Word: mitfordly
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...methodically as a prosecutor, she builds her case, attacking one by one the usual arguments in favor of prisons. First argument: prisons keep off the dark streets rapists, drug fiends, and other bogeymen of the American middle class. Nonsense, says Miss Mitford. In 9,000,000 crimes committed in a typical year, only 1½% of the criminals are imprisoned. Second argument: the threat of a prison sentence deters criminals. Miss Mitford cites contrary, though slightly equivocal evidence. Between 1961 and 1966, the penalty in California for assaulting a policeman with a deadly weapon rose from a minimum sentence...
...Need of Treatment." The greatest part of Miss Mitford's considerable energies are given over to demolishing the third argument: that prisons rehabilitate. On the contrary, she suggests, prisoners may have been better off when they were regarded as sinners in need of salvation than now, when they are judged to be sick individuals in "need of treatment." She tends to agree that "physical degradation is replaced by psychological degradation"−that all the "diagnosis" and "evaluation" are "the catch-22 of modern prison life." A "cure" is pronounced. Miss Mitford suspects, when a "poor/young/brown/ black captive appears...
...with in the walls of Michigan's Jackson State Prison, chiefly to test new products on the captive population−at least those guinea pigs who will volunteer for a dollar a day or so. "Criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material," one scientist confessed to Miss Mitford, "and much cheaper than chimpanzees...
...cost of keeping a man in San Quentin the state could be sending him to Harvard. What does this $5,000 (more or less) a year buy? The prisoner's meals. Miss Mitford figures, cost around 300 each. Only 5% is budgeted for that vaunted "rehabilitation." Most of the taxpayer's dollar, the author computes, goes to "security"−i.e., guards and guns. A lot of money also goes into penal bureaucracies, which have supported no law more faithfully than Parkinson...
Abusive Practice. Characteristically, Miss Mitford weakens her case by sardonic excesses. She is capable of snapping that a man with a dicebox might grant and deny paroles as fairly as most boards. If she has met in her travels an idealistic or even an effective penologist, she neglects to report the fact. "That 'prisons are a failure' is a cliche dating from the origin of prison," she writes, and briskly concludes that it is long past time for Americans to abolish their costly, cruel, and in fact morally corrupting penal communities. But when it comes to specific alternatives...