What are prisons for? To reform criminals, replied of the 77% of nation's Americans in "correctional" a recent Harris Poll. But 80% of the nation's " correctional;" employees merely guard 426,000 inmates in a hodgepodge of archaic institutions that range from adequate to appalling. Only 20% of the coun try's correctors work at rehabilitation. And 30% of all released offenders (75% in some areas) are reimprisofied within five years, often for worse crimes.
What eludes U.S. penology (from the Latin poena, meaning pain) is the basic recipe of effective punishment: speedy, inescapable prosecution, a fair chance for a fresh start, and state-upheld values that offenders can reasonably acknowledge as superior to their own. For one thing, 77% of reported U.S. crimes are never solved; many are never even reported. Thus, most caught criminals see their problem as bad luck rather than bad character. Indeed, such are the human mind's defenses that the guilty often feel in nocent. Dostoevsky astutely depicts a would-be murderer viewing his act as "not a crime."
All the more resistant is the typical U.S. offender: a failed male youth who wears the outcast labels of slum dweller, minority-group member, school dropout, unsuccessful employee and law violator. Stripped of selfesteem, this loser compensates by hating and hurting life's winners. And the U.S. criminal-justice system all too often reinforces his contempt for society's values. If the suspect cannot afford a skilled lawyer, he is pressured to plead guilty without a trial. For the same crime, different judges hand out wildly disparate sentences.
Perhaps the most appalling aspect of all this is the fact that the number of crimes is increasing because the number of young people is growing, and they commit most crimes. Viewing this situation objectively leads to two basic conclu sions. First, the U.S. is now spending $1 billion a year for corrections in ways that can only increase crime. Second, a dramatically different approach can decrease it — for the same money.
Barriers to Reform
The notion that imprisonment corrects criminals is a surprisingly recent idea. Before the 18th century, prisons were mainly used not to punish but to detain the accused or hostages—the debtor until he paid, for example. To combat crime, Europeans castrated rapists, cut off thieves' hands, tore out perjurers' tongues. England boasted 200 hanging offenses. When crime still flourished, reformers argued that overkill punishment is no deterrent. In 1786, the Philadelphia Quakers established incarceration as a humane alternative. Seeking penitence (source of "penitentiary"), the Quakers locked convicts in solitary cells until death or release. So many died or went insane that in 1825 New York's Auburn Prison introduced hard labor—in utter silence. Until quite recently, the U.S. relied almost entirely on the spirit-breaking Auburn system of shaved heads, lock-step marching and degrading toil in huge, costly, isolated cages that soothed the public's fear of escapes.