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The penal system is hard to rationalize on practical grounds and even harder to defend on moral ones. Prisons foster inhumanity, brutality and violence. Beatings, stabbings, rape—all are commonplace. Inmates murder inmates in U.S. prisons at the rate of about 100 a year. Wretched conditions just about everywhere have so persisted that the prison exposé has long been a hardy perennial of popular journalism. A voluminous genre of literature and drama has grown up around a singular theme of prison rebellions. Prison evils have been documented in thousands of articles, hundreds of books and scores of legislative reports, not to mention innumerable recapitulations by local, state, national and international investigative groups. The tale of Attica's prisoner mutiny and massacre nine years ago, though tragic because of its cost of 43 lives, was only a spit in the dark ocean of the prison chronicle.
It is quite a saga, a tale of horrors seeping forth from a real-life phantasmagoria. Thomas Murton writes of Arkansas' Tucker State Prison Farm as it was before he was brought in for a year as a reform superintendent in 1967: "Discipline was routinely enforced by flogging, beating with clubs, inserting of needles under fingernails, crushing of testicles with pliers, and the last word in torture devices: the 'Tucker telephone,' an instrument used to send an electric current through genitals." In Jail: The Ultimate Ghetto, Ronald Goldfarb records so many atrocities of prison life that the reader is scarcely surprised to learn that in the District of Columbia jail a young white antiwar protester of the 1960s was raped dozens of times by blacks. In a 75-page opinion, Federal Judge John L. Kane Jr. last December held that conditions in Colorado's Old Max prison were so primitive and confining that they were bound to damage the minds of the inmates.
The saga grows all the time. Last year Illinois Corrections Director Gayle Franzen had to mount a shakedown like a military maneuver to wrest control of Stateville Correctional Center from the inmate gangs who utterly ran the place. Says Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz: "One of the major issues on the prison-reform agenda is how to get the prisons back in the hands of the correction people. Too many prisons are in the hands of inmates." Far too many of the abominations associated with prisons turn out to be not flukes but widespread conditions.
Shabby penal operations are so prevalent, in fact, that in the past decade judges have found that prisons in 15 states were bad enough to be declared unconstitutional. Tennessee, Maryland, Rhode Island—these only begin the list. Suits demanding improvement have been filed in 15 other states, and with every chance of success. Court-ordered upgradings are to be welcomed and have already forced the betterment of prisons in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. But this method of progress is slow and not always effective. In most instances, too, it only raises conditions from subhuman to minimally lawful.