IMPRISONED BY POLICY

Could it be that America's massive prison expansion is becoming another
Vietnam: an intractable war full of lies and viciousness that lacerates
society before finally collapsing in defeat? If so, that may be the good
news. Vietnam eventually ended, but the insanity and racism of the American
prison boom - we have four percent of the world's population but 25 percent
of all prisoners, and half of all U.S. prisoners are black - are still in a
"pre-Tet" stage of escalation.

And like Vietnam, the prison-led war on crime and drugs has captured the
attention of many journalists and scholars who are highly critical of
American law and order. Going Up The River, by Wall Street Journal reporter
Joseph T. Hallinan, is the latest addition to this body of work.

Hallinan's thesis is pretty common: "Having failed to make prisons
effective, we have learned to make them profitable." It's a line shared by
nearly the entire political spectrum, but it happens to be factually wrong
and politically stunted. Prisons are not profitable, and the quest for
direct profits is not driving the lockdown expansion. True, private prisons
grew quickly in the mid-1990s, but their stock valuations have since
collapsed, and firms are selling off facilities.

Fortunately, the notion of a profit-driven "prison-industrial complex" is
not the only story in what, at its best, is a searing montage of human
horrors served up in a terse, no-nonsense style.

As well as looking at prisoners, Hallinan explores the workings of the
mostly white towns that host prisons full of black and brown people. The
twisted cultural dynamics of this geography of race and punishment are
sobering. But here Hallinan again stretches his point about direct economic
interest. For every prison town that has gained some jobs, through
government pork in the form of bricks and bars, there are other towns that
get nothing but an increased sewerage bill, but Hallinan doesn't deal with
that part of the story.

Hallinan also conducts a suggestive tour through American penology, tracing
managerial thinking about prisons from the Quaker reformers who led the way
in creating the modern penitentiary to the high-minded experiments with
therapy in the 1960s. But here, too, his narrative is extremely sketchy on
the bigger picture - the social hierarchies of class and race in which
prison is always imbedded. In playing it safe, by too often avoiding the
politics of the larger society, the book dismisses many of the central
elements of its own story. None the less, Hallinan's sharp, enterprising
reporting makes Going Up The River a valuable, accessible snapshot of the
damage kicked up in our quagmire of national incarceration.