Word: prisoner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this suggests that prisons are slowly absorbing a key lesson of modern psychology: desirable behavior is best induced by "positive reinforcement"-rewards rather than punishment. Thus, federal prisons and 24 states now use work-release schemes pioneered by North Carolina, where 12,000 select convicts have earned $10 million in ten years-even working as court reporters, while partly supporting their families, partly paying their prison keep and landing future jobs. At California's San Joaquin County Jail, one recent prisoner was an ex-airplane dealer who spent all day flying charter planes, duly landed for the night lockup...
Some critics argue that many of the new ideas still fail to solve the criminal's basic problem: his firm belief that society is wrong, not he. As critics see it, even the best prison is still a totalitarian society that spurs human resistance and reinforces the criminal's cynicism. In this view, the solution is getting criminals to reform themselves in the process of reforming other criminals. This approach has worked wonders in New Jersey with groups of 20 delinquent boys housed at Highfields, the old Lindbergh mansion. After working at daytime jobs, the boys spend evenings...
...North Carolina courageously put young felons into an open prison camp staffed entirely by group-therapy veterans-recently paroled California convicts. It worked, until the legislature nervously stopped the money. (The head parolee later became a professional penologist.) Several states profitably rely on Author Bill Sands (My Shadow Ran Fast), a reformed California armed robber, whose Seven Step Foundation sends ex-convicts into prisons to counsel inmates and runs "freedom houses" to help re-leasees. Of 5,000 Seventh Step graduates so far, only 10% have returned to prison. An ex-New York prisoner named Hiawatha Burris has carved...
...might feel that in prison we've paid our debt," says Burris, "but we know the community doesn't think so. Doing time is not enough-we have to give back to the community." And that may be the most profound point. The goal of crime prevention can be reached partly by attacks on crime-breeding social conditions, partly by creating more efficient police and courts. But also vital is a new concept of mutual reconciliation between convict and community: the outcast must be allowed to earn his way back and thereby learn to believe in himself...
...prisons be abolished? Not quite: perhaps 15% of inmates are dangerous or unreformable. But Attorney General Ramsey Clark, for one, estimates that 50% of today's inmates do not belong in prison; removing them would sharply improve attention to the rest. And caging must go. It is scandalous that in the U.S. only about 2% of all prison inmates are now being exposed to any kind of reform-oriented innovation...