Prisons - The Good Life Of Hard Time?

"If they only knew how much fun I was having in here, they would turn me loose." — Richard Speck, mass murderer, from a videotape made in a maximum-security prison cell

Is the corrections system too lenient? Many people seem to think so. When the ACLU recently asked: "From what you know, do you think life in prison is too harsh, not harsh enough, or about right?" 42% of respondents answered "Not harsh enough" and 35% said "About right."⁵ The nation has gotten tough on crime. One result? By 1995, our prisons were bursting at the seams, as the chart shows (federal data for 1990 are not available). That year, 40 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia were under court orders to deal with the issue of overcrowding in their prison systems.⁶ How did they do it? In many cases, they let violent repeat offenders go early while retaining nonviolent drug "criminals," many of them first offenders.

Are prisoners enjoying themselves at taxpayers' expense? Consider the typical prison, overfilled with a 50/50 mix of violent/nonviolent men, 36% of them white, 46% of them black, 16% Hispanic, about half of them under the age of 30. This seems more likely to be a recipe for trouble than a paid vacation. And so the research shows.

A 1996 report from Human Rights Watch documented "pervasive sexual harassment, sexual abuse and privacy violations by guards and other corrections department employees in state prisons in California, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, and New York." Amnesty International reported in 1999 that physical and sexual abuse of women in American prisons was widespread, adding that 12 states had no law prohibiting sexual contact between female prisoners and their jailers. A 2001 Human Rights Watch report documents widespread prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse in male prisons. Compounding the problems are the transmission of HIV, the abandonment of rehabilitation efforts, and the lack of medical and corrections personnel. The Congressional Institute calls the conditions in America's prison system "deplorable."

But things might not be so bad all over. For the benefit of disgraced CEOs, Forbes magazine recently published a list of "The Best Places to Go to Prison." The table shows where these federal prisons ("Club Fed") are. According to Forbes, convicts don't get to choose their prison, but they can always make requests. However, according to Herb Hoelter, the director of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, a program that tries to improve the lot of inmates: "My experience with white-collar criminals is that the guards treat them much more harshly … It's a power issue. They now have control over someone who once made $15 million a year." And even these posh places are not immune to the growing trend of "no frills" for prisoners. Coffee, weightlifting equipment, and hot meals are out in some jurisdictions; chain gangs are back in others. Legislation was introduced in Congress in 2001 to eliminate cable television and other frills from federal prison cells. Whether such punitive measures will have any effect on recidivism remains to be seen.

Forbes "Best Places to Go to Prison"

Institution	Location
Federal Correctional Institute Morgantown	Morgantown, W. Va.
Federal Prison Camp Otisville	Fort Walton Beach, Fla.
Federal Prison Camp Nellis	Otisville, NY
Federal Prison Camp Eglin	North Las Vegas, Nev.
Federal Prison Camp Allenwood	Montgomery, Pa.

Sources: Graphic: Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Prisoners in 2001," NCJ 195189, Table #15. "Nary a speck of decency," Time, May 27, 1996, v147, n22, p34. Amnesty International, "Not Part of My Sentence: Violations of the Human Rights of Women in Custody," http://www.amnestyusa.org/rightsforall/women/report/index.html. Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org/reports98/women/Mich.htm#P37_769. "Optimism, Pessimism, and Jailhouse Redemption: American Attitudes on Crime, Punishment, and Over-incarceration, Findings from a National Survey Conducted for the ACLU by Belden Russonello & Stewart," www.aclu.org/issues/criminal/overincarceration_report.pdf. Patrick T. McCormick, "Just Punishment and America's Prison Experiment," Theological Studies 61 (2000), p508+. Human Rights Watch, "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons," http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html. The Congressional Institute, "Prisons," http://www.conginst.org/OurLibrary/C/prisons.html. Jennifer Senior, "You've Got Jail," NewYorkMetro.com, http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/crimelaw/features/6228/index2.html. Peter Finn, "No-frills prisons and jails: a movement in flux," Federal Probation, Vol.60 No.3 (Sept. 1996), http://www.strengthtech.com/correct/issues/mediais/2000/flux.htm. Information retrieved November 26, 2002.