#life inside

First, it still tries to exact an equivalent in pain and trouble from the perpetrator of the crime. This is the old idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Secondly, it is hoped that confinement in a prison will offset any advantage that might possibly be derived from the crime. This is an appeal to the intellect of the prisoner, an effort to prove to him that, as the popular saying goes, crime does not pay.

Thirdly, the prison provides a place for the secure confinement of dangerous men who for one reason or another can neither be scared into good behavior nor reformed by what might be called Christian methods.

Lastly, the prison has as one of its purposes the reformation of the criminal.

It would be untrue to say that the prison attempts to carry out all these four avowed or implied goals in dealing with each individual that is forced to abide within its walls. On the other hand, it cannot be said that the prison applies only one of these four aims to a given individual. There is much confusion and it is generally quite impossible to decide whether a prisoner is feeling the effect of all four treatments or of only one. .... A prison is, it must be recognized, an unnatural place for a man to live. No animal that was not bred in captivity likes to be shut up. A prison is a cage for men and very, very few would stay in it voluntarily. ... The necessity of preventing or reducing homosexuality, of making the prison escape-proof, and of seeing to it that the weaker types of prisoners are not used by strong cunning ones for their own evil purposes makes it almost impossible for prisoners to live in an atmosphere of normal social relationship.

The advice which a prisoner gets from a warden is "pull your own time." In other words, keep your natural human sympathy to yourself. One must remember, of course, that each prisoner is surrounded entirely by other prisoners all of whom are where they are on account of acts which society deems injurious to itself - men whom one would not normally pick out to be companions for a friend in trouble. There are few adult first offenders in prison, fewer now than in the past, for the gradual extension of probation means inevitably that first offenders unless convicted of some revolting crime will ordinarily be placed on probation. Thus, there are perhaps good reasons for warning a new prisoner not to get mixed up in the lives and doings of other prisoners.

... The good prisoner in the eyes of the prison staff is the man who cheerfully obeys all the rules. Outward conformity is essential to a peaceful life in prison. The man who is "prison-wise" gets along the best. The prison reward for the man who has experienced an inward change is not apparent. Only the Federal Government and a few of the individual states have loosened the grip of the spoilsman on prison jobs. There are good men, no one will deny, among those appointed by political favor but the number of inexperienced and incapable prison officials is distressingly large, for which the spoils system is unquestionably to blame. These are, roughly, the most important of the persistent factors of prison life in the United States forming an ever present social miasma in which all prisoners live.

it is now agreed by most people that prisoners should be reasonably well housed and fed and that they should receive such medical attention as their condition demands. Do these improvements make for the reform of the criminal? In a negative way, they do, for the prisoner will go out with less accumulated bitterness over his treatment in prison. It is doubtful, however, if they exert any positive influence toward reformation, unless the prisoner's crime can be definitely traced, a rare situation in my opinion, to some physical defect or weakness. ... Classification, to which so much attention is now directed, has a little but not much to do with any of the aforesaid purposes of a prison. It relates directly to the cost of housing and guarding prisoners. Minimum, medium and maximum security could be also expressed as low, medium and high cost of building accommodations. To be sure, a man kept under minimum security conditions would have greater freedom of movement and less oversight than if he were quartered with some who might take the first chance they got to run off. But those classified as minimum security risks are not necessarily the best types of men. Some may even be weak-minded or petty but persistent offenders who haven't the energy or courage to make a break. Classification also simplifies somewhat the warden's difficulty of guarding prisoners. Fitting regimes can be devised for the three classes of prisoners with the result that the man who has no notion of trying to escape does not have to endure the restrictions necessarily imposed on those who will try it when opportunity presents. Classification is therefore a useful prison administrative device but the reformatory element in it is small. I would not deny that the reformatory element is present but I feel that its importance in classification has been greatly exaggerated by loose talk of its importance in prison management. It does definitely, however, strengthen the third purpose, namely, providing a secure place in which men addicted to serious crimes may be held. It can be considered the necessary first step in group treatment. ... The organization of prison administration which I shall discuss later is at the present time the stumbling block to their endeavors. Briefly, the presence [of psychiatrists, psychologists, classification and parole officers] on the staff of prisons adds nothing to the idea of exacting an equivalent in pain nor of taking the gain out of crime but it does assist in determining which are the bad actors among the prisoners and is, or could be, of great value to the fourth aim of detention in prison by giving clear, or at least clearer, ideas of the direction that reformation must take, in place of the vague commonplaces usually uttered by those who think reformation to be a compound of salvation, sweetness and light.”

Double Echo - Life Inside / Rupture / Sylvia

Self-released

It is not surprising, therefore, that prisoners joined together in communities to protect themselves from the unfettered and often inhumane authority of the gaol keepers. The inmates chiefly enforced whatever internal order existed in eighteenth century prisons. Added to the woefully inadequate numbers of staff, the architecture of eighteenth-century prisons, which did not take into account the role of observation and inspection in the ability to control, encouraged the flowering of inmate subcultures.

At Newgate, for example, each new prisoner was made to pay a fee to the other prisoners upon entrance. The prisoners used these membership dues to purchase wood, candles, drink and extra food for the group. Failure to pay meant one had to strip naked and run a gauntlet of kicks and blows. The prisoners then sold the clothes to pay the fee. Gaol keepers tacitly approved this custom, and it lasted until the 1830s in some local gaols. The inmate community might also have a rule enforcer, known as the wardsman, selected by the gaol keeper or the prisoners themselves. The wardsman would sometimes serve as judge in mock trials to settle disputes. He could even dole out punishments such as “the pillory” in which a prisoner was forced to place his head between the legs of a chair while his outstretched arms were tied to the seat for a specified period of time. Other disputes were settled with openly condoned boxing matches. Prison officials as late as the 1820s tolerated a boisterous ritual in which prisoners awaiting transportation tore up their bedding and smashed their furniture on the night before they were shipped out. Ignatieff tells us that the eighteenth-century inmate subculture left observers with the "image of an entrenched inmate netherworld, ruling an institution of the state with its own officers, its own customs, and its own rituals."

….late eighteenth and early-nineteenth century prison reformers targeted this thriving subculture in an effort to reclaim the interior of prisons for the forces of order. The hope was that enforcing routines of work, cleanliness and religious instruction would not only wrest control of the prison from the prisoners but also turn those subjected to it from their criminal ways. Such efforts at prison reform were based upon the belief that crime was the result of individual character defects, particularly the inability to control impulses, which could be corrected by a combination of persistent religious influence, an ascetic life-style, and exposure to a consistent routine of work. These ideas lent support to the prison, and in turn the prison produced a focus for the discussion of criminal punishment that tended to carry forward the simplistic and misguided understanding of criminality at its core."