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The caging syndrome has crippled U.S. penology in every way. Because forbidding forts refuse to crumble (25 prisons are more than 100 years old), there is often no way to separate tractable from intractable men—the preliminary step toward rehabilitation. Of course barriers to reform go far beyond the limitations of buildings. It is ironic that only in Mississippi are married convicts allowed conjugal visits with their wives; sexual deprivation in other American prisons incites riots, mental illness and homosexuality. By using strong inmates to control the weak, authoritarian officials create an inmate culture that forces prisoners to "do your own time"—trust no one, freeze your mind, be indifferent. Roughly 80% of adult inmates need psychiatric help. But illtrained, ill-paid guards are so concerned with security that treatment staffs can barely function. All American prisons have onl$ 150 full-time psychiatrists, half of them in federal institutions, which hold only 5% of all prisoners.
Even humane prison officials are still generally paying mere lip service to "individualized treatment"—the new ideal of curing each prisoner's hang-ups and converting society's misfits to crime-free lives. In progressive prisons, to be sure, guards are taught to break up the inmate culture by friendly communication; inmates are classified in graded groups, promoted for good conduct and hustled toward pa role. Indeed, the average stay today is 21 months; the average lifer exits in 20 years.
Yet all this usually amounts to what Penologist Howard Gill calls "birdshot penology." All the bands, baseball, radios and rodeos cannot gloss the fact that real rehabilitation is rare. Caging still outranks curing; short funds dilute short-stay effectiveness. And prison job-training is a scandal. Federal prisons do well; yet only 17% of released federal inmates find jobs related to their prison work. Most state prisoners get no usable training because business and unions have rammed through laws preventing competition by prison industries. At least one-third of all inmates simply keep the prison clean—or do nothing.
Building Community Bases
To attack the basic prison problem — isolation from society the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice advocates a drastic shift to "community-based corrections." Two-thirds of all offenders are already being supervised outside the walls, on probation or parole. But probation is still widely regarded as clemency rather than treatment; only one-third of American courts have reasonably adequate probation staffs. Burdened with over 100 cases apiece, plus pre-sentence reports for judges, many probation officers can give offenders only ten or 15 minutes, once or twice a month. To cut average caseloads to 35 per officer, the commission urges a quick and major staff increase — sevenfold in misdemeanor cases, which now too often turn jail graduates into prison felons.