(4 of 5)
Real reform is going to take more, but the resistance to it remains formidable despite glaring proof of the need. The Attica tragedy, for instance, blew up a blizzard of promised changes. Yet a U.N. human rights study group that inspected prisons last year reported that penal administrators seemed to have learned nothing at all from Attica. Did February's Santa Fe explosion produce new resolve? The only notable plan to emerge in the wake of that violence has been New Mexico's decision to build a new maximum-security prison.
New construction has little to do with prison reform. The reform movement today, in fact, generally favors a moratorium on the building of new prisons. Its reasoning is simple. The only sure thing about an added facility is that it will be filled —and given society's policies, will soon enough become just another hellhole. President Milton Rector of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency even contends that if space is "readily available," the rates of incarceration tend to go up even though serious crime may be declining.
Penal institutions, true enough, have improved in some ways over the years. The chain gangs of yore are gone. In some systems, bare-bones medical services have been expanded to include at least token psychological care. Reform movements still trudge along, and some of their programs are promising, at least in intent. The intent is, or ought to be, to remedy overcrowding in prisons not by building more cells but by sending nondangerous offenders into community-based programs.
Alternative punishment is the vogue reform label for such plans. In the past few years they have been experimentally launched in many states, among them Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma and Minnesota. The idea is to penalize offenders by compelling them to make restitution to their victims and the community that they have offended. Mississippi, for example, has set up four restitution centers into which thieves have been released from prisons. They pay the state a nominal $5 a day for room and board while they work to pay back the people they stole from. Success? Says State Corrections Commissioner John Watkins: "We hope ultimately that almost all property offenders will start off at these institutions."
Critics of alternative punishment may imagine that it is not truly punitive. But they underrate the pain of being utterly in the power of the state and closely restricted in personal activity. Under such circumstances, there is a decisive loss of liberty. Perhaps society's main gain from alternative punishment is the elimination of the risk of nondangerous offenders being turned vicious by sheer exposure to prison life. The truth is that a great many convicts would offer no violent risk to society if they were at large. Perhaps half of all prisoners are clearly dangerous, though various experts would argue that the percentage is greater or smaller. In any case, it is plain that a significant number could be set free without endangering the public. To find other ways to punish and treat such convicts would at once ease the problem of overcrowding and alleviate a great many pernicious problems related to it.