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It is hard to tell exactly how much effect the prisoners’ rights movement actually had on prisons and jails. It was surely greater than zero. Prison life became, in some ways, more humane, though it is difficult to say that the court cases caused these changes, except in the most obvious ways. Still, progress is easy to see in some ways: better general conditions, better health care; more recreation, education, and religious freedom. Prisoners today can play baseball, write letters, watch TV, go to school, and do all kinds of normal things. In some prisons, male inmates can even have sex with their wives from time to time. These are the so-called conjugal visits. Our times have a horror of sexual repression; celibacy seems downright abnormal. At any rate, the state is aware that sex does occur in prison, only not the right sort. Mississippi formalized conjugal visits in 1963, and a number of states followed this rather odd leader.79

And yet, many prisons are domains of fear; they combine despotism and anarchy. The strong brutalize and terrorize the weak. A Philadelphia study found thousands of incidents of rape of male prisoners in Philadelphia jails, in a period of about two years (1966—68).80 In some prisons, the murder rate is as high as on the mean streets of the most desperate cities. Gangs, organized by race or otherwise, dominate the prison yard. Drugs and weapons are freely available. In the movie Escape from New York, which came out in 1981, Manhattan Island had been converted into a giant penal colony. The state dumped convicted felons into the city, and simply left them there. No one was allowed to escape, but no one patrolled or controlled the island. Manhattan grew its own Hobbesian regime, with the most ruthless and vicious at the top of the heap. Are some American prisons heading in this direction? cd

Despite the guards with their guns, the walls, the rules and regulations, the prison of today is a far cry from the penitentiary that Dickens and De Tocqueville described. Of course, corrections do not exist in a social vacuum. A society does not randomly pick ways of punishing people; methods of punishment are always related to what is happening in the larger world. They are related to ideas about the causes and cures of crime that rattle about in the heads of good citizens. How afraid are people of crime? How high on the agenda is crime and punishment?

Some systems of corrections are offender-minded, some offense-minded. That is, some focus more on who the criminal is, while others focus more on what he did. Of course, there is always a mixture of both of these considerations; it is the proportions that change. As we saw, corrections shifted direction in the late nineteenth century. It moved somewhat from the what to the who. Indeterminate sentencing, parole, probation, juvenile justice—all had this in common. Who was born bad? Who could still be rescued? There was lacking the overwhelming, obsessive fright, the fear of crime that is everywhere today.

A strong strain in the literature, up to around 1950, describes criminals as typically weak, disjointed, and unconnected to family and economic life, but not, generally speaking, vicious and depraved beyond redemption. “Stanley,” the “jack-roller”ce whose story was taken down by Clifford Shaw in the late twenties, had come from an unhappy family. His mother was dead, his stepmother wanted to get rid of him. “Stanley” throws away chance after chance in favor of adventure, fun, immediate gratification, false bravado. He describes other criminals as essentially the same as he was—not evil so much as reckless and short-term in their thinking: “Consequences didn’t concern them much. They thought only of getting by.”83 “Stanley’s” story has a happy ending: he gets married, has a child, and holds down a good job as a salesman. Similarly, Thomas Mott Osborne described prisoners as regular fellows; men of honor and talent; if you trust them, “they will