The Prison-Industrial Complex
Part Three
The Atlantic Monthly
December 1998; Volume 282, No. 6.
The Bobby Ross Group, based in Austin, Texas, has proved to be one of the more
troubled private-prison companies. The company's founder, Bobby Ross, was a
sheriff in Texas and a successful bed broker before starting his own business,
in 1993. He eventually set up operations at seven Texas facilities and one
Georgia facility, signing contracts to accept inmates from states including
Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Virginia. It did not take
long for problems to begin. In January of 1996 nearly 500 Colorado inmates,
many of them sex offenders, were transferred to a Bobby Ross facility in Karnes
County, Texas; two later escaped, and a full day passed before state
authorities were notified. At the Bobby Ross prison in Dickens County, Texas,
fights broke out between inmates from Montana and Hawaii that spring. A few
months later a protest about the poor quality of food and medical care turned
into a riot, and the warden ordered guards to shoot live rounds. The warden was
replaced.
Montana canceled its contract with the Bobby Ross Group in September of last
year. Three Montana inmates had escaped, and one had been killed by an inmate
from Hawaii. Montana investigators found that many of the inmates at the
Dickens County prison were going hungry and waiting days to see a doctor. "We
really dislike losing a customer," an attorney representing Bobby Ross said to
a reporter. In October an inspector for the Texas Commission on Jail Standards
gave the Dickens County prison the highest possible ratings. A month later the
same inspector acknowledged that in addition to his official duties he worked
as a "consultant" for the Bobby Ross Group, which paid him $42,000 a year. In
December eleven inmates from Hawaii escaped from their dormitory at the Newton
County facility operated by Bobby Ross, released nearly 300 other inmates, and
set fire to one of the buildings. In February of this year inmates rioted again
at Newton and set fire to the prison commissary. In brighter days, before the
riots and fires, Bobby Ross had explained the usefulness of employing William
Sessions, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as a
"special adviser" to the company. "He goes with us on sales calls to potential
clients," Ross told a reporter for the Colorado paper Westword. "That
kind of thing."
The U.S. Corrections Corporation, for years the nation's third largest
private-prison company, has encountered legal difficulties even more serious
than those of the Bobby Ross Group. In 1993 an investigation by the Louisville
Courier-Journal discovered that the company was using unpaid prison
labor in Kentucky. Inmates were being forced to perform a variety of jobs,
including construction work on nine small buildings at the Lee County prison;
construction work on one church and renovation work on three others attended by
company employees; renovation work on a company employee's game-room business;
painting and maintenance at a country club; and painting at a private school
attended by a prison warden's daughter. The Courier-Journal concluded
that "U.S. Corrections has repeatedly profited financially from its misuse of
inmate labor." Although the state Department of Corrections confirmed these
findings, it took no action against the company. A year later J. Clifford Todd,
the chairman of U.S. Corrections, pleaded guilty to a federal charge of mail
fraud, admitting that he had paid a total of roughly $200,000 to a county
correctional official in Kentucky. In return for monthly payments, which for
four years were laundered through a California company, the official sent
inmates to U.S. Corrections. Todd cooperated fully with an FBI investigation,
but later became embittered when a federal judge denied his request for a term
of house arrest. The head of the nation's third largest private-prison company
was sentenced to fifteen months in a federal prison.
The nation's second largest private-prison company, Wackenhut Corrections, has
operated with a far greater degree of professionalism and discretion. Its
parent company, the Wackenhut Corporation, has for many years worked closely
with the federal government, performing various sensitive tasks such as
guarding nuclear-weapons facilities and overseas embassies. Indeed, the company
has long been accused of operating as a front for the Central Intelligence
Agency -- an accusation that its founder, George Wackenhut, has vehemently
denied. In the early 1950s Wackenhut quit the FBI, at the age of thirty-four,
and formed a private-security company with three other former FBI agents. He
went on to assemble the nation's largest private collection of files on alleged
"subversives," with dossiers on at least three million Americans. During the
1970s the Wackenhut Corporation diversified into strike-breaking and
anti-terrorism. The company, headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, has
branch offices in forty-two states and in more than fifty foreign countries.
Its annual revenues exceed $1 billion. George Wackenhut remains the chairman of
the company, but the day-to-day operations are handled by his son, Richard.
Over the years Wackenhut's board of directors has read like a Who's Who of
national security, including a former head of the FBI, a former head of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, a former CIA director, a former CIA deputy
director, a former head of the Secret Service, a former head of the Marine
Corps, and a former Attorney General. After the company decided to enter the
private-prison industry, it hired Norman Carlson, who had headed the Federal
Bureau of Prisons.
Last year Wackenhut Corrections became the first private company ever hired by
the Federal Bureau of Prisons to manage a large facility. The federal
government's long-standing relationship with Wackenhut has developed an odd
equilibrium: one wields the power while the other reaps the financial rewards.
Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the current director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is
responsible for the supervision of about 115,000 inmates, including drug lords,
international terrorists, and organized-crime leaders. Her salary last year was
$125,900. George C. Zoley, the chief executive officer of Wackenhut
Corrections, is responsible for the supervision of about 25,000 state and
federal inmates, mostly illegal aliens, low-level drug offenders, petty
thieves, and parole violators. His salary last year was $366,000 -- plus a bonus
of $122,500, plus a stock-option grant of 20,000 shares. At least half a dozen
other executives at Wackenhut Corrections were paid more last year than the
head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The Corrections Corporation of America is the nation's largest private-prison
company; it recently participated in a buyout of the U.S. Corrections
Corporation, thereby obtaining several thousand additional inmates. CCA was
founded in 1983 by Thomas W. Beasley and Doctor R. Crants, Nashville
businessmen with little previous experience in corrections. Beasley, a former
chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, later told Inc. magazine his
strategy for promoting the concept of private prisons: "You just sell it like
you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers." Beasley and Crants
recruited a former director of the Virginia Department of Corrections to help
run the company. In 1984 CCA accepted its first Texas inmates, before it had a
completed facility in that state. The inmates were housed in rented motel
rooms; a number of them pushed the air-conditioning units out of the wall and
escaped. A year later Beasley approached his good friend Lamar Alexander, the
governor of Tennessee, with an extraordinary proposal: CCA would buy the
state's entire prison system for $250 million. Alexander supported the idea,
saying, "We don't need to be afraid in America of people who want to make a
profit." His wife, Honey, and the speaker of the Tennessee House, Ned
McWherter, were among CCA's early investors; between them the two had owned 1.5
percent of CCA's stock; they sold their shares to avoid any perceived conflict
of interest. Nevertheless, the CCA plan was blocked by the Democratic majority
in the legislature.
CCA expanded nationwide over the next decade, winning contracts to house more
than 40,000 inmates and assembling the sixth largest prison system in the
United States; but it never lost the desire to take over all the prisons in
Tennessee. In order to achieve that goal, CCA executives established personal
and financial links with figures in both political parties. During the spring
of last year CCA's allies in the Tennessee legislature began once again to push
for privatization. Crants said that letting CCA run the prisons would save the
state up to $100 million a year; he did not specify how these dramatic savings
would be achieved. George Zoley, the head of Wackenhut Corrections, argued that
handing over the Tennessee prison system to a single company would simply turn
a state monopoly into a private one. Wackenhut employed the law firm of the
former U.S. senator Howard Baker to lobby on its behalf, seeking a piece of the
action.
By February of this year a compromise of sorts had emerged in Tennessee. New
legislation proposed shifting as much as 70 percent of the state's inmate
population to the private sector; CCA and Wackenhut would both get a chance to
bid for prison contracts. The new privatization bill seemed a sure thing. It
was never put before the legislature for a vote, however. On April 20 CCA
announced plans for a corporate restructuring so complex in its details that
many Wall Street analysts began to wonder about the company's financial health.
The price of CCA stock -- which in recent years had been one of the nation's top
performers -- began to plummet, declining in value by 25 percent over the next
several days. At the annual CCA shareholders meeting, last May, Crants compared
Wall Street investors to "wildebeests" stampeding out of fear, and blamed the
stock's plunge on a single broker who had sold 640,000 shares.
Crants neglected to tell CCA shareholders a crucial bit of information: he
himself had sold 200,000 shares of CCA stock just weeks before the announcement
that sent its value tumbling. By selling his stock on March 2, Crants had
avoided a loss of more than $2.5 million. When asked recently to explain his
CCA financial dealings, Crants declined to comment. The timing and the size of
that stock transaction are likely to be of interest to the attorneys who have
filed more than half a dozen lawsuits on behalf of CCA shareholders.
Although conservatives have long worried about the loss of American sovereignty
to international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, the
globalization of private-prison companies has thus far eluded criticism. A
British private-prison company, Securicor, operates two facilities in Florida.
Wackenhut Corrections is now under contract to operate Doncaster prison, in
England; three prisons in Australia; and a prison in Scotland. It is actively
seeking prison contracts in South Africa. CCA has received a good deal of
publicity lately, but few of the articles about it have mentioned that the
largest shareholder of America's largest private-prison company is Sodexho
Alliance -- a food-service conglomerate whose corporate headquarters are in
Paris.
The Mega-Prison
About 200 inmates were in the A yard at New Folsom when I visited not
long ago. They were playing soft-ball and handball, sitting on rocks,
standing in small groups, smoking, laughing, jogging around the perimeter.
Three unarmed correctional officers casually kept an eye on things, like
elementary school teachers during recess. The yard was about 300 feet long and
250 feet wide, with more dirt than grass, and it was hot, baking hot. The heat
of the sun bounced off the gray concrete walls enclosing the yard. "These are
the sensitive guys," a correctional officer told me, describing the men in
Facility A. Most of them had killed, raped, committed armed robberies, or
misbehaved at other prisons, but now they were trying to stay out of trouble.
Some were former gang members; some were lifers because of a third strike; some
were getting too old for prison violence; some were in protective custody
because of their celebrity, their snitching, or their previous occupation. A
few of the inmates on the yard were former police officers. As word spread that
I was a journalist, groups of inmates followed me and politely approached,
eager to talk. Lieutenant Billy Mayfield, New Folsom's press officer,
graciously kept his distance, allowing the prisoners to speak freely.
"I shouldn't be here" was a phrase I heard often, followed by an impassioned
story about the unfairness of the system. I asked each inmate how many of the
other men in the yard deserved to be locked up in this prison, and the usual
response was "These guys? Man, you wouldn't believe some of these guys; at
least two thirds of them should be here." Behind the need to blame others for
their predicament and the refusal to accept responsibility, behind all the
denial, lay an enormous anger, one that seemed far more intense than the
typical inmate complaints about the food or the behavior of certain officers.
Shirtless, sweating, unshaven, covered in tattoos, one inmate after another
described the rage that was growing inside New Folsom. The weights had been
taken away; no more conjugal visits for inmates who lacked a parole date; not
enough help for the inmates who were crazy, really crazy; not enough drug
treatment, when the place was full of junkies; not enough to do -- a list of
grievances magnified by the overcrowding into something that felt volatile,
ready to go off with the slightest spark. As I stood in the yard hearing the
anger of the sensitive guys, the inmates in Facility C were locked in their
cells, because of a gang-related stabbing the previous week, and the inmates in
Facility B were being shot with pepper spray to break up a fight.
The acting warden at New Folsom when I visited, a woman named Suzan Hubbard,
began her career as a correctional officer at San Quentin nineteen years ago.
Although she has a degree in social work from the University of California at
Berkeley, Hubbard says that her real education took place at the "college of
San Quentin." She spent a decade at the prison during one of its most violent
and turbulent periods. In her years on the job two fellow staff members were
murdered. Hubbard learned how to develop a firm but fair relationship with
inmates, some of whom were on death row. She found that contrary to some
expectations, women were well suited for work in a maximum-security prison.
Communication skills were extremely important in such a charged environment;
inmates often felt less threatened by women, less likely to engage in a clash
of egos. Hubbard was the deputy warden at New Folsom on September 27, 1996,
when fights broke out in the B yard. At nine o'clock in the morning she was
standing beside her car in the prison parking lot, and she heard three shots
being fired somewhere inside New Folsom. Everyone in the parking lot froze,
waiting for the sound of more gunfire. After more shots were fired, Hubbard
hurried into the prison, made her way to the B yard, and found it in chaos.
A group of Latino gang members had launched an attack on a group of
African-American gang members, catching them by surprise and stabbing them with
homemade weapons. The fighting soon spread to the other inmates in the exercise
yard, who divided along racial lines. As many as 200 inmates were involved in
the riot. Correctional officers instructed everyone in the yard to get down;
they fired warning shots, rubber bullets, and then live rounds. When Hubbard
arrived at the yard, about a hundred inmates had dropped to the ground and
another hundred were still fighting. The captain in charge of the unit stood
among a group of inmates, telling them, "Sit down, get down, we'll take care of
this." Hubbard and the other officers circulated in the yard, calling prisoners
by name, telling them to get down. It took thirty minutes to quell the riot.
Twelve correctional officers were injured while trying to separate combatants.
Six inmates were stabbed, and five were shot. Victor Hugo Flores, an inmate
serving an eighteen-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter and attempted
murder, was killed by gunfire.
Hubbard finds working in the California penal system to be stressful but highly
rewarding. She tries to defuse tensions by talking and listening to the inmates
on the yards. She and her officers routinely place themselves at great risk.
Last year 2,583 staff members were assaulted by inmates in California.
Thousands of the inmates are HIV-positive; thousands more carry hepatitis C.
Officers have lately become the target of a new form of assault by inmates,
known as gassing. Being "gassed" means being struck by a cup or bag containing
feces and urine. The California prison system, especially its Level 4
facilities, is full of warring gangs -- members of the Crips, the Bloods, the
Fresno Bulldogs, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Nazi Lowriders, the Mexican Mafia,
and the Black Guerrilla Family, to name a few. In addition to the organized
violence, there are random acts of violence. On June 15 of last year a
correctional officer was attacked by an inmate in the infirmary at New Folsom.
The officer, Linda Lowery, was savagely beaten and kicked, receiving severe
head wounds. Her attacker was serving a four-year sentence for assaulting an
officer.
California's correctional officers are not always the victims when violence
occurs behind bars; in recent months they have been linked to several widely
publicized acts of brutality. At Pelican Bay State Prison at least one officer
conspired with inmates to arrange assaults on convicted child molesters. At
Corcoran State Prison officers allegedly staged "gladiator days," in which
rival gang members were encouraged to fight, staff members placed bets on the
outcome, and matches often ended with inmates being shot. As the FBI
investigates alleged abuses at Corcoran and allegations of an official
cover-up, correctional officers are feeling misrepresented and unfairly
maligned by the media -- only adding to the tension in California's prisons.
The level of violence in the California penal system is actually lower today
than it was a decade ago. But the rate of assaults among inmates has gradually
climbed since its low point, in 1991. Studies have linked double-bunking and
prison overcrowding with higher rates of stress-induced mental disorders,
higher rates of aggression, and higher rates of violence. In the state's Level
4 prisons almost every cell is now double-bunked. The fact that more bloodshed
has not occurred is a testament to the high-tech design of the new prisons and
the skills of their officers. Nevertheless, Cal Terhune, the director of the
California Department of Corrections, worries about how much more stress the
system can bear, and about how long it can go without another riot. "We're
sitting on a very volatile situation," Terhune says. "Every time the phone
rings here, I wonder ..."
Thirty years ago California was renowned for the liberalism of its
criminal-justice system. In 1968 an inmate bill of rights was signed into law
by Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. More than any other state,
California was dedicated to the rehabilitative ideal, to the belief that a
prison could take a criminal and "cure" him, set him on the right path.
California's prisons were notable for their many educational and vocational
programs and their group-therapy sessions. In those days every state in the
country had a system of indeterminate prison sentences. The legislature set the
maximum sentence for a crime, and judges and parole boards tried to make the
punishment fit the individual. California's system was the most indeterminate:
the sentence for a given offense might be anything from probation to life. The
broad range of potential sentences gave enormous power to the parole board,
known as the Adult Authority; a prisoner's release depended on its evaluation
of how well his "treatment" was proceeding. One person might serve ten months
and another person ten years for the same crime.
Although indeterminate sentencing had many flaws, one of its virtues was that
it gave the state a means of controlling the size of the prison population. If
prisons grew too full, the parole board could release inmates who no longer
seemed to pose a threat to public safety. Governor Reagan used the Adult
Authority to reduce the size of California's inmate population, giving
thousands of prisoners an early release and closing one of the state's prisons.
By the mid-1970s, however, the Adult Authority had come under attack from an
unusual coalition of liberals, prisoners, and conservative advocates of law and
order. Liberals thought that the Adult Authority discriminated against
minorities, making them serve longer sentences. Prisoners thought that it was
unfair; after all, they were still in prison. Conservatives thought that it was
too soft, allowing too many criminals back on the street too soon. And no one
put much faith in the rehabilitative effects of prison. In 1971 seventeen
inmates and seven staff members were killed in California prisons. The
following year thirty-five inmates and one staff member were killed.
California was one of the first states in the nation to get rid of
indeterminate sentencing. The state's new law required inmates to serve the
sentence handed down by the judge, with an allowance for "good time," which
might reduce a prison term by half. The law also amended the section of the
state's penal code that declared the ultimate goals of imprisonment: the word
"rehabilitation" was replaced by the word "punishment." In 1976 the bill was
endorsed and signed into law by a liberal Democrat, Governor Jerry Brown.
As liberalism gave way to demands for law and order, California judges began to
send a larger proportion of convicted felons to prison and to give longer
sentences. The inmate population started to grow. Sentencing decisions made at
the county level, by local prosecutors and judges, soon had a major impact on
the state budget, which covered the costs of incarceration. Tax cuts mandated
by Proposition 13 meant that county governments were strapped for funds and
could not maintain local jails properly or pay for community-based programs
that administered alternative sentences. Offenders who might once have been
sent to a local jail or a halfway house were now sent to a state prison.
California's criminal-justice system slowly but surely spun out of control. The
state legislature passed hundreds of bills that required tough new sentences,
but did not adequately provide for their funding. Judges sent people to prison
without giving any thought to where the state would house them. And the
Department of Corrections was left to handle the flood of new inmates, unable
to choose how many it would accept or how many it would let go.
In 1977 the inmate population of California was 19,600. Today it is 159,000.
After spending $5.2 billion on prison construction over the past fifteen years,
California now has not only the largest but also the most overcrowded prison
system in the United States. The state Department of Corrections estimates that
it will need to spend an additional $6.1 billion on prisons over the next
decade just to maintain the current level of overcrowding. And the state's
jails are even more overcrowded than its prisons. In 1996 more than 325,000
inmates were released early from California jails in order to make room for
offenders arrested for more-serious crimes. According to a report this year by
the state's Little Hoover Commission, in many counties offenders who are
convicted of a crime and given sentences of less than ninety days will not even
be sent to jail. The state's backlog of arrest warrants now stands at about 2.6
million -- the number of arrests that have not been made, the report says,
largely because there's no room in the jails. According to one official
estimate, counties will need to spend $2.4 billion over the next ten years to
build more jails -- again, simply to maintain the current level of
overcrowding.
The extraordinary demand for new prison and jail cells in California has
diverted funds from other segments of the criminal-justice system, creating a
vicious circle. The failure to spend enough on relatively inexpensive
sanctions, such as drug treatment and probation, has forced the state to
increase spending on prisons. Only a fifth of the felony convictions in
California now lead to a prison sentence. The remaining four fifths are usually
punished with a jail sentence, a term of probation, or both. But the jails have
no room, and the huge caseloads maintained by most probation officers often
render probation meaningless. An ideal caseload is about twenty-five to fifty
offenders; some probation officers in California today have a caseload of 3,000
offenders. More than half the state's offenders on probation will most likely
serve their entire term without ever meeting or even speaking with a probation
officer. Indeed, the only obligation many offenders on probation must now
fulfill is mailing a postcard that gives their home address.
California parole officers, too, are overwhelmed by their caseloads. The
state's inmate population is not only enormous but constantly changing. Last
year California sent about 140,000 people to prison -- and released about
132,000. On average, inmates spend two and a half years behind bars, and then
serve a term of one to three years on parole. During the 1970s each parole
agent handled about forty-five parolees; today each agent handles about twice
that number. The money that the state has saved by not hiring enough new parole
agents is insignificant compared with the expense of sending parole violators
back to prison.
About half the California prisoners released on parole are illiterate. About 85
percent are substance abusers. Under the terms of their parole, they are
subjected to periodic drug tests. But they are rarely offered any opportunity
to get drug treatment. Of the approximately 130,000 substance abusers in
California's prisons, only 3,000 are receiving treatment behind bars. Only
8,000 are enrolled in any kind of pre-release program to help them cope with
life on the outside. Violent offenders, who need such programs most of all, are
usually ineligible for them. Roughly 124,000 inmates are simply released from
prison each year in California, given nothing more than $200 and a bus ticket
back to the county where they were convicted. At least 1,200 inmates every year
go from a secure housing unit at a Level 4 prison -- an isolation unit, designed
to hold the most violent and dangerous inmates in the system -- right onto the
street. One day these predatory inmates are locked in their cells for
twenty-three hours at a time and fed all their meals through a slot in the
door, and the next day they're out of prison, riding a bus home.
Almost two thirds of the people sent to prison in California last year were
parole violators. Of the roughly 80,000 parole violators returned to prison,
about 60,000 had committed a technical violation, such as failing a drug test;
about 15,000 had committed a property or a drug crime; and about 3,000 had
committed a violent crime, frequently a robbery to buy drugs. The gigantic
prison system that California has built at such great expense has essentially
become a revolving door for poor, highly dysfunctional, and often illiterate
drug abusers. They go in, they get out, they get sent back, and every year
there are more. The typical offender being sent to prison in California today
has five prior felony convictions.
The California legislature has not authorized a new bond issue for prison
construction since 1992, deadlocked over the cost. Meanwhile, the state's
"Three Strikes, You're Out" law has been steadily filling prison cells with
long-term inmates. Don Novey, the head of the California Correctional Peace
Officers Association (CCPOA), helped to gain passage of the law. He now worries
that if California's prison system becomes much more overcrowded, a federal
judge may order a large-scale release of inmates. Novey has proposed keeping
some nonviolent offenders out of prison, allowing judges to give them suspended
sentences and a term of probation instead. He has also advocated a way to save
money while expanding the penal system:build "mega-prisons." California already
builds and operates the biggest prisons in the United States. A number of
California prisons now hold more than 6,000 inmates -- about sixtimes the
nationwide average. The mega-prisons proposed by the CCPOA would house up to
20,000 inmates. A few new mega-prisons, Novey says, could satisfy California's
demand for new cells into the next century.
Correctional officials see prison overcrowding as grounds for worry about
potential riots, bloodshed, and court orders; others see opportunity. "It has
become clear over the past several months," Doctor R. Crants said earlier this
year, "that California is one of the most promising markets CCA has, with a
burgeoning need for secure, cost-effective prison beds at all levels of
government." In order to get a foothold in that market, CCA announced it would
build three prisons in California entirely on spec -- that is, without any
contract to fill them. "If you build it in the right place," a CCA executive
told The Wall Street Journal, "the prisoners will come." Crants boasted
to the Tennessean that California's private-prison industry will be
dominated by "CCA alone." Executives at Wackenhut Corrections think otherwise.
Wackenhut already houses almost 2,000 of California's minimum-security inmates
at facilities in the state. The legislature has recently adopted plans to house
an additional 2,000 minimum-security inmates in private prisons. Wackenhut and
CCA have opened offices in Sacramento and hired expensive lobbyists. The CCPOA
vows to fight hard against the private-prison companies and their anti-union
tactics. "They can build whatever prisons they want," Don Novey says. "But the
hell if they're going to run them." One of the new CCA prisons is rising in the
Mojave Desert outside California City, at a cost of about $100 million. The
company is gambling that cheap, empty prison beds will prove irresistible to
California lawmakers. The new CCA facility promises to be a boon to California
City once the inmates start arriving. The town has been hit hard by layoffs at
Edwards Air Force Base, which is nearby. Mayor Larry Adams, asked why he wanted
a prison, said, "We're a desperate city."
Factories for Crime
A Democracy in America is one
of the most famous books ever written about the politics and
culture of the United States. The original purpose of Tocqueville's 1831
journey to this country is less well known. He came to tour its prisons on
behalf of the French government. The United States at the time was renowned in
Europe for having created a whole new social institution: the penitentiary. In
New York and Pennsylvania prisons were being designed not to punish inmates but
to reform them. Solitary confinement, silence, and hard work were imposed in
order to encourage spiritual and moral change. At some penitentiaries officials
placed hoods over the heads of newcomers to isolate them from other inmates.
After visiting American prisons Tocqueville and his traveling companion,
Gustave de Beaumont, wrote that social reformers in the United States had been
swept up in "the monomania of the penitentiary system," convinced that prisons
were "a remedy for all the evils of society."
The historian David J. Rothman, author of The Discovery of the Asylum
(1971), has noted one of the ironies of America's early-nineteenth-century
fondness for prisons. The idea of the penitentiary took hold at the height of
Jacksonian democracy, when freedom and the spirit of the common man were being
widely celebrated. "At the very moment that Americans began to pride themselves
on the openness of their society, when the boundless frontier became the symbol
of opportunity and equality," Rothman observes, "notions of total isolation,
unquestioned obedience, and severe discipline became the hallmarks of the
captive society." More than a century and a half later political rhetoric about
small government and the virtues of the free market is being accompanied by an
eagerness to deny others their freedom. The hoods now placed on inmates in the
isolation units at maximum-security prisons are not intended to rehabilitate.
They are designed to protect correctional officers from being bitten or spat
upon.
The standard justification for today's prisons is that they prevent crime. The
rate of violent crime in the United States has indeed been declining since
1991. The political scientist James Q. Wilson, among many others, believes that
the recent rise in the nation's incarceration rate has been directly
responsible for the decrease in violent crime. Although the validity of the
theory seems obvious (murderers and rapists who are behind bars can no longer
kill and rape ordinary citizens), it is difficult to prove. Michael Tonry, a
professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, is an expert
on international sentencing policies and an advocate of alternative punishments
for nonviolent offenders. He acknowledges that the imprisonment of almost two
million Americans has prevented some crimes from being committed. "You could
choose another two million Americans at random and lock them up," Tonry says,
"and that would reduce the number of crimes too." But demographics and larger
cultural trends may be responsible for most of the decline in violent crime.
Over the past decade Canada's incarceration rate has risen only slightly.
Nevertheless, the rate of violent crime in Canada has been falling since 1991.
Last year the homicide rate fell by nine percent. The Canadian murder rate has
now reached its lowest level since 1969.
Christopher Stone, the head of New York's Vera Institute of Justice, believes
that prisons can be "factories for crime." The average inmate in the United
States spends only two years in prison. What happens during that time behind
bars may affect how he or she will behave upon release. The lesson being taught
in most American prisons -- where violence, extortion, and rape have long been
routine -- is that the strong will always rule the weak. Inmates who display the
slightest hint of vulnerability quickly become prey. During the 1950s and 1960s
prison gangs were formed in California and Illinois as a means of
self-protection. Those gangs have now spread nationwide. The Mexican Mafia and
the Aryan Brotherhood have gained power in Texas prisons. The Gangsta Killer
Bloods and the Sex Money Murder Bloods have emerged in New York prisons.
America's prisons now serve as networking and recruiting centers for gang
members. The differences between street gangs and prison gangs have become less
distinct. The leaders of prison gangs increasingly direct illegal activity both
inside and outside. A 1996 investigation by the Chicago Tribune found that
gangs had gained extraordinary control over the state prisons in Illinois:
formal classes at the Stateville prison law library had taught the history and
rules of the Maniac Latin Disciples; a leader of the Gangster Disciples had at
various times kept cellular phones, a color television, a stereo, a Nintendo
Game Boy, a portable washing machine, and up to a hundred pounds of marijuana
in his cell. Many of the customs, slang, and tattoos long associated with
prison gangs have become fashionable among young people. In cities throughout
America, the culture of the prisons is rapidly becoming the culture of the
streets.
The spirit of every age is manifest in its public works, in the great
construction projects that leave an enduring mark on the landscape. During the
early years of this century the Panama Canal became President Theodore
Roosevelt's legacy, a physical expression of his imperial yearnings. The New
Deal faith in government activism left behind huge dams and bridges, post
offices decorated with murals, power lines that finally brought electricity to
rural America. The interstate highway system fulfilled dreams of the Eisenhower
era, spreading suburbia far and wide; urban housing projects for the poor were
later built in the hopes of creating a Great Society.
"The era of big government is over," President Bill Clinton declared in
1996 -- an assertion that has proved false in at least one respect. A recent
issue of "Construction Report," a monthly newsletter published by
Correctional Building News, provides details of the nation's latest
public works: a 3,100-bed jail in Harris County, Texas; a 500-bed
medium-security prison in Redgranite, Wisconsin; a 130-bed minimum-security
facility in Oakland County, Michigan; two 200-bed housing pods at the Fort
Dodge Correctional Facility, in Iowa; a 350-bed juvenile correctional facility
in Pendleton, Indiana; and dozens more. The newsletter includes the telephone
numbers of project managers, so that prison-supply companies can call and make
bids. All across the country new cellblocks rise. And every one of them, every
brand-new prison, becomes another lasting monument, concrete and ringed with
deadly razor wire, to the fear and greed and political cowardice that now
pervade American society.
Eric Schlosser is a correspondent of The
Atlantic. His article "A Grief Like No Other," about the families of murder
victims, was The Atlantic's cover story for September, 1997.