Psycho factories

Comic relief is a good idea when it comes to a potentially depressing topic like prisons, but at times Hallinan gets carried away. Some of his portraits, both of prisoners and of prison workers, come close to cruel condescension. There's something a bit slimy about his "sympathetic" Tobacco Road-esque profile of the hapless, toothless Groves family of North Carolina, three entire generations of whom are now in jail for running a crack-selling operation out of the matriarch's trailer. (Hallinan patiently details how each of the none-too-swift family members realized they were being busted, complete with colorful exclamations such as "They done got Mama!"). I felt equally manipulated by his subtle ridicule of a tightly wound Virginia prison guard named Jennifer Miller (known among the inmates as "Killer Miller").

"I loved it from the moment I walked in," she says, beaming. "I loved the sound of those doors clanging behind me. It was like a big adventure." When she was a girl, her father would take her for a ride on the back of his Harley-Davidson. The faster he would go, the more she liked it. Prison, she said, is a little bit like that.

Is Hallinan's point that it's wrong to love your work as a prison guard? Here's a job that Miller enjoys, one that allows her to utilize her seemingly boundless anger toward men and her need for both control and adventure. We may have too many prisons in this country, and we may be building new prisons like the one she works in for all the wrong reasons, but if someone has to be a prison guard, she is an excellent candidate.

Still, "Going up the River" is a good, well-researched trip through our national prison culture. What it needed to be a great book was a little more analytical steam, and less reportorial whistling. He might have contended, for example, with the many conservative counter-arguments to his thesis, such as the idea that the crime rate is down precisely because we've locked up more of the bad people, and given them longer sentences. While he's devoting pages to describing the weirdo characters and tragic lost souls he meets in his travels through prisons, or recounting some of the alternately kooky and horrifying decisions that are made by the people who run individual prisons, Hallinan lets pass with too little reflection some truly knotty larger conflicts. These include problems such as how to keep prisoners occupied and help them develop job skills while not exploiting prison labor, and the moral question of how we can know whether a coldblooded killer is "rehabilitated." He seems only minimally interested in the fact that, for the most part, the guards who might seem to be among the main beneficiaries of the prison boom themselves live with economic and psychological struggles that parallel in eerie ways those of the prisoners they guard.

This is the dark territory that Ted Conover explored in his 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book, "Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing." Conover went undercover to work as a guard at the New York state maximum-security prison. The two books strike quite different moods, though they convey many of the same ideas and conclusions. Take your pick: Where Hallinan delivers his devastating verdict on prisons with an amusing dose of quirky Americana, Conover gives readers gritty realism, psychological probing, a total immersion experience. Eric Schlosser, author of the exposé "Fast Food Nation," has his own book about the subject in the works. With some of our best, most serious-minded writers turning their attention to prisons, those of us who haven't yet acknowledged the full implications of the prison boom won't be able to ignore it for much longer.

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