A Cleareyed Look at the Politics of the Prison System

Every senator, congressman and state legislator, as well as every governor and the president, should read “Going Up the River.” They probably won’t: The book’s subject is the appalling growth and size of the American prison industry, and it seems that no one in public life today has any ideas about prisons except to build more of them.

Joseph T. Hallinan, for some years a national reporter for the Newhouse chain, has written a book that could well have been written in cold anger. But it wasn’t. Instead Hallinan has taken a thorough, clear and calm look at how, almost unnoticed, the nation has created a $40-billion-a-year prison industry that employs 400,000 people. It is a system in which rehabilitation is nearly a forgotten goal, prisoners are treated most inhumanely in the most modern prisons and wardens talk as much about cutting costs as about devising ways to keep prisoners from repeating offenses.

A number of currents in American life flowed together to create the mighty torrent that is the prison system, which Hallinan calls the “prison-industrial complex.” One is America’s fear of crime, which since the late 1960s has led politicians at all levels to demonstrate their toughness by voting to put more criminals, even petty ones, into prison for longer terms with legislated sentencing standards replacing the discretion of judges. About 1.3 million Americans are currently in prison. Nearly half of them, the author writes, are black. A large proportion of the people in prison were convicted of possessing small amounts of drugs, like crack cocaine, for which the sentencing guidelines mandate long terms.

Hallinan also describes how there are pockets of poverty throughout the country in which jobs are so few that the prospect of low-skill prison work is enticing. So in small, remote towns across the nation, prisons have been thrown up to provide jobs and a sense of stability.

With these tendencies there is also a trend in parts of the country toward privatization of prisons, with private businesses, some of them very big, competing with one another and with the public prisons to keep costs down. Lower costs, Hallinan finds, mean fewer guards and more violence. It means less help for substance abuse and mental illness. It means less useful work for prisoners to do. It means fewer educational programs for the prisoners.

“Tough on crime” believers should note that Hallinan does not hold that crime is wholly the consequence of abstract forces such as poverty and education. Discussing two murderers he met at Washington State Reformatory, he writes: “Flowers did not kill--Grady did not kill--because he didn’t have a job or an education or an understanding that what he was doing was wrong. These men killed, because, at a critical juncture, some inner iron didn’t hold.”

Hallinan concludes that the 19th century Philadelphia Quakers had a point when they built the world-renowned Eastern State Penitentiary in order that criminals could reflect on their crimes and do penance. “A crime,” he writes, “is not an intellectual failure but a moral one.” He knows the history of penal practice in America and he has gone from coast to coast to see its contemporary faces, from Texas, which has more people in prison than any other state, to the Northwest, East Coast and California, whose so-called model prison at Pelican Bay is given an even-tempered scrutiny that should cause state officials to shudder.

In fact, Pelican Bay subjects many of its inmates to prolonged periods of empty isolation that can only be called extreme psychological torture. Many of its inmates come from urban centers several hundred miles away. Other states send prisoners to remote locations, far from families and friends. Hallinan calls this practice “internal exile.” Hallinan writes that he sees “no magic bullet” for the prison system. Yes, rehabilitation often fails, but not trying makes the results for the prisoners and for society even worse.

“One thing seems clear,” he says, “too many people are in prison for too long.” The United States incarcerates more people per capita than in any other nation except Russia. Hallinan believes there are signs here and there of a changing attitude toward prison. But he is not hopeful that change will come quickly. A powerful, levelheaded book, “Going Up the River” may just, hopefully, accelerate the pace of change.