Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week what U.S. Consul General Vernon McAninch billed as the largest transfer of prison inmates in history began. Eight American public defenders had spent three days in Mexico advising the 235 eligible inmates of their rights once they returned to U.S. soil. By week's end two chartered flights had touched down in San Diego, delivering the first 127 American prisoners-including 27 women, one with an 18-month-old baby girl. The rest are expected to arrive in transfers scheduled for later this month and early next year...
...confess, she would be tossed into a river and ground up by a nearby power plant. Another charged that officials had ripped off one of her earrings-and her ear lobe. Male inmates reported being tortured with cattle prods while still dripping from a shower. According to Stark, some prisoners told of extortion demands of up to $40,000 by Mexican lawyers promising to get them released. Before he was transferred from Mexico City's Santa Marta prison, Frank Machado, 29, a Californian who has served five years for smuggling cocaine, said, "I got my nose broken...
Traditionally, a prison sentence was supposed to serve four purposes: 1) rehabilitation, giving the prisoner an opportunity to learn a trade and go straight; 2) to keep him from further opportunity to harm society; 3) the meting out of "just desserts," society's penalty for misbehavior; 4) the deterrent value-a reminder to citizens generally and the offender in particular of the consequences of crime...
...critics say the theoretical soundness of the system is undermined by the discretion accorded everyone involved in setting prison terms, from prosecutors to judges to parole boards. Federal Judge Marvin Frankel, an articulate advocate of sentencing review, tells of a colleague who bragged about adding a fifth year to a convict's sentence simply because he spoke disrespectfully in court. Says University of Chicago Law Dean Norval Morris, another opponent of indeterminate sentences: "Present practices are arbitrary, discriminatory and unprincipled...
...Some prison officials fear that without the incentive of parole, what little life remains in the concept of rehabilitation will be snuffed out. Further, institutions will become even more crowded as convicts serve out long sentences. With only good time remaining as a route to early release, the potential for abuse by prison guards would be heightened as well. Warns George Denton, Ohio corrections director: "Determinate sentencing transfers discretion from the most qualified members of the corrections department to the lowest paid and least educated...