THE CRAZE OF INCARCERATION

More Americans went to prison or jail during the eight years of the Clinton
Administration than during any other. In total, 673,000 people were
sentenced to prison or jail terms during Clinton's Presidency, and our
national incarceration rates are now officially the highest in the world.
Altogether, two million Americans are currently behind bars. Another 4.5
million are on probation and parole. Meanwhile, crime rates have remained
relatively static-or have decreased in some categories-since 1980.

The three books under review address the incarceration craze and attempt to
answer several questions about it: Just how deeply wedded has our society
become to the idea of imprisonment as a solution to crime? Why? With what
consequences? And what can be done differently?

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph
T. Hallinan sets out to understand, both in economic and in human terms,
what's behind the prison boom. Going up the River, a riveting narrative
work, is the culmination of four years of Hallinan's travels across the
country talking with prisoners, correctional officers, government
officials, and residents of rural prison towns.

Much of Hallinan's itinerant account centers on George W. Bush's home
state. "Texas is to the prison culture of the 1990s what California was to
the youth culture of the 1960s: It's where it's happening," writes
Hallinan. " Texas has more prisons than any state in the country and
imprisons more of its people, per capita, than any state except Louisiana."

He begins in Beeville, Texas, a town of 13,000 with an additional
population of 7,200 inmates--a startling ration, which, the author points
out, is nearly unsurpassed in the United States. Two prisons, McConnell
Unit and Garza Unit, are already housed here. Still, the community is eager
for more.

As Hallinan soon finds out this eagerness stems from the windfall that the
prisons have provided to a town left gasping for revenue in the aftermath
of a naval base closure. Much to the town's relief, the McConnell and Garza
Units have already brought 1,500 permanent jobs to the community and a
combined payroll of $27 million. A correctional officer at McConnell Unit
makes a salary of more than $24,000 a year in a county, writes Hallinan,
"where the per capita income is $8,600 a year and one of every four people
lives in poverty."

Crime, as Hallinan aptly notes, is nearly nonexistent in Beeville, apart
from the time a lawnmower was stolen from an unfenced yard. The sheer
absence of serious crime in a community that has reinvented itself as one
of Texas's prison hubs leads Hallinan to ponder how essential it is for
Beeville's residents to convince themselves of the imminent likelihood of
criminal behavior.

"With crime, that's something you read about every day in your community,"
insists Brad Arvin, the head of the Beeville redevelopment council. "And
that's a clear and present danger-just as near as your morning paper. You
don't have to convince the public there's a crime problem. That's why you
have prison construction."

"I thought the people of Beeville had come to believe about crime in the
1990s what Americans had believed about communism in the 1950s," muses
Hallinan, "that its threat lurked everywhere at all times, and could be
stemmed only by the creation of a vast military-industrial complex-except
that now it was a prison-industrial complex."

America's prison industry employs more than 413,000 people, having more
than doubled in the last twenty years. But prison employees are only part
of the larger economic picture, as Hallinan witnesses firsthand when he
attends an annual meeting of the American Correctional Association (the
largest private correctional organization in the country) in Cincinnati.
Lining the halls of the convention center are booths hawking prison goods
ranging from prefabricated cells to grooming products specifically geared
for African American inmates (a lucrative business, considering that, for
the first time in U.S. history, fully half the nation's prisoners are
African Americans).

At the meeting, a company owner is trying to entice prison guards to
consider buying his new puncture-- resistant vest. Beneath the vest,
Hallinan explains, is a block of gelatin-- designed to simulate human
innards-and a $100 bill. In this surreal demonstration, guards are invited
to try to stab through the vest with an ice pick to win the cash prize.

"With more than 1.3 million people behind bars in this country, companies
like his are scrambling to cash in on a market estimated to be worth $37.8
billion a year, one that is bigger than major league baseball, bigger than
the porn industry," writes Hallinan.

With more than 70,000 inmates, private prison corporations have rushed to
grab a slice of that multi-- billion dollar pie. In 1980, not a single
private prison or jail operated in the United States. By the end of 1995,
there were 104. Yet Hallinan finds that many private prisons are not more
cost-effective than state-run facilities, as they had originally been
touted. Often, the owners rely on political connections to help win
contracts, using prisoners to make executives and investors wealthy.

"The appearance of the prison millionaire marked a turning point in
American penology," Hallinan writes. "Never before had it been possible in
this country to become rich by incarcerating other people. Now, it is
commonplace. . . . The consequence of this change has been subtle but
profound.... Public prisons are now places where the ambitious can hone
their financial skills before moving on to the really big money in the
private sector."

Much of the remainder of Hallinan's painstakingly researched book revolves
around the often barbaric treatment of prisoners, the inhumanity of maximum
security facilities and security housing units, and an account of the
evolution of America's prison system.

Hallinan brings his narrative to an appropriate close at the festive
inauguration of one of Virginia's new supermax facilities, Wallens Ridge,
where he finds "the perfectly evolved American prison": "It was both
lavishly expensive and needlessly remote, built not because it was needed
but because it was wanted-by politicians who thought it would bring them
votes, by voters who hoped it would bring them jobs, and by a corrections
establishment that no longer believed in correction."

America's frenzied rate of incarceration does nothing to further the
oncevalued goal of prisoner rehabilitation, Hallinan concludes. Prison has
simply become "pointlessly punitive."

The barbarism of the American prison system comes through, loudly in the
new anthology Prison Masculinities. Edited by D'Youville College social
sciences professor Don Sabo, psychiatrist Terry A. Kupers, and
prisoner/writer Willie London, Prison Masculinities brings together forty
thought-provoking essays and poems written by prisoners, scholars, and
activists.

[IMAGE ILLUSTRATION]

As the title suggests, this impressive collection examines the role of
prison in reproducing destructive forms of masculinity.

In his essay, "Crimes, Politics, and Community Since the 1990s," Marc Mauer
of the Sentencing Project notes that 94 percent of the nation's prisoners
are men, most of them young. The prisons that house them rest on what the
editors call the four cornerstones of patriarchal institutions:
homosociality, sex segregation, hierarchy, and violence.

Within this framework, the editors offer valuable and disturbing insight
into the "prison code" as it exists nearly universally in American male
prisons: Never admit fear. Do not snitch. Act tough. Do not help
authorities. Do not trust anyone. Always be ready to fight. It is a code
shared by prisoners and guards alike.

Many poems and essays in Prison Masculinities delve into the alarmingly
prevalent phenomenon of prison rape. In Terry A. Kupers's "Rape and the
Prison Code" and Stephen Donaldson's "A Million Jockers, Punks, and
Queens," the essays explore, with absolute frankness, the harsh reality of
sexual relations and domination within men's prisons, which often relegates
men into roles of jockeys (dominant men), punks (the largely heterosexual
men pressed into sexual servitude), and queens (a small and highly
desirable class of effeminate gays).

Essays such as these do not make for easy or casual reading; the horror of
sexual violence behind prison walls is communicated with disturbing detail.
But the passages are delivered with intelligence and honesty, with
important insights for the reader willing to trudge through the heavy material.

Other notable contributions include Christian Parentis "Rehabilitating
Prison Labor" and Mumia Abu-Jamal's "Caged and Celibate."

Angela Davis's sagacious analysis in her essay, "Race, Gender, and Prison
History," is one of the book's highlights. She argues that the
disproportionate incarceration of African Americans (especially in supermax
facilities) is a kind of bizarre succession to slavery. Davis calls for
cooperative work between anti-racist and prison activists, arguing that the
two movements are-or should be-inseparable.

The book's most powerful personal essay comes from Jarvis Masters, a
prisoner at San Quentin who sets out to talk to his fellow inmates about
child abuse in a piece entitled "Scars."

"Secretly, we all like it here," he writes of muscular, weight-lifting
prisoners who willingly show him their scars and talk about their violent
origins without ever uttering the words "child abuse." "This place welcomes
a man who is full of rage and violence. Here he is not abnormal or
perceived as different. Here rage is nothing new, and for men scarred by
child abuse and violent lives, the prison is an extension of inner life. We
learn to abuse and reabuse ourselves by moving in and out of places like
San Quentin."

In John Raymond Cook's Asphalt Justice, the author uses his own experiences
as a psychologist working in the criminal justice system to launch into an
impassioned, critical, and solution-oriented discussion.

Cook, now a professor of psychology at Mars Hill College in North Carolina,
sets out to establish that the rapid expansion of the prison system is
"deleterious to the long-term welfare of society." Current modes of
punishment, he explains, fail to take into account basic psychological
understandings of how people change their behavior for the better.

"While punishment may have its place in the criminal justice system, it is
a useless and counterproductive method when used all alone," he writes.
"Attempting to 'get tough' is a poorly considered, macho effort that plays
the game on the criminals' home turf."

To many of these men, abuse and toughness are just an integral part of the
everyday game of staying alive. The challenge, Cook explains, is to develop
an approach that provides the resources for prisoners to develop
introspection and new skills with which to relate to the world around them,
and not simply to reinforce or magnify old patterns and hatreds.

As in Hallinan's Going up the River, Cook devotes a significant portion of
Asphalt Justice to highlighting the economic incentives that have helped
fuel America's prison boom and to documenting the violations of human and
civil liberties that regularly occur behind bars.

Those institutions, stresses Cook, have been designed with a particular
criminal element in mind: the 5 percent of the prison population charged
with violent crimes. To subject the rest to an institution designed for
prisoners with a propensity for violence is cruel and unjust, he charges.

Cook is especially outraged at the treatment of juveniles who commit
crimes. Most states, he points out, now have laws allowing teens to be
tried as adults, a punitive phenomenon that demonstrates a lack of basic
understanding about adolescent psychology. For teens, normal confusion
concerning self-image and identity can be negatively impacted by familial
and environmental factors and can lead juveniles down a dangerous and
"criminal" road. But such factors do not, Cook insists, turn a
fourteen-year-old child into an adult, no matter how heinous his crime.

"Blaming children for the ills of society is like blaming the horses when
the barn burns down," he writes. "Children did not make this world; they
inherited it. Forcing children to live in adult jails and prisons will
almost assuredly not improve the future of our society."

Cook moves forward with his vision of what a restructuring of the U.S.
criminal justice system would entail. As an alternative to incarceration,
he emphasizes the effectiveness of pretrial diversion programs, the
potential benefits of drug legalization and the widespread availability of
drug treatment, restrictions on the ownership of handguns, improved
literacy rates, employment opportunities, education, social welfare, and
health care services.

If punishment must take the form of incarceration, Cook argues, persons
facing imprisonment should be required to undergo an extensive evaluation
with the aim of pinpointing the causes that underlie their criminal
behavior. Criteria could then be established to demonstrate whether or not
a person is able to address those underlying issues while in prison.

Accordingly, Cook proposes a multitiered system to encourage prosocial
behavior. At the first and lowest level, prisoners would have few
privileges (but humane treatment); at the second level, they would have the
ability to direct their own schedules and participate in group activities;
at the third, increased privileges including additional visitation and
phone time would be allowed; and, at the fourth, prisoners could enjoy the
widest range of activities, including daily visitation, increased freedom
of movement, and conjugal visits.

Actual release, suggests Cook, would be based on the completion of goals
outlined in each prisoner's individualized treatment plan.

Cook's proposals are intriguing, as is his suggestion that prisons be
redesigned as something between an academic institution and a monastery,
with an emphasis on stripped-down, single-occupancy cells. These cells, the
author states, would create a "safety refuge . . . where more than survival
is the dominant mode of life."

But his view that "solitude is good for the soul" raises red flags,
particularly in light of the serious and sometimes irreparable
psychological damage inflicted on prisoners kept in isolation units today,
as Kupers discusses in one of his essays in Prison Masculinities. (Unlike
the conditions of such supermax facilities, however, Cook's proposal does
not call for total isolation, only for plain, single-occupancy cells to
which prisoners can retire.)

Moreover, Cook seems to be basing most, if not all, of his proposals on his
experience with male prisoners and juvenile delinquents, while the realm of
prison experience for women-particularly the importance placed on prison
socializing and emotional support among cellmates-simply does not mesh well
with Cook's vision of solitude.

Yet the very basis of his vision-- that of a therapeutic approach toward
persons who have committed more serious crimes-is a logical and humane one.
Such an approach is already being tried in Scandinavian countries, the
Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, in Canada.

Given the American incarceration craze, the likes of which the world has
never seen, proposals like Cook's should lead to serious discussion and debate.

"Rehabilitation, greatly lacking in our system for decades, must reemerge
as an important aspect of the criminal justice system. If not, we as a
people will continue to pay the costs, both social and economic, for
increasing levels of incarceration," he concludes. "Ultimately, it is
future generations that will pay for misguided, poorly considered acts of
retribution."