Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
Who Should Go to Prison?
By Graham Hughes
Imprisonment in America: Choosing the Future
by Michael Sherman, by Gordon Hawkins
University of Chicago Press, 146 pp., $15.50
We would all like violent criminals to go away and there are several ways to make them disappear. Capital punishment works best but nobody has yet had the fortitude to urge it publicly on so grand a scale, though such a wish is surely often harbored. For a long time the British managed neatly by transporting felons for lifetime stays in faraway places, but the world eventually ran out of imperial wilderness. America, beset by early qualms about capital and corporal punishment (at least for whites) and being naturally sensitive about 'transportation' of undesirables, was forced to cast around for other means. With New World ingenuity we came up with the grand invention of the maximum security prison for long-term detention.
Review, 3372 words
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