has not yet gotten a release date. In effect, the governor is saying that families of certain prisoners choosing to participate in the program are not, in his view, exercising good judgment. So he will have the government make the right decision for them.

The change is estimated to affect half the state’s 130,000 inmates. Over the next few years, however, as the “three strikes” law fills the system with lifers, prisoners expect the program to die by attrition.

Under the current statute, a prisoner must earn the right to participate. At the California Men’s Colony, the faces of even the most stoically conditioned convicts could not hide the visceral alarm at learning of the governor’s directive. We live for these visits and the positive reinforcement they provide in an otherwise negative environment.

Most of those whose spouses participate do not believe their marriages can survive the duration of their sentences without intimacy. Could any marriage? Our families are stigmatized for continuing to support us. They are already under enormous social pressure to cut us loose. Victims of crime deserve consideration and compensation. No one bears more empathy for these people than the genuine repentant criminal, and there are more behind bars than you might readily believe. But is it just or wise to exploit victims’ emotion in fashioning public-safety policy? Is vengeance now the measure of justice? Is victims’ suffering lessened by the destruction of prisoners’ families? Is there a message in this for prisoners and their families, other than a new level of despondency and rage and validation for the “payback” ethic?

Convicts already understand that ethic. But it is not, by any measure, the code of civilized society.