Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [198]
The picture was not universally bad. There were people inside the system who worked hard to make it better. Probably the most remarkable of these was Thomas Mott Osborne of New York. Osborne was chairman of the New York State Commission on Prison Reform, in 1913. He was a hands-on person; to see what prison was like, he had himself admitted to prison as “Tom Brown” and spent a week behind bars. Later, in 1914, he became warden of Sing Sing. His most dramatic move was to give the convicts a large dose of self-government; the Mutual Welfare League, which he organized, let the prisoners play a significant role in runing their own institution.64
But Osborne was forced out at Sing Sing; and the status quo soon reasserted itself. The underlying problem of prisons, of course, was political and social: the men and women locked up were the lumpenproletariat; many of them were black; and the general public neither knew nor cared what happened to them. Indeed, people wanted prisoners to be treated harshly. Anything halfway decent was sneered at as a “country club.” Governor Haskell’s reaction to Kate Barnard’s charges were typical: “Kate would like to see the prisoners kept in rooms and fed and treated as if they were guests at the Waldorf Astoria.”65
When change did occur, it was partly because the system was becoming more professional—and more differentiated. There are maximum-, medium-, and minimum-security prisons, prisons for men, and prisons for women, and juvenile institutions of various sorts. There is no point to a minimum-security prison, of course, unless it is different from the hard-boiled prisons for hard-boiled prisoners. But even the “big house” changed over the years. The civil rights movement, an increased sensitivity toward minorities, and the general rights-consciousness of society: these forces and influences scaled the walls of the prison, or whatever substituted for walls. The prison was more a microcosm of the outside world, than an island, hermetically sealed.
Illinois’s Stateville Prison, built in 1925, was a “big house” of the classic type. From 1935 on, a tough, strong warden, Joseph Ragen, ran the prison as an absolute dictatorship. Ragen’s reign was severe but efficient; he imposed order and maintained it.66 But the Ragen years could not last forever; when Ragen left, no autocrat of the same dominant power replaced him. In part this was a matter of personality; Ragen was a strong authority with an iron will and great energy. But, more important, the ferments of the late twentieth century swept over Stateville and engulfed it. The age of iron discipline passed into history; prisons lost their autonomy; the civil rights revolution made its mark on these institutions as well.
Prison riots took place in Ohio in 1968. Ysabel Rennie, of Columbus, Ohio, wrote a report on prison life, after the riots. She found the usual situation of inhumanity. Not a single institution in Ohio failed to “degrade, corrupt, pervert, and dehumanize the men committed to its charge,” she reported. “Men can stand only so much abuse.” The “wonderful programs of rehabilitation, education, vocational training” were mere charades. In one incident, guards at Chillecothe Correctional Institute collected prisoners’ pet cats, including six newborn kittens, and “dashed their brains out in sight of the whole prison population.” This aroused a storm of indignation: “irate cat-lovers all over the country must have taken pen to paper to protest against the cat massacre.” But the “murders and beatings of prisoners” went almost unnoticed.67
Almost, but not quite. Two prisoners went to federal court, asking for an injunction against the horrors of prison life, which amounted, they said, to “cruel and unusual punishment.” These