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Some critics argue that many of the new ideas still fail to solve the criminal's basic problem: his firm belief that society is wrong, not he. As critics see it, even the best prison is still a totalitarian society that spurs human resistance and reinforces the criminal's cynicism. In this view, the solution is getting criminals to reform themselves in the process of reforming other criminals. This approach has worked wonders in New Jersey with groups of 20 delinquent boys housed at Highfields, the old Lindbergh mansion. After working at daytime jobs, the boys spend evenings listening to a selected boy's woes—and then deflating his rationalizations. Nonviolence is enforced by an adult sitting quietly outside the circle; but things get rough, for no boy leaves Highfields until he has proved to both his peers' and the adult's satisfaction that he has mastered his hang-ups enough to attain a very practical goal—avoiding future arrest.
In 1964, North Carolina courageously put young felons into an open prison camp staffed entirely by group-therapy veterans—recently paroled California convicts. It worked, until the legislature nervously stopped the money. (The head parolee later became a professional penologist.) Several states profitably rely on Author Bill Sands (My Shadow Ran Fast), a reformed California armed robber, whose Seven Step Foundation sends ex-convicts into prisons to counsel inmates and runs "freedom houses" to help re-leasees. Of 5,000 Seventh Step graduates so far, only 10% have returned to prison. An ex-New York prisoner named Hiawatha Burris has carved a new career persuading reluctant employers to hire ex-cons. With federal funds, Burris started Washington's Bonabond, a convict-run agency that has bonded and guided 441 men in new jobs. Bonabond has never had to pay off. Only 7% of its charges have been rearrested, none for crimes against their employers. Some employers now skip the bond and just take Bonabond's word.
"We might feel that in prison we've paid our debt," says Burris, "but we know the community doesn't think so. Doing time is not enough—we have to give back to the community." And that may be the most profound point. The goal of crime prevention can be reached partly by attacks on crime-breeding social conditions, partly by creating more efficient police and courts. But also vital is a new concept of mutual reconciliation between convict and community: the outcast must be allowed to earn his way back and thereby learn to believe in himself.
Toward Self-Respect
Can prisons be abolished? Not quite: perhaps 15% of inmates are dangerous or unreformable. But Attorney General Ramsey Clark, for one, estimates that 50% of today's inmates do not belong in prison; removing them would sharply improve attention to the rest. And caging must go. It is scandalous that in the U.S. only about 2% of all prison inmates are now being exposed to any kind of reform-oriented innovation.