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The truth about prisons is something else. Some part of that truth may not be subject to change; so long as prisons are cages for concentrations of violent people, a tendency to explosive and often bloody behavior is to be expected. But the point is that prisons do not do anything very well. They are capable of keeping dangerous people off society's back, but, given parole, probation and other practices of the larger justice system, they do not really do this effectively. They do not even carry out their primary philosophical mission—punishment—in an acceptable way. Society sends offenders to the pen to be punished by the loss of liberty and the submission to harsh discipline. In reality, the prison-bound convict faces not only the officially mandated penalty but grievous mental and physical abuse at the hands of the hardened inmates who are the de facto rulers of life on the inside. Prison officials cannot protect prisoners from prisoners. Rape and brutal hazing are a common destiny for weaker convicts—punishment no court has yet ordered.
Prisons may even add to, instead of subtract from, the total criminality in society. The assumption that they deter crime, though widely preached by politicians and believed by too many of their constituents, is no longer persuasive to most experts. Says President Thomas Reppetto of New York City's Citizens Crime Commission: "Given the present operation of the criminal-justice system, the prospect of imprisonment is too remote to seem a real deterrent." The point is underscored by the fact that the biggest part of the prison population consists of recidivists. Some repeaters were obviously not deterred by any fear of doing time, even though they had personally suffered the fate before. Moreover, all experts agree that the ever high U.S. crime rate has never been provably influenced by incarceration policy, nor by any of the fashions in sentencing, parole or probation. Experts find no correlation between crime rates and incarceration rates.
The notion that people who go to prison return to society as nicer citizens has long since become a bitter laugh. Forced rehabilitation, after a good try, has been an unmitigated flop. The penal system's success at giving convicts useful social vocations has been rare at best. The fact is that prisons generally remain what they have been called since the last century: seminaries for crime. The prison drill in most cases only hardens an inmate's antisocial tendencies and reinforces his motive to act on them.