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. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth