On American prisons - violence

Continuing with a look at Jason DeParle's New York Review of Books article The American Prison Nightmare the next topic to be covered here is prison violence,

The report tells us that America's prisons are dangerously overcrowded, unnecessarily violent, excessively reliant on physical segregation, breeding grounds of infectious disease, lacking in meaningful programs for inmates, and staffed by underpaid and undertrained guards in a culture that promotes abuse. What is more, prisoners' ability to legally challenge their living conditions has been curtailed by a congressional roadblock called the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which has cut in half the number of inmates filing civil rights complaints.

There is some good news. Since 1980 the murder rate inside prisons has fallen more than 90 percent, which should give pause to those inclined to think that prisons are impossible to reform. But programs for inmate education, training, and drug treatment have been made scarce. (If policymakers were once too credulous about rehabilitation, they are now too dismissive.) And physically separating some inmates from the rest of the population (often in conditions amounting to solitary confinement) has become a punishment of first resort, leading to what the commission called "tortuous conditions that are proven to cause mental deterioration." From 1995 to 2000, the number of inmates in isolated cells rose 40 percent to 81,000. Despite the decline in homicide, serious violence is common and recordkeeping so poor it often escapes notice. As the commission met in Los Angeles for its final hearing, two thousand prisoners at the North County Correctional Facility erupted in a race riot.

The three books reviewed by DeParle are:

• Punishment and Inequality in America by Bruce Western(Russell Sage Foundation)
• Confronting Confinement: A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons by John J. Gibbons and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, co-chairs
  (Vera Institute of Justice, available at www.prisoncommission.org)
• Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen (Oxford University Press)