Instead of prisons: a handbook for abolitionists

Partial Justice, A Study of Bias in Sentencing, p. 174.

81. Tromanhauser, An Eye for an Eye, p. 243. "Prison, as it exists today, is an exercise in 'dead end' penology. It reveals a childish faith in punishment as a crime deterrent... The pound of flesh that a vengeance-prone public seems to demand can be (and is) extracted behind prison walls, but the pound of flesh negates reformation. The public cannot have it both ways."

82. "Statement of the Ex-Prisoners Advisory Group", in Toward a New Corrections Policy: Two Declarations of Principles, p. 18. Also John Irwin, and "Rehabilitation Versus Justice" in Stanley L. Brodsky, ed., Changing Correctional Systems (University of Alabama, Center for Correctional Psychology, 1973) p. 63.

83. Struggle for Justice, p. 52.

84. Ronald H. Beattie and Charles K. Bridges, "Superior Court Probation and/or Jail Sample," published by the California Bureau of Criminal Statistics (1970), quoted in James Q. Wilson, Thinking about Crime (New York, Basic Books, 1975) p. 167.

85. Struggle for Justice, pp. 5556.

86. George Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York, Russell & Russell, 1939) p. 204.

87. Thorsten Sellin, Capital Punishment (New York Harper & Row, 1967).

88. Mitford, pp. 306-307. For further studies on the ineffectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent on the murder of law enforcement officers and prison guards, see pp. 190-91.

89. Nicholas F. Hahn and Scott Christianson, "Headin' for Stir," New York Times, June 30, 1975.

90. Robert Martinson, Douglas Lipton and Judith Wilks, The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment (New York, Praeger Publishers, 1975). First published in summary version in The Public Interest, Spring 1974.

91. Norman Carlson, as interviewed on 60 Minutes, CBS News, August 24, 1975.

92. Struggle for Justice, pp. 17-18. " ... a paradigm of the drama that critics and administrators of the penal system have played over and over again: the critic attacks, devising something that seems better; the administrator co-opts the critic and implements the idea in ways and for ends quite at odds with the original intention. The result may be more humane-or then again it might not be. In any event, it serves to entrench the legitimacy of the society's mode of handling criminals."

93. Michael T. Malloy, "Reform is a Flop," National Observer, January 4, 1975.

94. Herman Schwartz, "Protection of Prisoners' Rights," Christianity and Crisis, February 17, 1975, p. 21.

95. Mitford, pp. 116-17.

96. Gresham Sykes, "Prison is a Perfect Culture for Growing Conspiracies," New York Times, April 21, 1974.

97. See Andrew H. Malcolm, "For this Convict, 'Freedom' is Another Word for 'Fear'," New York Times, November 20, 1974, p. 41.

98. Behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner in a letter to The New York Times, February 17, 1974: ".. . it was a tragic mistake to include behavior modification thru management of the prison environment... It is possible for prisoners to discover positive reasons for behaving well rather than the negative reasons now in force... It is a gross misrepresentation of behavior modification thru the design of contingencies of reinforcement to call it 'systematic manipulation of behavior' or to say, that 'a reward is given at each stage at which a subject produces a specified behavior.' Prisoners are being rewarded now, and their behavior is being systematically manipulated, and the result is Attica. It will continue to be Attica until the nature and role of the prison environment are understood and changed."

99. Arpiar G. Saunders, Jr., "Behavior Therapy in Prisons: Walden II or Clockwork Orange?" (A paper prepared for the Eighth Annual Convention of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Chicago, November 1-3, 1974, as part of a panel entitled "Legal and Ethical Issues in Behavior Therapy.") He cites a court decision rendered on July 31, 1974 in the START (Special Treatment and Rehabilitative Training Program) litigation: Clonce v. Richardson. "The decision noted that the purpose of the program was not to develop behavior of an individual so that he would be able to conform his behavior to standards of society at large, but rather to make him a better and more manageable prisoner."

100. Norman Carison, quoted in the New York Times, October 25, 1975, speaking of the START program, phased out at Springfield in 1974: "If we had called START what it was-an experiment in control-many people think there would be no problem," he said. "Unfortunately, START was called a behavior modification program."

101. Robert Martinson, p. 25. Included in the research were 231 studies dealing with attempts at "rehabilitation." They were selected from 1,200 studies in the English language between 1945 and 1967 (on the basis of meeting standards of research and being acceptable for interpretation). Initiated in 1967 to help improve "rehabilitation" efforts, it was at first denied publication upon completion, given the unexpected conclusions. Its results became public information only with a subpoena in 1973 and its findings first published in The Public Interest.

102. Norval Morris, p. 15.

103. Ronald J. Ostro, "Saxbe Hits Penal 'Myth," New York Post, October 1, 1974.

104. "Big Change in Prisons: Punish-Not Reform," U.S. News and World Report, August 25, 1975, p. 21. Also Norman Carlson, "The Federal Prison System: Forty-five Years of Change," Federal Probation, June 1975.

105. Erik Olin Wright, The Politics of Punishment, pp. 25-26.

106. Ibid., p. 31.

107. Ibid., p. 320.

108. On suicide, see Scott Christianson, "In Prison: Contagion of Suicide," Nation, September 21, 1974, p. 243: New York City jails have registered approximately 80 suicides, 22 of them in one recent 11-month stretch; Albany's rate was about one death for every 1,000 inmates admitted during 1973, which was six times more than that for the general population, and twice that of the nation's jail population. Figures compiled by the New York State Correction Medical Review Board show that last year there were 102 inmate deaths in the state's penal institutions, 39 of them apparent suicides."

109. Schur, p. 229.

110. Korn, p.58.

111. BrandtF. Steele and Carl B. Pollack, psychiatrists quoted in "The ChildBeaters-Sick but Curable," National Observer, March 24, 1973.

112. Ibid. Also Karl Menninger, What Ever Became of Sin? , pp. 27-28: "The American Indians were shocked by the harshness of our forefathers in teaching morality to their offspring, and some tribes referred to settlers as 'the people who whip children."

113. Steele and Pollock. They studied for 51/2 years. 60 families in which significant abuse of infants or small children had occurred. "Battering parents, they found, are just like the rest of us in most respects. They come from farms, small towns, and cities. They are of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant faiths-or of none, or are antichurch. They are intelligent and well-educated and at the tops of their professions. They are unintelligent, poorly educated, and have poor job records. They are poor, middle class or wealthy."

114. Brandt F. Steele, "Violence in our Society," The Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha, April 1970, pp. 4248.

115. David Rothenberg, Fortune News, December 1974. "Our prisons are filled with men who were badly battered and frequently tortured children either at home or in orphanages, training schools, child shelters, or reformatories."

116. Nanette Dembitz, Judge, New York State Family Court, New York Times, August 9, 1975.

117. Tape interview with PREAP, December 1975.

118. "Psychology: Danger at Home," Time, June 30, 1975, p. 17.

119. Robert Brown interview.

120. Ibid. Brown explained that men generally go to prisons, women to mental institutions.

121. Steele, ''Violence in our Society."

122. Ibid.

123. Steele and Pollack.

124. Ibid.

125. James P. Corner, New York Times, December 29, 1975. "Our soaring crime rate is not due to spared rods and spoiled children. It is attributable to a breakdown in 'community' ... if our leaders cannot organize communities so that parents have sufficient income and security to respond to their children in a way that they become respected teachers and friends... we will eventually experience a level of delinquency, alienation and crime that will turn this society into an armed camp."

126. Steele, ''Violence in our Society."

127. Struggle for Justice, p. 26.

128. Karl Menninger, The Crime of Punishment, p. 204.

129. See Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Also writings by Mahatma Gandhi; George Lakey, Strategy for a Living Revolution (San Francisco, Freeman, 1973).

130. Frank Tannenbaum, Wall Shadows-A Study in American Prisons (New York, Putnam's, 1922) pp. 14748.

131. For lists of abolished punishments see: Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (Chicago, Herbert Stone, 1896 and reissued thru Detroit, Singing Tree Press, 1968).

132. Michael J. Hindelang et al., Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics--1974 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Justice, 1975) p. 120.

133. Ibid. , p. 121.

134. Ibid. , p. 129.

135. Richard F. Sullivan, "Prisons with Prices: The Cost of Confinement" in Steve Bagwell, ed., Depopulating the Prisons, p. 26. "Our society has created immense bureaucratic industries that fatten on the misery of others. Regard the size of the criminal justice industry. What would become of all those people if everyone went straight?... Just think of how remunerative the 'war on poverty' was for the middle classes. Now it's the 'war on crime.'"

Also Dr. James A. Bax, commissioner of the Community Services Administration of HEW, U.S. Congress, House, Select Committee on Crime, American Prisons in Turmoil, hearings, 92nd Congress, 1st Session, November 29-December3, 1971 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972) Part 1. pp. 277-99: Prisons "are often incestuous bureaucracies existing unto themselves. Their budgets are stoked by legislators, not on the basis of the numbers of citizens they rehabilitate, but on the numbers of prisoners they keep quietly tucked away out of circulation.

Institutions are amoral. They are socially irresponsible. They are inherently power-hungry. As every legislator knows, they are always hungry for more public money. In short, institutions are lawless-they themselves must be constantly controlled and rehabilitated. The prison system is no exception.

136. David Greenberg and Fay Stender, "The Prison as a Lawless Agency," Buffalo Law Review, 21 (1972), p. 812. In 1971, for example, the California Department of Corrections campaigned-at public expense against each and every one of the 175 prison reform bills which had been introduced in the state legislature.

137. From unpublished draft of Slavery and Imprisonment: Some Introductory Notes, Scott Christianson, School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York.

138. Most prisons are located in isolated rural areas, where local populations depend on the prison as "industry" providing employment, income and other revenue to hard-pressed communities. For instance, as reported in Mitford, p. 9: "In December 1972, when the California Department of Corrections announced it would shortly close down the nine-year-old Susanville Prison, the newspapers ran touching stories about what this would mean to the guards, their families, real estate values, school subsidies and small businesses in this little community of 6,000. Under the headline 'A Mountain Town Battles to Keep Its Grip on Life,' the San Francisco Examiner reported that residents were up in arms over the threatened loss of the prison; the local radio station manager had urged all listeners to send Christmas cards to Governor Reagan with the message, 'Remember Susanville!' Apparently the governor heeded this outpouring of Yuletide sentiment, for the following February, the Sacramento Press Journal reported that the prison would not be closed after all, but would instead be remodeled at an estimated cost of $4,635,000."

139. Richard F. Sullivan, p. 21. "When we turn to the cost of prison as the means of fighting crime, we find it extremely high, especially when the social costs are weighed into the bargain. The public suffers under the delusion that the harm and hurt imposed on men and women in prisons (our noncitizens or nonpersons) does not affect the rest of society. When we consider that 98 percent of all prisoners will eventually be released, and that 80 percent of all crime is committed by men with prior criminal records, it is clear that the harm done a [person] inside may well bring harm to the world outside one day."

140. "Problems of Women in Prison," Women Behind Bars, p. 6.

141. Richard F. Sullivan, p. 24.

142. See Ritchie M. Turner, "Federal Minimum Wage Law," Proceedings of the 103rd Annual Congress of the American Correctional Association, 1973 (College Park, Maryland, ACA, 1974) pp. 142-52.

143. Prison Research Project, pp. 36-37.

144. "A Perspective on Crime and Punishment.'' The United States, among 15 industrialized nations, uses imprisonment more than any other, having an imprisonment rate of 200.0 per 100,000 population, nearly ten times as high, for instance, as the Netherlands which ranks lowest with a rate of 22.4. (Statistics reprinted from Criminal Law Quarterly, December 1974.) More recent accounts as described in media sources, indicate spiraling prison counts in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Missouri, Illinois and Michigan.

145. Richard F. Sullivan, p. 22. Firm monetary costs are not easy to come by, since there are several methods of computing daily costs of imprisonment. If, for instance, we used the figure of the average yearly cost of institutional incarceration as $10,000, the increased average sentence served in California between 1963-1968 was six months increase (increase from 30 to 36 months): for the average 30,000 population in California prisons at that time, we would have the figure of $150 million as the cost of keeping that many persons in prison for that additional period of time. If we use the prison's usual marginal cost of $620 for locking one person up per year (the extra cost of putting one person in prison assuming that the prison had empty space and that none of the costs of the buildings or of the regular staff would be included) we would have a lesser figure of $9 million. Sullivan points out that such computation is an incorrect use of the idea of marginal cost, since one would have to count much more than food and a few extras in order to estimate the true cost of keeping the entire prison population confined for six additional months.

In 1969 the Chairman of the Lorton Lifers at the Lorton, Virginia facility, wrote that the costs of keeping 86 Lifers in prison at the (then) figures of $7,000 per man per year for imprisonment, and about $3,000 for welfare for his wife and two children, for the minimum of 15 years would be $11,610,000. He says "It can be concluded that the taxpayers have expended the sum of (prison and welfare) $11,610,000 just to release to the community a better "crook" who was never rehabilitated during those 15 years. Of course, there was the cost of court and prosecution that should be added on to the above figures." (From a letter to the Institute for Policy Studies).

146. Morales v. Schmidt, 340 F. Supp. 544, 548-49 (1972).

147. See Philip J. Hirschkop and Michael A. Millemann, "The Unconstitutionality of Prison Life," 55 Virginia Law Review 5, June 1969, pp. 795-839; Note, "And the Walls Come Tumbling Down: An Analysis of Social and Legal Pressures Bearing on the American Prison System," 19 New York Law Forum, Winter 1974, pp. 609-637.

148. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.''

149. See Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. 1024, 21 Gratt 790, 796 (1871).

150. See Sostre v. McGinnis, 442 F. 2d 178 (2d Cit. 1971), concerning an inmate who had been kept in solitary confinement for over a year as punishment for his political and legal activities in New York State prisons.

151. "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

152. Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, 368-70 (1910).

153. Ibid.

154. Jackson v. Bishop, 404 F. 2d 571, 579-81 (8th Cir. 1968).

155. See