Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...original robbers, Maffie and Richardson, received an enthusiastic and prolonged ovation from the audience. Both were released from prison in 1970, after serving 14 years. It took the FBI six years and 29 million dollars to track them down after the robbery
DIED. James V. Bennett, 84, innovative director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from 1937 to 1964; of kidney failure; in Bethesda, Md. An early advocate of rehabilitation rather than punishment, Bennett introduced such then unknown reforms as job training for inmates, halfway houses and "open" prisons without bars or armed guards. His efforts met with success: during his tenure, the recidivism rate for released federal prisoners dropped 50%. After his retirement, Bennett continued to work for prison reform and gun control...
...Live Anarchy!" but even before this, the American anarchist movement had already lost its momentum. Anarchism was inextricably linked with terrorism and foreigners in the minds of the American people, and foreign anarchists had been prohibited from entering the country in 1901. Other anarchists were deported, many were in prison, and some had been executed by the time Sacco and Vanzetti died in the electric chair...
Court reform is perhaps most urgently needed in the juvenile court system--the education of criminals begins very early. Juvenile courts now either overreact or underreact; the first mars children for life with prison terms, the second gives them a sense that there are no consequences for antisocial acts. The juvenile courts need more of a choice than jail or a slap on the wrists: some means of instilling a notion of just dessert in young criminals without resorting to homeopathic incarceration...
Silberman goes on to puncture the rightist dogma of severe punishment and electrocution enthusiasm. Certainty of punishment, not severity, deters crime; overcrowded, bestially violent American prisons pile punishment on to no recognizable end, and the animals they create of men make prison government impossible. "The fatal flaw in the traditional approach to prison government," Silberman writes, "is that by expecting the worst, it succeeds in bringing out the worst." Prison government might proceed more efficiently and humanely, indeed more constitutionally, by treating inmates like citizens in a community...