For them, as for Willie and Butch, prison has come all too often to represent simply a rite of passage. Prison is where they expect to go, if they are not killed first. There is also the terrible power of example. The best way to predict who will be arrested and sent to a reformatory, some corrections officials believe, is to check which boys have a father or older brother who has been in prison. Willie and Butch fit this pattern painfully well.
Prisons have another disadvantage-they are a heavy financial burden.
In many states, new laws mandating longer prison terms have forced local governments into prison construction programs that are the fastest-rising item in their budgets. California has reduced funding for its once excellent state college and university system to help pay for its growing number of prisons. Lowering the quality of higher education cannot be a good crime prevention program in the long run. Add to all this another fifty billion dollars a year for the police, and twenty billion dollars annually for the cost of injuries and deaths caused by firearms, and it takes 120 billion dollars a year to pay for our national violent crime problem. If welfare is a failed, dead-end policy, so too is relying on prison to stop crime.