Pubdate: Thu, 10 May 2001
Source: Progressive, The (US)
Edition: May 2001, Volume 65, Issue 5, ISSN 00330736
Section: Pg 40-44
Copyright: 2001 The Progressive
Contact:  http://www.progressive.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/351
Author: Silja J.A. Talvi
Note: Silja J. A. Talvi is a Seattle-based freelance journalist who reports 
frequently on criminal justice and prison-related topics. Her previous book 
review essay for The Progressive, "The Veil and Its Meanings, "appeared in 
the June 2000 issue
Note: Reviews of "Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation" by Joseph 
T. Hallinan (Random House, 320 pages, $24.95), "Asphalt Justice: A Critique 
of the Criminal Justice System in America" by John Raymond Cook (Greenwood 
Publishing, 224 pages, $65), and "Prison Masculinities" edited by Don Sabo, 
Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London (Temple University, 296 pages, $79.50)

THE CRAZE OF INCARCERATION

More Americans went to prison or jail during the eight years of the Clinton 
Administration than during any other. In total, 673,000 people were 
sentenced to prison or jail terms during Clinton's Presidency, and our 
national incarceration rates are now officially the highest in the world. 
Altogether, two million Americans are currently behind bars. Another 4.5 
million are on probation and parole. Meanwhile, crime rates have remained 
relatively static-or have decreased in some categories-since 1980.

The three books under review address the incarceration craze and attempt to 
answer several questions about it: Just how deeply wedded has our society 
become to the idea of imprisonment as a solution to crime? Why? With what 
consequences? And what can be done differently?

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph 
T. Hallinan sets out to understand, both in economic and in human terms, 
what's behind the prison boom. Going up the River, a riveting narrative 
work, is the culmination of four years of Hallinan's travels across the 
country talking with prisoners, correctional officers, government 
officials, and residents of rural prison towns.

Much of Hallinan's itinerant account centers on George W. Bush's home 
state. "Texas is to the prison culture of the 1990s what California was to 
the youth culture of the 1960s: It's where it's happening," writes 
Hallinan. " Texas has more prisons than any state in the country and 
imprisons more of its people, per capita, than any state except Louisiana."

He begins in Beeville, Texas, a town of 13,000 with an additional 
population of 7,200 inmates--a startling ration, which, the author points 
out, is nearly unsurpassed in the United States. Two prisons, McConnell 
Unit and Garza Unit, are already housed here. Still, the community is eager 
for more.

As Hallinan soon finds out this eagerness stems from the windfall that the 
prisons have provided to a town left gasping for revenue in the aftermath 
of a naval base closure. Much to the town's relief, the McConnell and Garza 
Units have already brought 1,500 permanent jobs to the community and a 
combined payroll of $27 million. A correctional officer at McConnell Unit 
makes a salary of more than $24,000 a year in a county, writes Hallinan, 
"where the per capita income is $8,600 a year and one of every four people 
lives in poverty."

Crime, as Hallinan aptly notes, is nearly nonexistent in Beeville, apart 
from the time a lawnmower was stolen from an unfenced yard. The sheer 
absence of serious crime in a community that has reinvented itself as one 
of Texas's prison hubs leads Hallinan to ponder how essential it is for 
Beeville's residents to convince themselves of the imminent likelihood of 
criminal behavior.

"With crime, that's something you read about every day in your community," 
insists Brad Arvin, the head of the Beeville redevelopment council. "And 
that's a clear and present danger-just as near as your morning paper. You 
don't have to convince the public there's a crime problem. That's why you 
have prison construction."

"I thought the people of Beeville had come to believe about crime in the 
1990s what Americans had believed about communism in the 1950s," muses 
Hallinan, "that its threat lurked everywhere at all times, and could be 
stemmed only by the creation of a vast military-industrial complex-except 
that now it was a prison-industrial complex."

America's prison industry employs more than 413,000 people, having more 
than doubled in the last twenty years. But prison employees are only part 
of the larger economic picture, as Hallinan witnesses firsthand when he 
attends an annual meeting of the American Correctional Association (the 
largest private correctional organization in the country) in Cincinnati. 
Lining the halls of the convention center are booths hawking prison goods 
ranging from prefabricated cells to grooming products specifically geared 
for African American inmates (a lucrative business, considering that, for 
the first time in U.S. history, fully half the nation's prisoners are 
African Americans).

At the meeting, a company owner is trying to entice prison guards to 
consider buying his new puncture-- resistant vest. Beneath the vest, 
Hallinan explains, is a block of gelatin-- designed to simulate human 
innards-and a $100 bill. In this surreal demonstration, guards are invited 
to try to stab through the vest with an ice pick to win the cash prize.

"With more than 1.3 million people behind bars in this country, companies 
like his are scrambling to cash in on a market estimated to be worth $37.8 
billion a year, one that is bigger than major league baseball, bigger than 
the porn industry," writes Hallinan.

With more than 70,000 inmates, private prison corporations have rushed to 
grab a slice of that multi-- billion dollar pie. In 1980, not a single 
private prison or jail operated in the United States. By the end of 1995, 
there were 104. Yet Hallinan finds that many private prisons are not more 
cost-effective than state-run facilities, as they had originally been 
touted. Often, the owners rely on political connections to help win 
contracts, using prisoners to make executives and investors wealthy.

"The appearance of the prison millionaire marked a turning point in 
American penology," Hallinan writes. "Never before had it been possible in 
this country to become rich by incarcerating other people. Now, it is 
commonplace. . . . The consequence of this change has been subtle but 
profound.... Public prisons are now places where the ambitious can hone 
their financial skills before moving on to the really big money in the 
private sector."

Much of the remainder of Hallinan's painstakingly researched book revolves 
around the often barbaric treatment of prisoners, the inhumanity of maximum 
security facilities and security housing units, and an account of the 
evolution of America's prison system.

Hallinan brings his narrative to an appropriate close at the festive 
inauguration of one of Virginia's new supermax facilities, Wallens Ridge, 
where he finds "the perfectly evolved American prison": "It was both 
lavishly expensive and needlessly remote, built not because it was needed 
but because it was wanted-by politicians who thought it would bring them 
votes, by voters who hoped it would bring them jobs, and by a corrections 
establishment that no longer believed in correction."

America's frenzied rate of incarceration does nothing to further the 
oncevalued goal of prisoner rehabilitation, Hallinan concludes. Prison has 
simply become "pointlessly punitive."

The barbarism of the American prison system comes through, loudly in the 
new anthology Prison Masculinities. Edited by D'Youville College social 
sciences professor Don Sabo, psychiatrist Terry A. Kupers, and 
prisoner/writer Willie London, Prison Masculinities brings together forty 
thought-provoking essays and poems written by prisoners, scholars, and 
activists.

[IMAGE ILLUSTRATION]

As the title suggests, this impressive collection examines the role of 
prison in reproducing destructive forms of masculinity.

In his essay, "Crimes, Politics, and Community Since the 1990s," Marc Mauer 
of the Sentencing Project notes that 94 percent of the nation's prisoners 
are men, most of them young. The prisons that house them rest on what the 
editors call the four cornerstones of patriarchal institutions: 
homosociality, sex segregation, hierarchy, and violence.

Within this framework, the editors offer valuable and disturbing insight 
into the "prison code" as it exists nearly universally in American male 
prisons: Never admit fear. Do not snitch. Act tough. Do not help 
authorities. Do not trust anyone. Always be ready to fight. It is a code 
shared by prisoners and guards alike.

Many poems and essays in Prison Masculinities delve into the alarmingly 
prevalent phenomenon of prison rape. In Terry A. Kupers's "Rape and the 
Prison Code" and Stephen Donaldson's "A Million Jockers, Punks, and 
Queens," the essays explore, with absolute frankness, the harsh reality of 
sexual relations and domination within men's prisons, which often relegates 
men into roles of jockeys (dominant men), punks (the largely heterosexual 
men pressed into sexual servitude), and queens (a small and highly 
desirable class of effeminate gays).

Essays such as these do not make for easy or casual reading; the horror of 
sexual violence behind prison walls is communicated with disturbing detail. 
But the passages are delivered with intelligence and honesty, with 
important insights for the reader willing to trudge through the heavy material.

Other notable contributions include Christian Parentis "Rehabilitating 
Prison Labor" and Mumia Abu-Jamal's "Caged and Celibate."

Angela Davis's sagacious analysis in her essay, "Race, Gender, and Prison 
History," is one of the book's highlights. She argues that the 
disproportionate incarceration of African Americans (especially in supermax 
facilities) is a kind of bizarre succession to slavery. Davis calls for 
cooperative work between anti-racist and prison activists, arguing that the 
two movements are-or should be-inseparable.

The book's most powerful personal essay comes from Jarvis Masters, a 
prisoner at San Quentin who sets out to talk to his fellow inmates about 
child abuse in a piece entitled "Scars."

"Secretly, we all like it here," he writes of muscular, weight-lifting 
prisoners who willingly show him their scars and talk about their violent 
origins without ever uttering the words "child abuse." "This place welcomes 
a man who is full of rage and violence. Here he is not abnormal or 
perceived as different. Here rage is nothing new, and for men scarred by 
child abuse and violent lives, the prison is an extension of inner life. We 
learn to abuse and reabuse ourselves by moving in and out of places like 
San Quentin."

In John Raymond Cook's Asphalt Justice, the author uses his own experiences 
as a psychologist working in the criminal justice system to launch into an 
impassioned, critical, and solution-oriented discussion.

Cook, now a professor of psychology at Mars Hill College in North Carolina, 
sets out to establish that the rapid expansion of the prison system is 
"deleterious to the long-term welfare of society." Current modes of 
punishment, he explains, fail to take into account basic psychological 
understandings of how people change their behavior for the better.

"While punishment may have its place in the criminal justice system, it is 
a useless and counterproductive method when used all alone," he writes. 
"Attempting to 'get tough' is a poorly considered, macho effort that plays 
the game on the criminals' home turf."

To many of these men, abuse and toughness are just an integral part of the 
everyday game of staying alive. The challenge, Cook explains, is to develop 
an approach that provides the resources for prisoners to develop 
introspection and new skills with which to relate to the world around them, 
and not simply to reinforce or magnify old patterns and hatreds.

As in Hallinan's Going up the River, Cook devotes a significant portion of 
Asphalt Justice to highlighting the economic incentives that have helped 
fuel America's prison boom and to documenting the violations of human and 
civil liberties that regularly occur behind bars.

Those institutions, stresses Cook, have been designed with a particular 
criminal element in mind: the 5 percent of the prison population charged 
with violent crimes. To subject the rest to an institution designed for 
prisoners with a propensity for violence is cruel and unjust, he charges.

Cook is especially outraged at the treatment of juveniles who commit 
crimes. Most states, he points out, now have laws allowing teens to be 
tried as adults, a punitive phenomenon that demonstrates a lack of basic 
understanding about adolescent psychology. For teens, normal confusion 
concerning self-image and identity can be negatively impacted by familial 
and environmental factors and can lead juveniles down a dangerous and 
"criminal" road. But such factors do not, Cook insists, turn a 
fourteen-year-old child into an adult, no matter how heinous his crime.

"Blaming children for the ills of society is like blaming the horses when 
the barn burns down," he writes. "Children did not make this world; they 
inherited it. Forcing children to live in adult jails and prisons will 
almost assuredly not improve the future of our society."

Cook moves forward with his vision of what a restructuring of the U.S. 
criminal justice system would entail. As an alternative to incarceration, 
he emphasizes the effectiveness of pretrial diversion programs, the 
potential benefits of drug legalization and the widespread availability of 
drug treatment, restrictions on the ownership of handguns, improved 
literacy rates, employment opportunities, education, social welfare, and 
health care services.

If punishment must take the form of incarceration, Cook argues, persons 
facing imprisonment should be required to undergo an extensive evaluation 
with the aim of pinpointing the causes that underlie their criminal 
behavior. Criteria could then be established to demonstrate whether or not 
a person is able to address those underlying issues while in prison.

Accordingly, Cook proposes a multitiered system to encourage prosocial 
behavior. At the first and lowest level, prisoners would have few 
privileges (but humane treatment); at the second level, they would have the 
ability to direct their own schedules and participate in group activities; 
at the third, increased privileges including additional visitation and 
phone time would be allowed; and, at the fourth, prisoners could enjoy the 
widest range of activities, including daily visitation, increased freedom 
of movement, and conjugal visits.

Actual release, suggests Cook, would be based on the completion of goals 
outlined in each prisoner's individualized treatment plan.

Cook's proposals are intriguing, as is his suggestion that prisons be 
redesigned as something between an academic institution and a monastery, 
with an emphasis on stripped-down, single-occupancy cells. These cells, the 
author states, would create a "safety refuge . . . where more than survival 
is the dominant mode of life."

But his view that "solitude is good for the soul" raises red flags, 
particularly in light of the serious and sometimes irreparable 
psychological damage inflicted on prisoners kept in isolation units today, 
as Kupers discusses in one of his essays in Prison Masculinities. (Unlike 
the conditions of such supermax facilities, however, Cook's proposal does 
not call for total isolation, only for plain, single-occupancy cells to 
which prisoners can retire.)

Moreover, Cook seems to be basing most, if not all, of his proposals on his 
experience with male prisoners and juvenile delinquents, while the realm of 
prison experience for women-particularly the importance placed on prison 
socializing and emotional support among cellmates-simply does not mesh well 
with Cook's vision of solitude.

Yet the very basis of his vision-- that of a therapeutic approach toward 
persons who have committed more serious crimes-is a logical and humane one. 
Such an approach is already being tried in Scandinavian countries, the 
Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, in Canada.

Given the American incarceration craze, the likes of which the world has 
never seen, proposals like Cook's should lead to serious discussion and debate.

"Rehabilitation, greatly lacking in our system for decades, must reemerge 
as an important aspect of the criminal justice system. If not, we as a 
people will continue to pay the costs, both social and economic, for 
increasing levels of incarceration," he concludes. "Ultimately, it is 
future generations that will pay for misguided, poorly considered acts of 
retribution."
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