STIR CRAZY

How America's Get-Tough-On-Crime Attitudes Created A Prison-industrial Complex

NON-FICTION : GOING UP THE RIVER: Travels in a Prison Nation by Joseph T.
Hallinan (Random House, 263 pp., $24.95)

Gene Roberts, the former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, likes to say
that the most important stories don't break, they ooze. He cites the
migration of African-Americans from the South to the North after World War
II as a historic shift that got little or no coverage at the time it was
happening.

In "Going Up the River," Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph T. Hallinan
examines an equally historic shift that has oozed in the 1980s and 1990s --
the staggering growth of a prison-industrial complex that has become
entrenched with little public awareness or media attention. The U.S. prison
system has grown tenfold in 30 years, he reports, and the 2 million men and
women now behind bars on any given day make up one of the largest
migrations in the nation's history.

Hallinan spent four years traveling the country and visiting prisons --
talking to prisoners, corrections officers, government officials and
residents of prison towns. Looking at the prison boom, he obeyed the dictum
of another newspaper editor, Ben Bradlee, formerly of the Washington Post:
"Follow the money." The cost to taxpayers has not gone unreported: In some
states the budget for prisons now equals or surpasses the budget for higher
education.

Hallinan looks at the other side of the coin. If all that money is being
spent, somebody is making it. For more than a few communities, workers and
private businesses, prisons have become profit centers.

Hallinan visited some of the small towns with dying industries or closed
military bases that have lobbied hard for prisons to provide employment,
like Beeville, Texas, a town of 13,000 people and 7,200 inmates, and
Hinton, Okla., which wanted a prison so much it built one itself.

Other cars on the $37.5 billion-a-year gravy train are contractors and
construction workers involved in the prison building boom, along with the
fencing business, barbed wire, metal doors, telephone service. Inmates
don't get to choose their carriers, and they pay a high rate to AT&T, MCI,
etc. -- $1 billion a year, Hallinan reports. Then add the corrections
officers and their growing union and, in the past decade, private prison
companies that run or build and run prisons in a number of states.

For the first time in history, he writes, we have "prison millionaires."
One private prison executive talked to Hallinan about "growing the
business." Does this involve lobbying for longer sentences? Hallinan
believes this kind of pressure is inevitable, given the financial
incentives. I wish, though, he had looked at whether interested parties had
indeed lobbied for particular sentencing and other criminal justice bills.

Hallinan's capsule history of U.S. prisons over the past 50 years turns up
no golden age; the era of highly disciplined prisons came at a price of
brutality while the era of prisoners' rights brought disorder. No
rehabilitation program -- education, counseling, job training -- has been a
smashing success in reducing recidivism, though he describes a few he
considers promising.

In Hallinan's view, it's hard to rehabilitate people who've never been
"habilitated" in the first place by caring parents and good schools. Public
opinion today holds that punishment is more instructive, an idea that
reached a pointless extreme in an Alabama prison that actually pays for
rocks to be brought in so inmates can break them.

At this point, Hallinan demonstrates, the debate over rehabilitation vs.
punishment is almost moot anyway because of crowding. Tough mandatory
sentencing laws in the past decade have caused the prison population to
explode. In a chapter on the impact of mandatory sentences for drugs,
Hallinan writes about a family of former moonshiners busted for selling
crack cocaine from their trailer on a dirt road in North Carolina. The
76-year-old grandmother gets a 24-year sentence. Even with the building
boom, many prisons today have at least twice as many inmates as they were
designed to hold, and crowding means less control and more violence.

The last prison Hallinan visits is the new one in Wallens Ridge, Va. It is
a supermax -- the latest innovation in U.S. prisons. These are designed to
keep the system's "worst of the worst" isolated in their cells so they
can't hurt guards or other inmates. These prisons are expensive and
controversial, since isolation makes some of the inmates crazy or crazier.

On opening day, Hallinan asks the warden how he will know whether his
prison is succeeding or failing. The warden answers, "If it's a safe day,
it's a good day."

Comments Hallinan. "That's it. . . . Just a safe day. A secure day. At
$110,000 a cell, it seemed a modest hope. But that's what America's prison
boom has produced. And the funny thing is, no one complains."

I reported on prisons in the mid-1990s, and I can appreciate Hallinan's
sense that some aspects of U.S. prison and sentencing policies seem
stunningly wrongheaded. And I share his amazement that for all the public
money being spent on incarceration and all the lives affected (one-eighth
of African-American men from age 20 to 34 are in prison any given day) so
few people raise questions about what we're doing and whether it's
necessary to put so many in prison for so long. For anyone who doesn't know
much about prisons, this book should be an eye-opener. Let's hope it starts
a real debate.