Word: penalities
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...hour. Whatever their outlay, the states aim for a good return. It costs about $10,000 to house the average prisoner for a year, and with inmate population expanding and taxpayers' tolerance shrinking, legislators are loath to spend any more than they absolutely must to keep their penal systems going. Thus it is a boon when a state's prison industries can show an increase in sales like that in Massachusetts: from $200,000 in 1972 to $3.4 million last year. States can benefit in yet another way, by obtaining goods and services from their prisons and thereby...
...calls Brubaker the best film about a plantation prison, comparing it to Cool Hand Luke, about a chain gang, and Papillon, which showed life in a penal colony. Redford, he says, seems deliberate and intelligent, perfect for the role of the good guy, the renegade hero...
...highly publicized KGB responsibility is to rid the country of dissenters. Of the 2 million people currently imprisoned in the Soviet penal system, about 10,000 are so-called prisoners of conscience, who have been jailed for their religious, intellectual or political beliefs. In the past year the KGB has employed increasingly sophisticated methods to discredit dissidents; Jewish activists have been charged with speculation and other economic crimes in order to whip up local anti-Semitic feelings...
...Penal institutions, true enough, have improved in some ways over the years. The chain gangs of yore are gone. In some systems, bare-bones medical services have been expanded to include at least token psychological care. Reform movements still trudge along, and some of their programs are promising, at least in intent. The intent is, or ought to be, to remedy overcrowding in prisons not by building more cells but by sending nondangerous offenders into community-based programs...
Much more will be needed before the penal system can be called even tolerable. That day is not likely to come until the public stops thinking of prison as a symbol and begins coldly assessing what prisons can and cannot accomplish. A good deal of expert thought has already been devoted to the question. In 1973, for instance, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals concluded a sober review with this recommendation: "Prisons should be repudiated as useless for any purpose other than locking away persons who are too dangerous to be allowed at large...