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Violence is the currency of action and reaction in prison. It is also a rite of passage. It is employed by guards and members of the convict establishment as a means of maintaining control. Other inmates find it the only way of preserving their anal virginity. For many--both prisoners and guards--it is as familiar and necessary as breathing. Yet, just as it is on the outside, violence is only a symptom of more fundamental stress or change...

Author: By Tony Hill, | Title: Out of the Game and Into the Vanguard | 10/26/1971 | See Source »

...indeterminate sentence is an old idea first advocated by British and French penal reformers in the 19th century. The European reformers and their American counterparts argued that the practice of giving a convict a fixed sentence--one in which the time to be served is immutable by any action by the convict--provided to incentive for the inmate to reform. With nothing to gain by reforming, the prisoner usually became bitter and dangerously hostile to prison officials and the society they represented. The con served hard time, and often after his release sought revenge on society for his incarceration...

Author: By Tony Hill, | Title: For As Long As You Breathe | 10/22/1971 | See Source »

Essentially then, the indeterminate sentence uses two means to attempt the reform of the convict. First, it removes the power or responsibility of sentencing from the courts and invests it in the penal system. Second, it attempts to use the flexibility derived from that shift as a means of inducing the convict to make "some indication of amended character...

Author: By Tony Hill, | Title: For As Long As You Breathe | 10/22/1971 | See Source »

...these last two prejudices that lie at the core of the passage quoted above. It is the criminal's "misconduct" that "compels us to send" him to an institution for personal correction. The criminal, now a convict, is to be interred in the institution until he displays a willingness to accept the profit motive and the work ethic in personal practice. In effect, regardless of his acceptance of society's complicity in crime as a theory, the author of this passage rejected the notion in practice. He was and is not alone...

Author: By Tony Hill, | Title: For As Long As You Breathe | 10/22/1971 | See Source »

...California prison system into which George Jackson entered is a criminologist's dream and a convict's nightmare. In their 1951 book, New Horizons in Criminology, Harry Elmer Barnes and Hegley K. Teeters said: "The state of California stands in the forefront of penal experimentation, with its progressive philosophy epitomized in the Youth and Adult Authorities." At the time, the statement may well have been accurate, for Earl Warren was then governor of the state and had effected a number of changes designed to bring California's prison system into the 20th century. However, the promise seeded by the reforms...

Author: By Tony Hill, | Title: West to Crime and Punishment | 10/21/1971 | See Source »

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