Word: penal
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...endless effort to cope with one of the world's higher crime rates, the U.S. has long sent more people to prison for longer terms than any other industrialized Western nation except South Africa. Yet the country's penal institutions add up to a national disgrace. Riotous prison disorders have become so common that it was only second-rate news last March when a guard was wounded and several others were taken hostage during a mutiny of 100 or so inmates in a Newark, N.J., jail. In fact, the event seemed trivial only because it came so soon...
...also a very expensive scandal. American governments, from the federal level down, spend some $4 billion a year operating 4,700 penal institutions of all kinds. The cost of housing an inmate runs from less than $7,000 a year in Arkansas through $13,000 in California to more than $26,000 in the jail system of New York City. Other huge chunks of money go for the constant expansion of the system, with some $7 billion in construction now planned or contemplated. At that, the growth of prison plants is not expected to keep up with their population. Between...
...penal system is hard to rationalize on practical grounds and even harder to defend on moral ones. Prisons foster inhumanity, brutality and violence. Beatings, stabbings, rape-all are commonplace. Inmates murder inmates in U.S. prisons at the rate of about 100 a year. Wretched conditions just about everywhere have so persisted that the prison exposé has long been a hardy perennial of popular journalism. A voluminous genre of literature and drama has grown up around a singular theme of prison rebellions. Prison evils have been documented in thousands of articles, hundreds of books and scores of legislative reports...
...Shabby penal operations are so prevalent, in fact, that in the past decade judges have found that prisons in 15 states were bad enough to be declared unconstitutional. Tennessee, Maryland, Rhode Island-these only begin the list. Suits demanding improvement have been filed in 15 other states, and with every chance of success. Court-ordered upgradings are to be welcomed and have already forced the betterment of prisons in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. But this method of progress is slow and not always effective. In most instances, too, it only raises conditions from subhuman to minimally lawful...
Real reform is going to take more, but the resistance to it remains formidable despite glaring proof of the need. The Attica tragedy, for instance, blew up a blizzard of promised changes. Yet a U.N. human rights study group that inspected prisons last year reported that penal administrators seemed to have learned nothing at all from Attica. Did February's Santa Fe explosion produce new resolve? The only notable plan to emerge in the wake of that violence has been New Mexico's decision to build a new maximum-security prison...