PRISON HORROR TOO EASY TO FORGET ABOUT

It was easy to wish for capital punishment for John William King. Too
easy.

It was easy because he committed a heinous, racist murder. He dragged
a disabled black man for three miles from the back of a truck. James
Byrd Jr. died, horribly tortured to death just to prove King's bona
fides as the leader of a fledgling white supremacist group.

It was easy to ignore what King's lawyer showed a Texas jury, and the
nation. He showed us the racist tattoos King had on his body. He
showed us a troubled but harmless man transformed into a vicious
monster by a stay in prison, where everyone coming in is raped and
shuttled into gangs for their protection.

It was easy to ignore that, because the consequences of paying
attention to what we are doing to 1.8 million of our fellow citizens
is too painful to contemplate. We are locking up far more of our
citizens than any other industrialized or democratic country in the
world.

We are celebrating lower crime rates caused partly by imprisoning not
just violent criminals, but many more people who have fallen prey to
drug addiction or other non-violent offenses, and even simple mental
illness. We are stowing them and their problems where we can't see
them. In the process, we are turning people who had a shot at
productive lives into members of a dehumanized army that will return
to our streets.

They've gone to school. Not the schools to which we could be sending
many more of our citizens if society wanted to provide opportunity.
They've gone to prison-college for criminals.

Acknowledging this fact would mean recognizing that most of us would
crumble living under such conditions.

Sure I wanted to see King convicted. But his defense also rang true to
me _ as an indictment of the explosive insanity of our lock-em up fever.

The defense rang true because of my repeated visits to Connecticut
jails while serving as New Haven's police chief through much of the
1990s. I remember the fear the young inmates live in. "The gangs are
still here," one Latin King drug runner from Fair Haven told me.
"They're running the prison." He wrote to me because he wanted help
leaving the gang. He was finding it harder than you might believe.

What about the guards? They choose to look the other way. That way
they keep the more dangerous inmates (who outnumber them) distracted,
with outlets for their aggression, with "galboys"/sex slaves to fight
over.

You don't have to be a chief or the relative or friend of an inmate to
know about this. From Texas to California to here in Connecticut,
officials' studies and investigations have described this violent
subculture. Massachusetts prison psychiatrist James Gilligan of
Harvard, in his landmark 1996 book "Violence," fleshed out those
studies with the personal stories of inmates he'd treated. First he
sends them to hospitals to have their anuses stitched back up. Then he
works on the hard part - trying to give them a way to think about surviving.

In 1975, a state Department of Correction criminologist named Anthony
M. Sacco found sexual violence rampant throughout the juvenile and
young-adult jails. Even when such a study does make the news, it's a
one-day story. It's too painful to think about longer than that.

What has changed is the growth of this culture, because of America's
careening prison population. We're building jails faster than ever -
and still can't find room for all the nonviolent offenders.

Prison doesn't reform. Prison makes you animalistic. It makes you
hate. It doesn't just punish. It punishes through violence - and
violence only begets more violence.

Prison won't begin to reform until we begin to completely separate
violent from nonviolent inmates as well as begin to distinguish
violent from nonviolent crimes and penalties. Success will come when
we stop creating huge prison populations by establishing alternatives
to putting any except the violent behind bars. People with mental
illness, and certainly people suffering with drug addiction, need
medical attention and community support, not paddy wagons and
incarceration.

There are statistics and statistics around the issue. The most
important one is that 96 percent of our prison population will be -
sooner or later - released.

Nicholas Pastore, a former New Haven police chief, directs the New
Haven office of the Washington-based Criminal Justice Policy
Foundation. Readers may write him at Suite 604, 109 Church St., New
Haven 06510.