Psycho factories

In part thanks to those mandatory drug-sentencing laws that treat crimes involving crack cocaine much more harshly than those involving standard-issue cocaine or other drugs, inmate populations are disproportionately black. But new prisons are almost always built in white, rural areas, far from inmates' homes. Politicians claim this is because these areas suffer from high unemployment, but as Hallinan points out, the nation's inner cities aren't exactly hotbeds of employment opportunity, either. While studies have shown that regular contact with family and close friends in the outside world is a key to prisoner rehabilitation, most inmates are now housed across entire states from their homes, in places with little opportunity for job programs or other community involvement as their sentences near completion.

Hallinan shows how racial tension between white guards and nonwhite inmates is almost inevitable; the symbolism alone is enough to drive up the stakes in the slightest confrontation between the two sides. In Texas, armed white guards patrol on horseback while the mostly black and Chicano inmates do field work, singing work songs passed down from the days of slavery.

The problem is that while building new prisons near the areas that most inmates come from makes a certain kind of rational sense, it doesn't make emotional sense at a time when the public wants to see criminals punished, not just locked up. The result, Hallinan writes, is that regardless of the severity of the average prisoner's crime, his time behind bars has become "pointlessly punitive." Being far from home and not likely to receive visits has become just another psychic dimension of the punishment that the public demands.

Humiliations large and small are thought up for prisoners: In some Alabama prisons, an inmate caught masturbating is made to wear a pink uniform. It's as if prisons have become a stage on which to play out our lust for vengeance and our rage about the toll that violent crime has taken on our national psyche. Florida, for example, recently debated a bill to require its prisons to be "no-frills" -- no TVs, no weights, even no air conditioning. "Our objective is to make prison life intolerable," as one supporter summed it up.

But as Hallinan shows again and again, brutal, dangerous prisons that give their prisoners nothing meaningful to occupy their time produce brutal and dangerous inmates. What happens, then, when these prisoners return to the outside world? Today's prisons, "Going up the River" suggests, regularly turn garden-variety, low-level criminals into violent, sociopathic thugs who are much more dangerous when they come out than when they went in. Higher education for inmates is "on the verge of extinction." Many prison units become sick, self-enclosed dystopias. "You can't create and maintain a climate where people want to change," as one former corrrections commissioner puts it, "where every day when they open their cell door ... they're preoccupied with their survival that day."

Rehabilitation, though, appears to be the furthest thing from the minds of prison officials dealing with extreme discipline problems. Restoring order and taking the system back from the gangs are the first priority of the prison officials Hallinan quotes, and the solution most have embraced is the new breed of "supermax" prisons, the "handful of ultramodern, ultraexpensive, increasingly popular prisons designed to deprive the men in them of human interaction."

Illinois, for example, sees its new supermax as the only way to break the stranglehold of gangs on prison life; 80 percent of its supermax prisoners are gang leaders. Supermax inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in windowless cells, with an hour of daily exercise in a caged-in yard. Most are allowed either no phone calls or one 15-minute call a month, with no cafeteria visits, no library privileges and only an occasional, brief "noncontact" visit. These supermaxes are, in short, "incubators for psychoses," in one psychologist's phrase, yet many of the prisoners here are eventually returned to the general prison population.

Next Page: Wardens party with locals in the supermax

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