NONFICTION - Jan. 7, 1996

IRON HOUSE by Jerome Washington (Vintage: $11; 176 pp.). “I’m in prison as punishment,” a convict tells his guards in this memoir of Jerome Washington’s 16 years in New York State’s maximum-security prisons, including Attica. “Not for punishment. So don’t take your hostilities out on me.” This is Washington’s message for society at large, now that more Americans than ever are being locked up and the corrections field has become a prime source of jobs. In the current system, he shows by anecdote and argument, “authority is capricious, thoughts are contraband,” and physical brutality by both inmates and guards is common. Prison, Washington says, neither rehabilitates people nor punishes them fairly.

We are not told why Washington was imprisoned--only that the charges against him were eventually dismissed. Before his release in 1991, he wrote a play, “The Boys in Cellblock C,” and won a landmark suit in defense of prison writers’ First Amendment rights. He now teaches writing in Northern California. His account of the lawsuit and a flashback to his youth are well done, but the stories at the heart of “Iron House”--brief vignettes of the con men, dreamers, addicts, psychopaths and heroes he lived among--exist in a curious limbo, neither documented enough to be useful reportage nor developed enough to be good fiction. In prison, Washington’s writing could be justified by its courage and sincerity alone; on the outside, unfortunately, it can’t.