Pubdate: Thu, 19 Apr 2001
Source: Guardian Weekly, The (UK)
Section: Pg 30
Copyright: Guardian Publications 2001
Contact:  http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/GWeekly/front/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/633
Author: Christian Parenti, Reviewer
Note: Published book review: Going up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation 
by Joseph T. Hallinan Random House 244 pp $29.95

IMPRISONED BY POLICY

Could it be that America's massive prison expansion is becoming another 
Vietnam: an intractable war full of lies and viciousness that lacerates 
society before finally collapsing in defeat? If so, that may be the good 
news. Vietnam eventually ended, but the insanity and racism of the American 
prison boom - we have four percent of the world's population but 25 percent 
of all prisoners, and half of all U.S. prisoners are black - are still in a 
"pre-Tet" stage of escalation.

And like Vietnam, the prison-led war on crime and drugs has captured the 
attention of many journalists and scholars who are highly critical of 
American law and order. Going Up The River, by Wall Street Journal reporter 
Joseph T. Hallinan, is the latest addition to this body of work.

Hallinan's thesis is pretty common: "Having failed to make prisons 
effective, we have learned to make them profitable." It's a line shared by 
nearly the entire political spectrum, but it happens to be factually wrong 
and politically stunted. Prisons are not profitable, and the quest for 
direct profits is not driving the lockdown expansion. True, private prisons 
grew quickly in the mid-1990s, but their stock valuations have since 
collapsed, and firms are selling off facilities.

Fortunately, the notion of a profit-driven "prison-industrial complex" is 
not the only story in what, at its best, is a searing montage of human 
horrors served up in a terse, no-nonsense style.

As well as looking at prisoners, Hallinan explores the workings of the 
mostly white towns that host prisons full of black and brown people. The 
twisted cultural dynamics of this geography of race and punishment are 
sobering. But here Hallinan again stretches his point about direct economic 
interest. For every prison town that has gained some jobs, through 
government pork in the form of bricks and bars, there are other towns that 
get nothing but an increased sewerage bill, but Hallinan doesn't deal with 
that part of the story.

Hallinan also conducts a suggestive tour through American penology, tracing 
managerial thinking about prisons from the Quaker reformers who led the way 
in creating the modern penitentiary to the high-minded experiments with 
therapy in the 1960s. But here, too, his narrative is extremely sketchy on 
the bigger picture - the social hierarchies of class and race in which 
prison is always imbedded. In playing it safe, by too often avoiding the 
politics of the larger society, the book dismisses many of the central 
elements of its own story. None the less, Hallinan's sharp, enterprising 
reporting makes Going Up The River a valuable, accessible snapshot of the 
damage kicked up in our quagmire of national incarceration.
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