Word: mitfords
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more she saw, the less she liked. The Quakers who founded the first American prison in Philadelphia in 1790 may have thought that rescuing sinners from a wicked world and putting them in solitary with a Bible was more humane than flogging, branding or the stocks. But Miss Mitford can find no Christian words for the costs, theories and failures of a punitive system that has since swelled into a coast-to-coast community of 1.33 million incarcerated Americans...
...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...