Every edition of this book has begun with an important truism: it is hard to think of crime without also thinking of prison. To most of us, especially in America, crime means street crime, especially violent street crime. The punishment of choice for such crime is prison, and our image of prison is largely formed by the Big House of Hollywood fame. Hard criminals are meant to serve hard time in hard places like Alcatraz, aptly nicknamed “the Rock.” You do the crime, you do the time – hard time, behind prison walls. The notion that hard time can be constructive time is a lingering hope, based on the plausible notion that this species of adversity might help some folks mature and come to grips with life's problems in more constructive, or at least less destructive, ways.
For better or worse, prisons are a fact of modern life, as solid and imposing as the walls that surround and contain them. Individual prisons may come and go – and rates of incarceration can vary considerably across jurisdictions and over time – but the institution of the prison endures. Unlike the Wall of Jericho or, a bit more recently, the Berlin Wall, the prison edifice stands firm. Indeed, prisons are a more central feature of our criminal justice system than at any time in history, though in recent years there has been a gradual decline of the rate of incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders, a decline that puts a hopeful – though exceedingly modest – dent in the phenomenon known as mass incarceration, the term of art used by experts to describe our massive and surprisingly resilient penal system.1 More than ever, however, prison is our punishment of first resort for serious crime, particularly serious violent crime.
The fit between crime and prison, then, would seem to be a good one, at least an easy one to live with for people who do not have to live in prisons. For the average citizen, who presumes himself or herself a most unlikely candidate for confinement, prisons take on a kind of mythic quality that makes them recurring subjects of popular culture, from songs, books, and movies to cartoons and jokes. One revealing cartoon is a Far Side segment featuring two prisoners hanging by their wrists from a dungeon wall. Off in the corner, a third prisoner is tied to a rack. No one struggles; everyone is utterly defeated. On the wall is a plaque that reads, in bold letters, “Congratulations, Bob. Torturer of the Month.”2 For us, prison as a setting of punishment – though not torture, which is why the cartoon makes us laugh rather than cry – comes to mind with the same easy facility that earlier generations thought of corporal or capital punishment. Just as errant English children in centuries past were warned that they would “come to a bad end,” meaning the end of the hangman's rope, or threatened with a “lick” from the vicious “cat” (the cat-o'-nine-tails, a nine-tailed whip), we caution our delinquents about the rigors of life in prison, hoping to scare them straight.
Recent scholarship suggests we may want to rethink whether prisons are settings of punishment or of torture, or some uneasy mix of the two, which would put us on guard, so to say, when we think about specific prisons and prison conditions. In a scathing critique of the American system of punishment, Robert Ferguson3 concludes that our justice system, and most particularly our prison system, is an inferno – a kind of hell. Ferguson's analysis is insightful and troubling. As we proceed, we will keep in mind the notion that harsh punishment may shade into torture, by which we mean pain gratuitously applied to people in captivity because the authorities are able to do so, because they have the upper hand, because hurting dehumanized groups like criminals feels right and good and is, for the most part, entirely legal.4 It is one thing to imagine a subject like the pains of imprisonment, a centerpiece of penal scholarship, in abstract terms. It is quite another to imagine living with and countenancing those pains, and, further, to imagine the warping of character that may result both for those forced to serve time in prison and for those who work in prison, for whom force has become, often unbeknownst to themselves, a central part of their lives.5
Prisons have a peculiar salience in American culture, though few of us have visited a prison or even laid eyes on one,6 or think about the moral implications of settings that store people under conditions of outright subjugation, as if, in the worst case, they were so much human waste.7 Some years back, The New Yorker featured a cartoon with a prisoner sitting silently in his neatly maintained cell, reading a magazine, surrounded by posters touting several well-known prisons such as Attica and Stateville, including a pennant for Sing Sing, the original Big House to which offenders were consigned when they were “sent up the river” (the Hudson River) to pay their debt to society by breaking rocks in the prison quarry. It is as if these famous (or infamous) prisons were choice vacation spots or alma maters for the criminal set, the poster announcing a kind of Ivy League travel itinerary to which ambitious offenders might aspire. One thing we find striking is the humorist's assumption that an educated reading audience will know – by reputation – the various specific prisons that are the subjects of the posters adorning the inmate's wall. Readers can laugh at this cartoon, we suspect, because they are outsiders to the prison world and have only a limited sense of what goes on inside the prison, other than the vague notion that prisons punish people who need punishing. That offenders might remember prisons fondly or advertise them proudly suggests a comforting complicity between a guilty criminal and a society that must (perhaps guiltily) impose harsh penal sanctions. There is also, of course, a perverse pride of accomplishment reflected in this cartoon. In some circles, surviving prison – perhaps especially a well-known prison – is a badge of courage and a mark of criminal distinction. If some prisons are hell, some are more hellish than others. Surviving these especially demanding prisons and living to tell about it, even to joke about it, is a sign of considerable strength of character, at least in the circles of those who know enough to appreciate the daunting challenges of prison life.
If few of us have ever visited a prison, even fewer of us spend much time pondering the state of our prisons. As upright citizens, we believe prisons are necessary. Most of us cannot imagine the world without them. We take prisons for granted – no one living today can remember a time before prisons were a staple of criminal justice – and we suppose that, being inevitable, prisons are more or less just. Yet we harbor doubts. When pressed, we may concede that prisons are expensive to build and to operate and that they are, at best, ponderous instruments of public policy. It does not take much imagination to realize that sending offenders to prison is at once to penalize (sometimes traumatize) the prisoners and their loved ones, especially their children, and to impose added financial burdens on society, which must support those left behind when the offender is taken away and, later, absorb ex-prisoners with sharply limited employment prospects.8 And though our prisons are awesome to behold – seemingly worth their weight in deterrence – a thoughtful observer cannot help but note that prison sentences, even savage prison sentences, seem unable to bring the crime problem to heel by scaring prisoners straight or by occasioning in many offenders the kind of reflection that changes lives for the better. Yet we persist in building and staffing prisons at exorbitant costs and in stocking them with remarkable alacrity. At last count, American prisons housed well over 2 million inmates. Though, as noted above, there have been modest fluctuations in the rate of incarceration over the last few years,9 with small decreases in overall prison populations some years followed by small increases th...
