AFTER THE MADNESS: A Judge’s Own Prison Memoir.<i> By Sol Wachtler</i> .<i> Random House: 376 pp., $24</i>

In 1992, as Judge Sol Wachtler drove home on the Long Island Expressway, a carload of FBI agents forced him to stop. They ordered the judge out of his car, handcuffed him before a crowd of curious onlookers and took him to the FBI’s office in the federal courthouse in Manhattan. He was booked and, ultimately, manacled to a bed in a hospital psychiatric ward. Charged with conspiracy to commit extortion, interstate racketeering, blackmail and a host of other crimes stemming from the harassment and stalking of his former lover, Wachtler was to spend slightly less than a year in two federal prisons--at Butner, N.C., and at Rochester, Minn.--before being released to a halfway house in New York.

Virtually overnight, Wachtler endured a “staggering plunge from the dignity of [his] office, where the law in all its majesty was expounded and applied, to the status of publicly apprehended criminal, under physical restraint and at the mercy of nameless enforcers.” “After the Madness” is his tale of that plunge and, most important, of what he saw during his time on the other side of the law.

Going to prison is hardly unusual in America in the 1990s. At the time Wachtler entered the federal facility at Butner, there were nearly a million other inmates in state and federal prisons; today that number is approaching 1.2 million. But Wachtler, the former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, a widely respected legal thinker and friend of governors and Supreme Court justices, was not your usual inmate. It is what Wachtler has to tell us about the other million-plus Americans behind bars that is the most valuable and telling contribution of this memoir.

There are really two stories in this book, joined by the common theme of madness. On one level, “After the Madness” is a sometimes wrenching account of one man’s precipitous descent from the pinnacle of prestige and status in conventional society, a fall Wachtler attributes to the effects of his own madness, specifically, a manic-depressive disorder exacerbated by overuse of a bewildering array of medications. On another level, it is about the institutional madness of the criminal justice system in America: It is a system that, just as Wachtler’s fellow inmates in the mental health units at Butner and Rochester experienced, has gone off the deep end. It is about the craziness of a penal system that routinely dehumanizes inmates and then releases them, in even worse condition, into our communities. It is about the craziness of a “rage to punish” that gives 40-year sentences to nonviolent offenders in the name of a “war” on drugs.

And it is here that the book succeeds most. The tale of how this affluent, respected and rather sheltered jurist abased himself to the point of such behavior as donning a disguise to stalk his mistress is straightforwardly told, but we do not really learn enough about the judge or his background to make this memoir stand out as an exploration of the roots and meaning of mental illness. What we do learn a great deal about is the nature of our penal system in an age of heedless harshness, and it is precisely the uniqueness of Wachtler’s position that allows him to see the system’s madness clearly and in revealing detail. His picture of America’s prisons is not the one drawn by the advocates of ever “tougher” punishment. But it is the real thing. And it is the picture we must confront if we want to begin restoring sanity to our justice system.

Wachtler tells us that he decided to publish this account, in part, to dispel some of the more pernicious myths about the comforts of life in prison. In Rochester, he listened to “a radio talk show expert” describing “country club” prisons where inmates enjoy the luxury of private rooms: “I listened to this as I lay in one of the two double-decked bunks that filled my 12-by-14-foot cell. There were four of us in that cell. The only ventilation was a window that opened a few inches from the top. The four of us froze in the Minnesota winter; in the summer we were bathed in sweat, cramped on 3-inch-thick oilcloth mattresses that seemed to generate their own heat.”

Far from coddling prisoners, the system routinely dehumanizes them in ways both blatant and subtle. Inmates are verbally abused by guards; an administrator who apparently “hates” prisoners takes pride in denying compassionate leave for the terminally ill; there is a general institutional assumption that imprisonment alone isn’t punishment enough and that further pain and humiliation must be added to the pain of being confined and severed from family and community.

The Butner facility, Wachtler notes, has “beautifully maintained” grounds: If you ignore the razor wire and armed guard tower, it looks like a well-maintained industrial park or a schoolyard. But, he points out, it is a schoolyard “monitored by bullies.” And what makes this all the more telling is that Butner is among the better federal facilities; it is a place inmates in other parts of the system would like to be sent. Wachtler’s observations only hint at the character of life in the federal “supermaximum” institutions or in the worst state prisons. And in each prison, the recurrent assaults on human dignity have consequences, which are largely ignored in our current rush to punish. Wachtler reminds us that nearly everyone we put behind bars will get out sooner or later and that “If the prisoner is made to feel like garbage when he is in prison, he will for certain act like garbage when he is released.”

These things have been said before, but not by a judge speaking from the vantage point of a federal prison cell, a vantage that allows Wachtler to dispose of other myths as well. For example, it is widely--and wrongly--claimed that virtually all inmates in the country’s prisons are behind bars for violent crimes, predators who would rape, rob and pillage if it weren’t for our huge investment in incarceration. At Rochester, Wachtler writes, “In every four-man cell, there are two or three 20- to 30-year-olds doing a minimum of 10 years. They are first-time offenders, usually in for dealing drugs or growing marijuana. . . . Some have sentences of up to 40 years. None are violent.” And all, he is certain, “have been replaced on the street by someone else doing the same thing.”

There is “Danny,” sentenced to 40 years for cocaine trafficking, a first offender who claims he was only carrying a relative’s bags to the train station. Or “Julio,” serving 20 years for simply arranging--at the instigation of an FBI informant--for a friend to meet another to sell three kilos of cocaine. Or “Chet,” serving a mandatory three years for mailing a single blotter of LSD to a friend who, once caught for dealing in his own state, promptly turned Chet in. We knew such cases existed: The Justice Department’s own research has found that close to one in five federal prison inmates is incarcerated for crimes that are both minor and nonviolent. Wachtler’s account allows us to see the lives of real people, with real families, behind the statistics.

In exposing the folly of these sentences, Wachtler isn’t calling for drug legalization. He is calling for a return to more individualized sentencing with more room for judicial discretion. To the extent that discretion remains in the justice system at all in the age of mandatory sentencing, it rests increasingly with prosecutors, while judges have become increasingly marginal, rubber-stampers of predetermined punishments. The federal sentencing guidelines that have brought us preposterous sentences were designed to rationalize sentencing and reduce arbitrariness, but we have, in Wachtler’s view, gone too far in the other direction, losing both a sense of proportion and the possibility of a finer-grained, more individualized justice.

The problem isn’t only that we impose “ridiculously long” mandatory sentences for some categories of crimes, notably nonviolent drug offenses. Even in the case of violent crimes, the conventional categories force acts with very different social and moral weight into the same Procrustean scheme, preventing judges from making the “contextual and individual analysis” that would allow the sentence to make sense.

One of Wachtler’s fellow inmates was “Mike Kelly,” a first-time robber and cocaine addict serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery. Kelly, as it turns out, brandished a starter pistol in a bank and made off with all of $1,850, which he promptly spent on drugs. In a reasonable system, Wachtler argues, Kelly’s sentence might have been five years coupled with drug treatment and long-term, closely supervised after care. But the sentencing guidelines don’t permit that kind of judgment. (In California, of course, our “three strikes” law has taken this problem to its absurd extreme.)

The result is a system that is increasingly neither humane nor effective, that is both needlessly (and expensively) punitive and frustratingly inept at diminishing the violence that scars our society more than any other in the developed world. Might we change this? Wachtler is pessimistic. He reminds us that in the 1960s, there was some movement--though mainly rhetorical--toward the view that imprisonment ought to be for the purpose of public safety, not simply for vengeance, and therefore ought to be reserved for the truly dangerous. It was widely understood, at least by those who knew something about what went on in prisons, that overusing them would do more harm than good. Wachtler’s own experience convinces him that these critics were right. But “there was and is no constituency for pursuing this goal.”

He may be wrong on this. Certainly we’re in the midst of an unprecedented burst of punitiveness, a cultural and political shift that goes well beyond our attitude toward offenders to our treatment of--among others--welfare mothers and people who beg on the street. But below that harsh surface, things are considerably more complicated.

Recent polls, in California and elsewhere, show a surprising public commitment to officially unfashionable notions of rehabilitation. Opinion studies have long found that, when presented with alternatives that lie somewhere between imprisoning nonviolent offenders and doing nothing with them whatever, a majority of Americans support middle-range punishments like restitution, drug treatment and community service. The voters in Arizona, much to the displeasure of the Clinton administration, opted last year not only to permit the medical use of marijuana but also to remove first-time drug possession offenders from prison. We have a long way to go before we achieve anything approaching a more balanced vision of criminal justice. But there are stirrings of a movement in that direction. Judge Wachtler’s valuable and welcome contribution may help us get some of the way there.