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Foreword Institutionalized sanctions of serious criminal offenders mirror the society in which they are applied. Punishment rationales and practices reflect prevailing values. In turn, citizens whose behavior and lifestyles least reflect those values are invariably those most often subject to criminal sanctions. And, as society changes, so too do institutions of punishment. The history of prisons well illustrates these connections between punishment systems and social order.Though lockups have been around for centuries, only in early-nineteenth-century America did prisons emerge as places where offenders were incarcerated as punishment rather than as places for offenders to await punishment of some other type. In a religious society where both individual freedom and personal responsibility were core values and where crime (and the possibility of redemption) was thought to hinge on the will of the offender, prisons became institutions in which extended confinement itself constituted the punishment. Incarcerated offenders were expected to become penitent and to see the error of their ways. Prisons, then as now, were populated primarily by marginalized people whose values and behaviors fall outside society’s socio-legal mainstream. Prisoners typically represent the lowest rungs of society’s life-chance ladder. In the United States, they are overwhelmingly poor, uneducated, and occupationally (as well as criminally) unskilled men. Moreover, racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans, are disproportionately represented in U.S. prisons. In Texas prisons, for example, African American inmates constitute well over 40 percent of the population, three times their proportion in the state overall. A similar disparity exists in prisons across the country. Though activists in the last century sought to eliminate the discrimination in law and practice that disadvantaged minorities in particular, they made only limited progress until the mid-twentieth century. By the 1940s the tide x First available Cell began to turn as the justification for automatic discrimination and routine segregation by race came increasingly under federal scrutiny. In 1948, President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the military in part to recognize the contributions of African American soldiers in World War II, but also due to the increasing social and legal pressures for racial equality in the country. That same year Gunnar Myrdal published his influential American Dilemma, which underscored the long-standing contradiction between the American ideal of individual opportunity and equality before the law on the one hand and the reality of systematic discrimination against minority populations on the other. Then, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” policies, which had held sway since the nineteenth century, were unconstitutional. These decisions targeted discriminatory practices in every institution in the country. And prisons also began to change. Whether separated from society by the high stone walls of urban prisons or the remoteness of southern prison farms, these institutions have historically been places apart. When citizens think about them (seldom), they are viewed as arcane, dangerous worlds best left to the discretion of the wardens and jailers who manage them. Law-abiding citizens have tended to believe that if a felon is convicted, then he deserves whatever happens to him in prison. This attitude was shared by federal and state judges. Through the mid-twentieth century, courts routinely subscribed to a “hands-off” policy of nonintervention , allowing wardens the final say on conditions under which prisoners lived and worked. Consequently, when prisoners, especially minority prisoners, felt they were abused or treated unfairly, they could grieve only to their keepers with no appeal beyond the prison walls. By the late 1960s, however, the civil rights movement and court rulings on behalf of citizens generally gave impetus to a prisoners’ rights movement. Judges began to consider prisoner appeals, and over the next twenty years interventions by the judiciary led to often dramatic changes in prison operations . For example, in 1980 a federal district judge in Texas concluded after years of litigation that operations in the state’s institutional correctional system were broadly unconstitutional and must undergo wholesale reform. Prisons are conservative institutions marked by traditional, informal structures often deemed indispensable by officials and by many inmates who may benefit from these structures. For this reason, judicially mandated changes in how state prisons housed, fed, treated, and controlled prisoners were often met with some resistance. The resistance came not just from a desire to maintain the status quo, but also from concerns that change would undermine prison security and order. And it often did. In Texas, prisons experienced [18.191.202.45] Project MUSE...

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