Comment: Beyond Attica

Prison is the only garbage dump we have that is so repulsive we encircle it with barbed wire and a stone wall. You get there in a closed van and the doors of the van don ' t open until the big iron gates have clanged shut behind you. You aren' t released until a group of old men like no old men you ever knew decide you are something like a nice tractable person now. For years you don ' t touch the hand of a woman or child, wear clothing of your own choice, go somewhere on the spur of the moment; you don ' t eat what you feel like eating, talk to whomever you 'd like to talk to, read a magazine you happen to see on the stand and find interesting. That is because there are no women and children in prison (save those beyond the wire grills of visiting rooms), and all the clothing is the same in prison, and there are those walls and barbed wire and bars to keep you from going anywhere at all; it is because the only food you get is what the mess hall manages to set out that day or what you can hustle on the side; it is because conversations in prison are guarded or tight or secret and there are no telephones with which you may have casual chats with casual friends, and there are no magazine stands on which to find that potentially interesting magazine. Prison is a place where all sorts of things are not there. What is there hurts: sameness, bars, guards on towers with guns, guards walking the halls with clubs who find you strange and alien and perhaps even hateful and evil because you 've been adjudged a criminal by a group the law insists represents your peers. They look at you with fear or hate or c o n t e m p t , perhaps only because you ' re a nigger or a s p i c or perhaps just because they don ' t know what is going on in your head, and that alone is frightening enough to make them hate you or fear you. And you t h e m hate and fear are always bilateral affairs. In addition to the guards are the people you must live w i t h o t h e r convicts: suspicious, mean, guarded and as frightened as you are perhaps, surely as mistrusting as you. The days are short, the nights interminable. In most prisons in this country there is little for inmates to do, so men spend up to 18 hours of each day locked in small cells, waiting to be tired enough to sleep, waiting for sleep to descend long enough to break up the boring run of days in which almost nothing happens save an occasional letter from home, a fight to watch, an argument to have, a hustle to make. What work there is in prison is usually demeaning and boring: inmates are paid humiliating wages (New York 30 cents a day, California up to a dollar for a few, Texas nothing at all) for tedious and often exhausting and usually uninstructive work (picking cotton, stamping out license plates on an ancient machine in extreme heat, pushing a mop, a n d y e s e v e n breaking rocks). A good inmate is one who makes no trouble for the institution. He may do whatever he wants -have homosexual affairs, run gambling concessions, deal dope, brutalize his fellows, peddle soft j o b s b u t so long as he is quiet about it and makes no trouble the administration cannot ignore, he will not be bothered by guards and he will be paroled out reasonably early in his sentence. A bad inmate is one who makes ripples, someone who complains about treatment or food or lack of educational oppor tuni ty or humiliation by guards; a very bad inmate is one who talks such things up among his fellows; an outrageously bad inmate is one who suggests to his fellows that they do not have to stand for such treatment, who tells them that the courts may have sentenced them to punishment by incarceration but that does not mean the prison authorities have any duty or right to punish them further. Such inmates do the maximum amount of t ime the law permits, for au thor i t i e s parole boards and suchfee l they are not fit to be released in society for they have not learned how to "get along." California for years has ridden along on the crest of a prison reputation that derived from some pet ty changes it made over 20 years ago. But California prisons are cesspools, where inmates with politically deviant ideas are locked away for years in euphem i s t i c a l l y n a m e d " A d j u s t m e n t Centers," prisons within prisons where men are locked in cells 23'h hours every day and given nothing to do, where guards and convicts engage in a spiraling game of mutual brutalization. There is no appeal from commitment to an Adjustment Center, there is no right to know why one was placed there or who one's accusers are, there is no chance to present evidence on one 's own behalf. California has the indeterminate sen tence -a pret ty idea that says fit the punishment to the criminal and not the c r ime tha t resuits in longer sentences than most other states, for the time in prison is fixed by a board of ex-law enforcement officials all appointed by the governor, and their desiderata of good citizenship have little to do with anything but internal order of the prison. Texas makes sure it has a good parole statistical show by paroling people only very late in their sen tencetha t means there are very few parole violators and officials can say their parole workers do good work. New York's parole system is capricious and arbitrary; people are returned to prison for the silliest of reasons and without the most basic legal rights. In much of the North, prison officials encourage racial disharmony among inmates because they know if the inmates are hating and fighting one another they will have little energy left to hate and fight the prison administrators. Occasionally