In the endless effort to cope with one of the world's higher crime rates, the U.S. has long sent more people to prison for longer terms than any other industrialized Western nation except South Africa. Yet the country's penal institutions add up to a national disgrace. Riotous prison disorders have become so common that it was only second-rate news last March when a guard was wounded and several others were taken hostage during a mutiny of 100 or so inmates in a Newark, N.J., jail. In fact, the event seemed trivial only because it came so soon after the epic mayhem that took 33 lives in February at the New Mexico State Penitentiary near Santa Fe. That was a hard act to follow. But such is the condition of prisons, overcrowded and festering everywhere, that penal officials admit that other spectacular explosions could come at any time—and will, sooner or later. The national disgrace, in short, has grown into a combustible scandal.
It is also a very expensive scandal. American governments, from the federal level down, spend some $4 billion a year operating 4,700 penal institutions of all kinds. The cost of housing an inmate runs from less than $7,000 a year in Arkansas through $13,000 in California to more than $26,000 in the jail system of New York City. Other huge chunks of money go for the constant expansion of the system, with some $7 billion in construction now planned or contemplated. At that, the growth of prison plants is not expected to keep up with their population. Between 1968 and 1978 the number of inmates in state and federal prisons grew by two-thirds, to 307,000, and cell space almost everywhere is now scarce. Population exceeds decent (and safe) capacity by 58%.
Given the conditions in prisons, and, just as important, the dubious results that flow from them, it is clearly time to ask some cold-blooded questions about the future of the penitentiary. Does it make more sense, at $50,000 a cell, to cope with overcrowding by adding space? Or should the problem be dealt with by finding alternative penalties for nondangerous offenders, leaving prisons to do the only thing they have ever done well: confine the truly dangerous?
The appalling truths about penitentiaries have been exposed so often and thoroughly that only one real mystery is left. Why does society let these institutions persist as they are? The country's continual resistance to substantial prison reform is not easy to understand. Present building plans alone prove that stinginess does not really explain it. Real reform might save money, but it is as though the public remains somehow blind to the situation. Prison, after all, has become a symbol of society's stern feelings against crime. And most Americans probably carry in mind not an actual institution but a symbolic prison, a mythical place whose forbidding walls somehow protect society from the felons inside while training them for a return to society, a place whose very existence deters people on the outside from committing crimes. Indeed, it is exactly this myth that has led to the development of the U.S. prison system. If the myth is still widely believed, the fact, though deplorable, at least offers an added reason why prison reform comes so hard.