Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [196]
A parallel movement, with the same general motives and aims, leveled heavy artillery at the parole system as well. Here was another institution that looked terribly unfair. The prisoner had no real say, no due process. The parole board could use whatever criteria it liked, and its decisions were beyond review. The law-and-order people (and much of the general public), on the other hand, let out a howl every time somebody out on parole committed a crime. Illinois, for example, abolished parole in 1977, at the same time that it eliminated the indeterminate sentence.47
The movement for “victims’ rights” was another symptom of backlash against the due process revolution in a period of high crime and high concern.48 Its message was: the system cares more for criminals and their rights than it does for the poor damaged victims. A “victims’ bill of rights” was adopted in Oklahoma in 1981; California, by popular vote, adopted a victims’ bill of rights in 1982. The movement was distinctly conservative, distinctly “law and order.” It invoked the image of a person “preyed upon by strangers . . . an elderly person robbed of her life savings, an ‘innocent bystander’ injured or killed during a holdup, or a brutally ravaged rape victim”—in short, a “blameless, pure stereotype, with whom all can identify.”49 The “rights” of victims included the right to play a role during the sentencing proceedings. More significantly, there were provisions in the California law aimed at dismantling some of the more liberal “improvements” added on to the house of due process; the purpose was to make the system tougher on defendants. But these provisions were wrapped in a mantle of victims’ rights. Law-and-order people expected good results from giving victims a voice in the system. Victims, after all, rarely turn the other cheek; on the contrary, they become (understandably) bitter and frustrated. As an old joke put it, a neoconservative is a liberal whose pocket has been picked. The outrage and pain expressed by victims would counterbalance the tendency to wax sentimental about the defendant and his hard knocks. cb
Prisons and Prisoners’ Rights
In the first few decades of the twentieth century, conditions in prisons, and in local jails, continued to be absolutely abominable. Overcrowding was epidemic. In the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, in the early 1920s, 1,700 inmates were crammed three and four to a tiny cell: “There is less room per prisoner in some of the cells than a dead man has in his coffin.”53 When Lewis Lawes, later to be warden of Sing Sing, arrived in 1905 as a rookie guard at Clinton Prison, in Dannemora, New York, he found the prison still run “on the silent system.” Prisoners “were allowed very little recreation outside their cells.... Just aimless treading across a barren waste of ground.” Lawes was transferred to Auburn, supposedly an innovative prison, in 1906. But here, too, silence reigned: “It was the hush of repression.” In this “city of silent men,” clubs and guns were used to enforce obedience of the rules.54
From all over the country, with monotonous regularity, came reports of inhuman conditions. In 1913, a grand jury in Westchester County, New York, censured Sing Sing: the cells were “unfit for the housing of animals, much less human beings”; there were no toilet facilities in cells, only the infamous slop buckets; there was no running water; the cell blocks were “infested with vermin”; prisoners were jammed together, “healthy men . . . subjected to the nightly companionship of syphilitics”; hardened criminals were put together with first offenders; young boys were “condemned to room with . . . creatures who make a practice of sodomy”; and (this from New York, mind you) “negroes and whites