A Dilemma: Overpopulation in Southern Prisons

Bob Powell

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 16-17

“A free, democratic society cannot cage inmates like animals or stack them like cattle in a warehouse and expect them to emerge as decent, law-abiding, contributing members of the community. In the end, society is the loser.”

Judge Charles R. Scott

With these words and the stroke of a pen, in 1976 Judge Scott, a Federal Judge in Florida, found the Florida prison system in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution barring cruel and unusual punishment.

It is not an uncommon thing these days for Southern prison systems to be in this predicament. Across the South since 1975, five states have been told to stop overcrowding their prisons and a sixth, Tennessee, is currently a defendant in an undecided case. Chan Kendrick, the former director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee, who filed suit against the facility said the overcrowded conditions at the Transit Building, a converted warehouse made into a makeshift prison, were “simply unbelievable.”

The main cause of the Eighth Amendment violations in regard to prison conditions centers on overcrowding. The South’s prison systems are the most crowded in the nation. Overcrowding not only means an excess of bodies, but also overused medical facilities and overworked personnel. Funds that could be used for rehabilitation are often used elsewhere.

And despite popular opinion to the contrary, overcrowded prisons are not solving any crime problems. If anything at all, they are creating more. The crime rate continues to go up and recidivism soars.

Five of the top six states with high prison populations in ratio to the general population are in the South. These states, ranked in order from second to sixth, are North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas.

The source of this data, the March 1978 issue of Corrections Magazine, lists four other Southern states as being in the Top Twenty. They are Virginia (12th), Louisiana (16th), Tennessee (17th) and Arkansas (20th).

And who is to blame for this wonderful state of affairs in Southern prisons? Even the administrators, the usual heavies of the correctional system foul-ups, cannot be held responsible for this condition. Prison administrators may be accountable for a lot of the defects of the system, but failing to warn the public about overcrowded conditions in the prisons is not one of them.

According to a New York Times article dated January 24,1976, the prison administrators were trying to warn the Southern Governor’s Conference about the overcrowding crunch at that time.

The front page Times article said, “Southern prison officials are recommending a broad program of liberal reform to relieve prison overcrowding that they agree has reached crisis proportions.”

The Governors had all sent representatives to that gathering. Surely, at least one Southern Governor heard the ringing words that the Secretary of the Department of Corrections for South Carolina, William Leeke, told his colleagues: “I feel personally we are going way beyond locking up the dangerous offender. It would appear, and I believe most of my colleagues would agree, that in many cases we are locking up people where it is totally counterproductive to our purpose.”

Leeke also warned that, “Increased tension and possible violence is the result of all this overcrowding. I know in my jurisdiction we are seeing more assaults of inmates on inmates and inmates on personnel.”

“The first thing that overcrowding does is create tension,” said Leroi X (Mason), an inmate at the Virginia State Penitentiary.

Mason, a recipient of ACLU’s award for defense of the Bill of Rights, said overcrowding also produces crime and theft inside the prison. In Virginia where inmates get paid for the work they do, overcrowding causes unemployment and unemployment causes those inmates without jobs to steal from other inmates.

Despite the warnings, the politicians have found it productive in getting reelected to push for tougher crime laws, longer sentences and mandatory sentencing. In the United States, prisoners are given from two to three times longer sentences than European offenders for the same offense. Plus, they serve up to half or two-thirds of the term, a period considerably greater than the one European prisoners serve for the same offense.

But being rational does not always get the votes. When Federal Judge Frank Johnson of the Middle District of Alabama declared the Alabama prison system in violation of the Eighth Amendment in 1976, Wallace got into his favorite form denouncing liberal, soft-headed judges.

While one expects that from a man who stands in school house doors to block the desegregation of schools, Wallace’s next door neighbor, Governor George Busbee, an alleged moderate, pulled one from the same bag of tricks.

In March of 1978, James Moss, a prisoner at the Georgia State Penitentiary in Reidsville was killed in an interracial scuffle. Sixteen others were wounded in the disturbance.

Prisoners blamed the death and injuries on overcrowded conditions. After all, prisoners pointed out, Reidsville was built for 1,500 and now houses, 2,700.

Busbee blamed the killing on that all time favorite Southern bogey man, race. The Atlanta Journal on April 7, 1978 reports Busbee as saying, “The problem at Reidsville is caused by the integration of the sleeping quarters.”

In Virginia, a state that ranks relatively low in overcrowded prison conditions, one can still see the headaches that overcrowding is causing for that state.

In the early 1970’s, Virginia made plans to close the State Penitentiary in Richmond. Called by its occupants, “the Walls,” the ominous structure, partially designed by Thomas Jefferson, was supposed to be closed by 1978. It is still in operation today and its supposed replacement, the Meckleburg Correctional Center, is already filled to capacity.

In nearby Powhatan County, Virginia, which has numerous minimum security prisons, the state is putting prisoners in old surplus house trailers. Local jails have become so overcrowded that the state refuses to take any new prisoners.

Powhatan County residents are upset about Virginia’s new plans for more prisons there. The residents argued that more jails would turn their county into a “penal colony” where prisoners outnumbered residents.

If that was not enough in Virginia for one year, the Federal District Court for the Western part of the state declared that the Bland, Virginia Correctional Center was in violation of the Eighth Amendment for its overcrowded conditions.

Further South, Alabama was still trying to get around Judge Johnson’s court order and reduce overcrowding. But Alabama was

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finding the going rough.

In 1978, attorneys for the Alabama Board of Corrections admitted that, prison construction “planned or currently underway won’t keep pace with the number of new inmates.”

“The sad thing about prison reformers,” says Gene Guerrero, director of the ACLU of Georgia, “is that they know about the direct relationship between jobs and imprisonment. Yet, they tell legislators that through some new gimmick or new prison, they can deal with the criminal problem, while at the same time researchers are finding in Georgia that 75% of the state’s sharp increase in prison population is directly attributable to unemployment. Despite knowing this, what they propose is building a new prison.”

There were other voices that were warning against locking up prisoners and throwing away the key. One of these was William G. Nagel of the American Foundation, Institute of Corrections, a research group.

On February 9, 1976, Nagel wrote the following letter to Richard Kwartler of Corrections Magazine:

“Any attempt to understand the increase in prison population should start with a study of practices in the South. On December 31, 1965, ten Southern states held 49,435 prisoners. According to your tabulations, the same ten states now hold 86,380 prisoners. That is an increase of 75.5%.”

Nagel also pointed out that the other forty states had prison population increases of just 3.1%, but that the crime rate had increased in the South faster than in the North.

Another study by Nagel’s American Foundation concluded that a state’s rating on conservatism or liberalism had nothing to do with its success in fighting crime.

In a 1977 meeting of the American Correction’s Association (ACA), Nagel and the American Foundation said, “There is no significant relationship between a state’s rating on liberalism or conservatism and its reported rate of crime. However, conservative states have more people incarcerated.”

The key culprit seems to be the law and order philosophy of heavier sentencing, less parole and probation and more time served in jail.

Added to this are stingy legislators who don’t want to give the image to the folks down home that they are coddling criminals or putting up money for country club prisons.

On top of all this is the fact that nobody wants a prison near his home, even if the general populace does favor putting all the crooks away.

The most extreme example of this syndrome of wanting more prisons but not in my neighborhood occurred in Morristown, Tennessee where irate citizens tried to dynamite a 40% completed prison.

Depending on your degree of political realism, some may be shocked to know that New South racism has a lot to do with prison overcrowding. To a pessimist, that overcrowding in prisons might be the new wave to fill the void of what to do with Black folks.

There is a disproportionate number of Blacks in prison as compared to their proportions in the general population. For instance, the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond has a 70% Black population but Blacks constitute only 25% of the general population. Reidsville, Georgia has a 70% Black prison population and only a 30% Black general population. Black prison population proportions in the South are usually double their proportions in the general population.

What comedian Richard Pryor called ‘justus” often passes for justice: Various studies, including one by the ACA, show that Blacks tend to get longer sentences for the same offense and have more encounters with police. “Those who say prison camps are concentration camps for the Blacks and the poor are quite correct,” Guerrero said, “because it is Blacks and the poor who are pushed out of the economy when hard times come.”

Perhaps using something of an overstatement, a Black Virginia mother whose son is serving 75 years in a prison there for the alleged rape of a white woman accurately described this kind of Southern prison: “I look around my church and wonder where all the young Black men are. All I see is women and old men. But now I know. They are all in prison.”

The extreme insult, after locking all these folks up for years, is that study after study indicates that incarceration is a huge failure.

At the 18th annual Southern Conference on Corrections, back in the Stone Ages of 1973, it was noted in a report that “students of prison subculture have long understood that habitual forms of incarceration will increase the likelihood that convicted offenders will persist in criminal activities after their release from prison.”

It’s a social merry-go-round. We put people in jail for corrections and punishment and they come out crazier than when they went in.

At the same conference, so called alternatives to incarceration, even “alternatives to court exposure” were called an “obvious future trend.”

These alternatives have hit upon hard times. Court room alternatives are now overshadowed by plea bargaining and overloaded court dockets.

Alternatives to incarceration such as half-way houses, work release centers, community work sentences, etc. could be utilized to cut down on the prison population. But the percentage of prisoners in these type of facilities has not increased significantly in the last four years or so.

The choices are clear. Just like the man in the Sunoco commercial says about services to automobiles, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.” The same holds true for the prison overpopulation problem. Either society can make a real effort to reduce overcrowding and its root causes, or it can pay later when expensive Federal court cases roll around and when the soaring crime rate and increased recidivism requires more and more of your tax dollars to build more and more caging facilities.

Texas Prisoners Rights on Trial

By Bob Powell

Vol. 1, No. 4, 1979, pp. 11-13, 24

“When I die, I may not go to heaven
I don’t know if they let cowboys in
If they don’t, let me go to Texas
Texas is as close as I have been.”

From Song, “Texas When I Die” by Tanya Tucker

From cantaloupes to oilfields, Texans have always been known for things that are big. A recent prison rights case, the largest to date, is no exception to the rule. The case, Ruiz v. Estelle, now on trial in Houston, is wild and wooly in the best Texas tradition. The U.S. Justice Department alone, who has intervened on behalf of the prisoners, is expected to call 150 witnesses.

In essence, Texas is the tip of the iceberg in a ten-year period in which Southern prison systems have come under greater federal court scrutiny. Interestingly enough, in an historic sense, Ruiz is being fought exactly 10 years after the Virginia State Penitentiary strike in 1968. In that year, the strike led to an investigation by Congress and the FBI and to an offer from the Southern Regional Council to mediate the strike and provide national publicity on the Virginia system.

From this strike came the lawsuit, Landman v. Royster, settled in 1971. It has been the basis for many of the other Southern prisoner rights cases. “Without Landman,” says Salvatore Gonzalez, an ex-convict and an outspoken member of the Prisoner’s Solidarity Committee (PSC) of Texas, “there would be no Ruiz v. Estelle.In Landman the state penal codes began to expand convict’s procedural rights. The federal district court forbade the Virginia state penitentiary system from any longer imposing a bread and water diet, from using chains or tape or tear gas except in an immediate emergency, from using physical force as a punishment, and it also demanded minimum due process protections before a convict lost “good time” (that would shorten his sentence), or suffered any deprivation of his normal prison privileges (such as loss of exercise or communication with other inmates).

The Texas suit used tactics developed over 10 years ago on a larger scale. These tactics include two stages. The first is lawsuits by jailhouse lawyers coupled with strikes and the use of the media. The second tactic is the cultivation of outside activists and gaining their support for actions inside. From Landman in Virginia in 1968 to Ruiz in Texas in 1978, the cases form a pattern.

The roots of the Ruiz case go back eight years. At that time, there were almost a hundred suits filed against the prison system, charging various cruel and unusual practices offensive to the Constitution. A year ago, Federal Judge William Justice consolidated the cases into one class action suit that would affect all similarly situated prisoners in the Texas system. William Bennett Turner of the California NAACP was appointed chief counsel for the

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plaintiffs and the U.S. Justice Department intervened on behalf of the prisoners.

On October 2, 1978, the first stage of the trial began with the plaintiffs, represented by Turner and the Texas ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), presenting their case. Witnesses alleged that prisoners operated on prisoners in surgery and that dissidents such as jailhouse lawyers were ordered killed by convict guards.

A few days ‘later, on October 5, Texas prisoners went on strike. The strike began in Darrington, Texas at a corrections unit there. It spread to other units in the system. The strike apparently fueled emotions between the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC), and the prisoners. Three prisoners were wounded in a melee between guards and prisoners.

At the trial, Edward Idar, assistant attorney general for the state of Texas, compared the situation to Attica in its potential for violence.

Judge Justice, considered a liberal, said “The violence and disruption by inmates may impede the legal proceedings now taking place before my court.” But at a rally in Austin, Texas, Early Bennett of Citizen’s United to Rehabilitate Errands (CURE), a prison reform group, defended the strike action. “We don’t need to be talking about another Attica,” said the CURE leader, “when what we have is a peaceful, legal strike by prisoners.”

Another group that has been heavily involved in the strike support work is the Prisoner’s Solidarity Committee (PSC) of Texas. Gonzalez of the PSC said, “The biggest problem in TDC is the convict guard system,” where convicts are made into guards over other inmates, a system that has vanished from most other prison systems.

At the head of the convict guard system is the tier boss. This is an inmate who makes work assignments and functions like an inmate Army sergeant in that he has subordinates to carry out his orders.

At first glance, it appears to be a rewarding system where inmates take responsibility for each other, but critics of it say that it turns inmate against inmate and allows the stronger inmates to physically, sexually and economically exploit the weaker ones.

“It produces a huge snitch system (network of informers),” says Gonzalez, “whose work is even used in parole hearings. Many inmates have been denied parole on the word of another inmate.”

In disciplinary hearings, Gonzalez says that inmate snitchers and correctional officers are given more weight in testimony than prisoners. Gonzalez also charges that officers who charge inmates with prison violations, often end on panels judging the same offense.

Gonzalez insists the inmate guard system is real and existing. But public information officer Ronald Taylor of the TDC denies its existence entirely.

“We don’t have such a system,” Taylor told Southern Changes, “It does not exist.” However, in the trial, a former TDC official testified that TDC passed a memo

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banning the term “convict guard” and substituted “floor boy.”

Conditions in solitary confinement are another point in the litigation. Gonzalez charges that the solitary confinement is often used to contain troublesome writ writers. Another major point in the suit is that prison officials have systematically denied prisoner’s access to the courts.

Gonzalez, who has spent 12 years in TDC, tells of one alleged incident that seems to be out of the pages of the book Clockwork Orange where the hero, a violent criminal, was conditioned out of his violent behavior by prison authorities and reconditioned to become nauseous at the sound of his favorite composer, Ludwig Von Beethoven.

According to Gonzalez, guards at TDC once placed him and other Black and Chicano prisoners in cells and piped in country music at full blast.

“One guy cracked up,” Gonzalez reported. “He yelled, ‘I can’t stand it anymore.”‘ After being subjected to this rather bizarre incident, Gonzalez however says, “But I like country music now.”

The suit alleges that far more serious abuses, like beatings, near starvation of prisoners and other similar incidents also occur in Texas solitary units. As a result Texas supporters have lodged complaints with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

It was a big thing,” said Gonzalez, “to count beans in your soup while in solitary. It was a big deal to get up to twelve beans.”

Soon after the trial began, prisoners who were witnesses began to send letters to their attorneys claiming harassment and intimidation by prison authorities. The letters allege that everything from death threats, to reassignments, to lock up in solitary have been used as punishment against prisoners who testified.

Ron Taylor of the TDC dismisses the charges.

“They are spurious charges,” said Taylor, “You might add that the defendant David Ruiz has been indicted for sexual assault by a Harris County Grand Jury. He tried to rape another inmate.”

In response to the indictment Gloria Rodriguez, Prisoner Solidarity Committee member, said “The charges are absurd and a frameup as far as we are concerned. David told us several weeks ago of the investigation. The FBI investigated it and found nothing. At that time it was a Federal charge and they dropped it. Apparently, the sheriff involved took the information and gave it to the state Grand Jury. We received affidavits from a prisoner who overheard the sheriff saying to a TDC official, ‘Now Ruiz will know how the shoe feels on the other foot.'”

One prisoner, Allen Lamar, who has filed over 100 suits with the courts, alleged in a letter to Gloria Rodriguez, that he had been threatened with death for his role in the trial. When a call was made to the Texas unit where Lamar is apparently being held, the assistant warden said, “You have to call Huntsville.”

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“Don’t you know who is in your prison?” this reporter asked.

He replied again, “You have to call Huntsville. We have a bad connection.”

Interestingly enough, an anonymous source in the unit had confirmed that Lamar was in lock up the night before. No other details were available.

Supporters of the suit such as Rodriquez are optimistic of its outcome. She insists that public support is on their side. “There are a lot of working people in Texas,” Rodriquez says, “who have friends or relatives in prisons. We even got two petitions supporting us from prisoners in Virginia and Florida. It meant a lot to us.”

To Salvatore Gonzalez, the suit has Southwide implications.

“Northern prison systems are very advanced compared to Southern prisons,” says Rodriquez. “Southern prisons are still fighting to get out of slavery.”

On the TDC side, Ron Taylor expressed a wait and see attitude that was vague and ambiguous in nature.

“They put on the case much as we expected them to,” said Taylor, “It’s too early to tell how things are going.”

If other Southern states are any gauge of how things are going, then the TDC is in for some changes. In state after state in the South, among the defeats have been major victories in court battles. Even the state courts are bending a little in recognizing prisoner rights as witnessed by the Tennessee Supreme Court who ruled parts of the Tennessee system unconstitutional.

Not only is the Ruiz case a test of what is unconstitutional, but also a test of what is enforceable. Considering that even a state court in Tennessee (given the historic reluctance of state courts to intervene positively in the face of constitutional abuses) recently ruled a part of its state’s system unconstitutional, it is not a question of whether there are really abuses going on in prisons. The questions, after 10 years of prison litigation fromLandman to Ruiz, are whether the rulings will be enforced.

Bob Powell is a free-lance writer who resides in Atlanta.

Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris and the Alabama Death Sentence

By om Gardner

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 10-14

“It’s Time for a New Beginning.” proclaims a campaign billboard for Alabama’s new governor-elect, Fob James. With Wallace gone and anyone new coming in, many Alabamans have responded to that slogan with a new sense of hope for their state.

Yet only 15 minutes from that billboard, a few miles from the 1-65 interstate in southern Alabama, stands a grim reminder that the old Alabama is institutionalized in too many concrete forms to be transformed with one campaign slogan.

Stretching for hundreds of acres in Escambia County is a vast plantation owned by the state. There are no stately mansions with white columns and verandas. There are, however, slave laborers. But the slave gangs, while mostly Black, are integrated. In the foggy dawn light they doubletime out to vegetable and cane fields, where they labor from “can-see to can’t-see” under the watchful eyes of shotgun-toting guards on horseback. If a slave should run, haying hounds will chase him down, and whether he returns dead or alive depends on the whim of his captor.

Some historians claim that Escambia County, Alabama, was the last county in the Confederacy to free its slaves. But it is now 1979, and “slave labor” administered by the state Department of Corrections is still the dominant form of labor relations in Escambia County, Alabama.

The name of the “slave quarters” was changed to G.K Fountain Correctional Center when the citizens of nearby Atmore demanded in 1974 that the name be changed to disassociate their town from the notorious Atmore prison. It was Atmore prison that Heywood Patterson in his autobiographical Scottsboro Boy described as “The Southernmost part of Hell.” Many say it still is, despite the name change.

Across the highway is the newer, but no more humane, maximum security Holman state prison. Deep in the rear corner of Holman prison is a chair. It was brought there from the old Kilby prison near Montgomery. With a new coat of yellow paint, it resembles that new plastic furniture with the modern square look. But it’s different – it kills people. Its last victim was a woman in 1965.

In the cells adjacent to that chair are 42 prisoners, all on death row, all scheduled to die by that faceless yellow executioner.

How one of Alabama’s death row inmates got there is a story which, in itself, raises serious questions about the competence of the Alabama judicial system to impose such a final sentence on anyone.

Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris

The facts in the case of Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris are unique in some respects. But in several others his case reveals fundamental flaws in the judicial and corrections systems of Alabama; flaws that any serious “new beginning” in Alabama must correct as its first order of business.

Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris is a 33-year-old Black man who is on Alabama’s death row after a chain of judicial atrocities. He was convicted in February 1975 of first degree murder for participating in a protest in which an Atmore prison guard died. The guard was killed during the violent suppression of the prisoners’ protest in Atmore’s segregation unit on January 18, 1974.

The state did not prove that the inmate, Johnny Harris, killed Luell Barrow, the guard who died. At a July 1975 pre-trial hearing. Assistant Attorney General George Van Tassel stated, “It is not our position that this defendant (Johnny Harris) was actually holding the knife or anything else. We don’t contend that this defendant stabbed the guard.”

It was merely for his alleged participation in protesting conditions later described by Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson as “barbaric, cruel and unusual” and “unconstitutional” that Johnny Harris was sentenced to death.

William Baxley, then Attorney General of Alabama, personally prosecuted Johnny Harris. Apparently aware that he had not proved Harris’ supposed connection to the. death of the guard, Baxley told thejury, “If you don’t want to believe that this defendant is guilty on circumstantial

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evidence, then put it out of your mind and look at the la on aiding and abetting. If you are convinced that any of these people (other prisoners) committed first-degree murder,” Baxley reasoned for the jury, “then Harris is guilty as well.”

The all-White, male Baldwin county jury from which Basley had systematically struck the few Blacks and women in the prospective jury pool, returned a verdict of first-degree murder.

Baxley’s dramatic prosecution of Harris may have been a bid for white “law ‘n’ order” votes in the anticipated governor’s race. But his reenactment of the death sentence brought a memory of horror to many Black Alabamans. To them the death sentence translates into legal lynching as in the case of the “Scottsboro Boys” and many others who were not saved. A definite pattern of racial discrimination in applying the death sentence was documented by Bill Bowers, a nationally recognized expert on capital punishment, at a recent appeal hearing for Johnny Harris. He testified that between 1927 and 1965, 82 percent of all executions in Alabama were of Black people. Bowers also testified that the death sentence is far more likely to be imposed if the victim is White and the defendant Black than if the situation is reversed. In fact there is no White on death row in Alabama for the murder of a Black victim.

Yet, Baxley appealed to Harris’ White jury that, “If we can apply it (the death sentence) here, it will be a start toward bringing it back.” A local NAACP official said, “After seeing Baxley send this young man to the chair I don’t see how Black people could ever vote for him again.”

Baxley dug up an 1862 law used only seven times in Alabama’s history to use against Johnny Harris. The civil war era law mandates an automatic death sentence for anyone convicted of first degree murder while serving a life sentence.

The law assumes that the life sentence itself was received fairly, with all the constitutional protections of due process and effective assistance of counsel. In many cases, particularly those involving Black and poor defendants, that may not be a safe assumption, as we shall see in the case of Johnny Harris.

Railroaded For Desegregation?

In 1970, Johnny Harris moved with his family into an all-White neighborhood in Birmingham. They were met with garbage on their doorsteps, paint and acid on their car, and Ku Klux Klan literature slipped under their doors. The Klan activity in the neighborhood was so strong that members of the Black community on the other side of Border Street, which divides the Black and White areas, were forced to form a protective association.

The Harris family refused to he intimidated. But according to an investigator for the Harris defense team, “This is where the police came in.”

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There were five Birmingham police officers living on the same street as the Harris family. Gary Thomas Rowe, a former FBI informant, testified to a Senate Committee in 1975 that the Birmingham police department worked closely with the Klan in resisting integration. The arrest of Johnny Harris could well have been a result of that close cooperation.

One of the senior arresting officers in the case was Lt. Cook, who, according to Rowe’s Senate testimony, made the arrangements with the Klan for the police to look the other way for 15 minutes while Freedom Riders were beaten severely on May 14, 1961, in the Birmingham Trailways Terminal.

On August 19, 1970, Johnny Harris was arrested on his way to work. According to Harris, his picture was taken, he was forced into a line-up (after his accuser may have been shown his photo), and then he was told that if he didn’t confess to a robbery and a rape charge more cases would be put on him.

The alleged rape victim was a young White teenager with relatives on the police force. Harris was eventually charged with four robberies – of $11, $67, $90, and $205 – and the supposed rape.

Harris gave one of his court-appointed lawyers a list of alibi witnesses who were with him in bars on the other side of town when the crimes were supposed to have occurred. But the witnesses, including bartenders who supported his alibi, were never subpoenaed to appear in court.

The attorney appointed to represent Harris on the rape charge, Louis School, according to jail records, never once visited Harris before his trial date. And he didn’t bother to investigate the alleged rape victim’s medical report.

According to their own testimony in a hearing last April that challenged the five life sentences, Harris’ appointed lawyers waived a preliminary hearing, made no motion I’m hail, failed to question the line-up procedure, neither interviewed the supposed rape victim nor looked at a medical report on the alleged rape, never questioned Harris’ illegal arrest or the warrantless search of his house, made no pretrial motions, and filed no challenge to a jury pool in ss hich Blacks were greatly underrepresented. At the recent hearing, one attorney, School, produced his file folder on the Harris case, with only seven pages of notes in it. In other words, his attorneys prepared no defense at all. And in 1970, Harris could have received the death sentence for a conviction on any of the five charges.

Testifying on his own behalf on those charges for the first time in eight years, Harris explained at the recent hearing what happened when he went to court on April 6, 1971.

School said he didn’t see how I was going to win the case sshen the court was going to take the White woman’s word over mine, because I was Black, and that he didn’t have no intention of bucking the system. He said if I didn’t take the 1).A.’s offer I was going to get the chair. I still wanted to go to trial.

Harris testified further:

Later, they told me they didn’t have alibi witnesses subpoenaed. weren’t prepared to go to trial, and didn’t think I should fight this all the way. They said I should change my plea on the rape case and get the other four dismissed. I was [told] that there was no defense prepared: I didn’t want to get the chair. I changed my plea – not because I wasn’t innocent, but because I had no choice.

Harris thought he was pleading guilty to only one charge but found he had signed a plea to all of them when the trial judge, Joseph Jasper, sentenced him to five consecutive life sentences.

The recent challenge to the five life sentences, called a “petition for writ of error coram nobis,” was conducted before the same judge who sentenced Harris in 1971, in accordance with Alabama law. In the week-long appeal hearing, Harris’ current lawyers put forth strong evidence that Johnny Harris was denied his constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel, but Judge Jasper denied Harris a new trial. In appealing that denial, his attorneys objected that the judge based his ruling, to an extent, on his own opinion that the previously appointed lawyers had done a competent job on other cases before his court, although no evidence was entered during the hearing to support such a conclusion.

On the contrary, a long line of expert witnesses called both by Harris’ defense team and by the state, including Millard Farmer of Team Defense, Ralph Knowles of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Prison Project, and noted Alabama lawyers, judges, and law professors, testified that the trial preparations by Harris’ appointed attorneys did not meet minimum standards of competent

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representation, particularly in capital felony cases.

The decision of the lower court was upheld by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and is now on appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court.

In Prison – A Struggle For Survival

The rest of Johnny Harris’ story is bound up with the desperate lives of thousands of Alabama’s prison inmates.

Faced with inhuman conditions, Alabama’s prisoners took that action which Frederick Douglas said separated the slave from a beast of burden – they rebelled.

In 1972, the prisoners, tired of ignored petitions to the public and the courts, staged a 100 percent effective workstoppage. While sugar cane rotted in the fields, the administration tried to defeat the strike with every tool at their disposal.

They threatened mass punishment with guns pointed at the prisoners sitting down in the yard. The prisoners held firm. They tried to divide the White prisoners from the Black – the prisoners remained unified. Finally, they beat, transferred and isolated over 300 prisoners, hoping to disperse the “ringleaders.”

The partially successful strike ended from a combination of repression and promised reforms. But the administration swore to destroy the prisoners’ organization, the Inmates for Action (I FA). All of the officers of the I FA were placed in Atmore’s segregation unit.

Johnny Harris, like many other prisoners, protested the conditions. In 1973 he was charged with attempted escape and placed in the segregation unit. Here he took the name Imani, which means Faith.

Even in the dark recesses of Atmore’s segregation unit, the IFA continued to conduct meetings by shouting down the hall from cell to cell. They conducted daily classes in reading and writing, political education, history, and legal and physical survival in a “lecture hail” of cells where, as Imani later write, their classmates were “familiar to them only by voice, not by sight.”

On January 18, 1974, guards entered the segregation unit with bloody uniforms, after beating an IFA member at Holman Prison across the street. According to prisoners, they said, “We ought to kill these revolutionary niggers, the way we killed Clanzy,” as they started to reach for bats and ax-handles.

Fearing that an attack was imminent, two prisoners who were out of their cells grabbed two guards hostage and freed the other prisoners from their cells within the segregation unit.

When the warden arrived he was informed by IFA Chairman George “Chagina” Dobbins that the prisoners’ sole demand was to see certain named members of the press, clergy, legislature, and prison administration in order to expose the beatings and conditions to the public.

The warden, Marion Harding, according to prisoner witnesses, told Chagina, “You’re a walking dead man.” Harding, a few minutes later, led a shooting attack by prison guards on the prisoners. The warden ordered one of the guards to shoot Chagina Dobbins. Dobbins was incapacitated by the ensuing shotgun blast of birdshot in the side.

Harold E. Martin, editor and publisher of The Advertiser Montgomery and Alabama Journal, investigated the incident immediately. On February 15. 1974. he wrote in The Advertiser:

The Board of Corrections released a statement from a “fact-finding board” that Dobbins was killed by gunshot during the riot.

But State Toxicologist Nelson Gruhhs. who viewed Dobbins’ body at Mobile General Hospital, said that Dobbins died from nine stab sounds in his head caused by a heavy.sharp instrument wielded with enough force to penetrate the frontal bone in to places.

Who stabbed Dohbins and when is a mystery!

That “mystery” never resulted in any criminal indictments b the state of Alabama. even though Dobbins was apparently murdered after being shot and while in the custody of state officials.

One of the prisoners charged with the killing of the guard-hostage was Frank X. Moore. Moore was released from prison shortly after the incident, but was re-arrested at the gate on the murder charge and held on an impossible S250,000 bail in Escambia County Jail. While awaiting trial. Frank X. Moore, an IFA member, was “found” hanging in his cell. Sheriff Scotty Byrnes said it was “suicide.” But autopsy photos indicate a struggle.

Two months after the incident in Atmore, another IFA member at Holman Prison was beaten to death. Tommy “Yukeena” Dotson had smuggled out to a visitor a “death

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list” of IFA members allegedly found on the warden’s desk by a trustee. According to the Mobile Press Register, the warden denied the existence of such a list. But on March 12. 1974, Tommy “Yukeena” Dotson, said to be next on the list after Chagina Dobbins, was killed. He was removed, naked and handcuffed, from his cell, and, according to testimony, on the order of a captain, was beaten with ax-handles until his skull was caved in. Undisputed inmate witnesses said a second group of guards then came along, beat him some more, and threw his limp body down a flight of stairs.

An attempt by the state to cover up this murder by prosecuting other IFA members for an alleged escape attempt supposedly planned with Dotson, fell on its face. The state’s witnesses so contradicted each other’s testimony that Escambia County Judge Douglas Webb directed a verdict of “Not Guilty” for the accused inmates. But when this reporter asked Attorney General Bill BaxIcy 1 the state would prosecute any guards for the murder of Dotson, he replied, “There was no criminal negligence: they were doing their job.”

The guards were also “doing their job” during the January 18 Atmore rebellion. At the murder trial of IFA member Gamba Mani (Oscar Johnson), Paul Echols, a White inmate from Georgia, testified:

When the guards came in shooting, some of us got in cells… They told us to come out with our hands behind our head or we would get shot … As we got to the lobby, they beat us while they made us strip … They took all of our a itches, rings, and money . . . and stomped on them. Then the made us crawl on our hands and knees putting our hands and heads on the next man’s ass while they heat us. I Iic made us hark that day. I guess to low grade us and iiov, us the were superior.

Another inmate, Claude Harris, testified,

The guards lined up on both sides of the wall and beat us as we crawled through their gauntlet. We crawled up to the visiting room. There were two tables there, one for signing a statement, and the other for medical treatment We had to make and sign a statement before even getting patched up.

Instead of either indictment or reprimand for this barbaric group torture. Warden Marion Harding was praised by the Attorney General. Baxley said at the Harris trial, “The State of Alabama can be proud to have men like Warden Harding in charge of its institutions.” With the “mystery” of Chagina Dobbins’ death still hanging over him, Marion Harding left the Alabama prison system to take an administrative job with the federally-funded Law Enforcement Protection Agency, and has since become Auburn, Alabama’s police chief.

Meanwhile, Johnny “Imani” Harris sits on death row fighting against an execution for a crime he didn’t commit in a place where he should never have been. With a dedicated team of lawyers, and growing national and international support, Imani and his hard working defense committee are hopeful that his execution can be stopped. But such a triumph for justice, however important, is only the beginning.

Imani wrote in a recent letter,

Before the U.S. government goes degrading other countries about the way they treat theirs and American prisoners, why don’t they look at the way American prisoners are being treated here in this country. Where they and we are still citizens. Yes, stop and look at the way these prisons are run and the way we are treated.

In his Inaugural Address on January 15, Fob James told his public, “It is time to end racism and discrimination in Alabama.” If the new Governor truly wants to give Alabama a “new beginning,” there is no more pressing place to stop, look and act than the Alabama prison and judicial systems.

Tom Gardner is an Atlanta free-lance writer who is active on the defense committee for Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris.

Segregation Order at Reidsville Prison

By Ginny Looney

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp.19-21

In southeast Georgia last summer, the day before Independence Day, a decade of legal precedent was overturned at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville when U.S. District Judge Anthony Aliamo ordered the segregation of dormitories for a 60-day period. The segregation order, issued to cool tempers and ease the tension, came after one prisoner was killed and five others were wounded during a racial fight, one of a series of revengeful attacks since November 1976 that killed five inmates and injured 47. The court told prison officials to assign Black and White inmates to alternating dormitories in checkerboard fashion; the cell blocks, dining hall, recreation and work areas remained integrated.

The court-ordered segregation marked the first time in modern history that a federal judge had directed a state to separate prisoners by race. Although prison officials said they opposed the order as a misguided and potentially troublesome attempt to end racial attacks, the state complied with the order without a legal challenge and later asked for an extension of it. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, representing the prisoners, also did not appeal the judge’s decision, preferring to publicly remain silent on segregation while privately negotiating for better conditions at the prison.

The 60 days of segregation grew to eight months finally ending in mid-February. The state vacillated and LDF acquiesced to the judge’s decision, thereby accepting the premise that separating the races was the only way to restore peace at Reidsville. Their illusion was dispelled in only a few weeks after the order was issued when racial violence again erupted in July and August.

Aliamo ordered the segregation as part of the Guthrie case, a class action lawsuit filed in 1973 to seek reform at the state prison. In 1974 one of case’s earlier orders, Aliamo required the state to integrate Reidsville and rejected requests to have segregated dormitories.

On at least four occasions since the state law requiring segregated prisons was found unlawful in 1968, integration at Georgia State Prison had been attempted but violence caused the experiments in integration to be short-lived. Therefore, Aliamo’s order continued a ten-year tradition at Reidsville of reverting to segregation to resolve racial violence.

The segregation of 1978, like its predecessors, was justified by arguments of security. Marvin Pipkin, a Brunswick attorney Aliamo appointed as special master in the Guthrie case, says he recommended the temporary separation of White and Black prisoners to the judge to return order to the prison and save innocent lives. “There were so many rumors and so much tension in the prison. I felt that if we separated the prisoners for an intervening period of time and let things cool off, it would help the situation. We were trying to stop the senseless assault of Whites and Blacks on each other,” he said.

“I felt the need for the life and health of inmates was more important on a temporary basis than saying to the prisoners, ‘Well, you’re going to have to live together’,” because there’s a Supreme Court decision which says that prisons have to be integrated.

The arguments favoring segregation in prisons may not have been modified over the past ten years, but in this case the party responsible for initiating the decision to segregate was unique. While prison officials acting alone have segregated prisoners by race for a few days and judges have permitted such racial separation, no judge has been known to use the power of the federal court to affirmatively order segregation, even for a short period of time.

“In Washington v. Lee (the Alabama case which first declared unconstitutional state laws mandating racial segregation in prisons), the court left open the possibility of segregating prisoners if race could be shown to be a specific problem. It’s my understanding that the judge took this case one step further by issuing an affirmative order to

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resegregate,” says Ralph I. Knowles Jr., associate director of the National Prison Project, which is affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Aliamo not only required the racial separation, but he also issued the order without the plaintiffs or defendants formally requesting it. “I don’t think either side particularly approved the action,” said Pipkin. “At the time they were saying they wanted to try something else.”

However, the only people publicly disapproving the court-ordered segregation were civil rights and prison reform groups. “It’s the worst sort of cop-out – to lay the problems at Reidsville on integration,” said Gene Guerrero, director of the ACLU of Georgia. “The conditions at Reidsville, which concern overcrowding and the way inmates are treated, go back 40 years.” After Aliamo extended the segregation of October for an indefinite time period, Tyrone Brooks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said, “I don’t believe this is the answer. It just makes people believe the only reason the problem of killings and violence is there is because of integration.”

In contrast, the prisoners’ attorney expressed only resignation when he said the order demonstrated how bad the situation had become at Reidsville. Although the LDF lawyers did not support the judge’s decision to segregate, they also did not initially oppose it and allowed it to continue unchallenged for eight months. Instead of seeking a reversal of the decision, the lawyers chose to continue discussions with the state’s attorneys on the unresolved issues in the Guthrie case, including the process of reintegration.

No challenge was made, says Steve Winter, an LDF staff attorney, because no one thought the original 60-day order would be prolonged for several months. In addition, “(t)here’s the problem of whether we could have won on appeal to the Fifth Circuit,” says Winter, who inherited the case in September. “We hoped that negotiations with the judge and the defendants would be more successful than litigation.”

The state’s position on the court order was even more muddled. Prison spokeswoman Sara Passmore says, “We particularly felt it wasn’t the solution because the major conflicts haven’t occurred in the living areas.” Her boss, Prison Commissioner David Evans criticized the “checker-hoarding” order when it was issued, particularly the time requirements. “When you pull inmates out to live in their own races for 60 days and then reintegrate them, I cannot see anything viable that will come of this,” he said. Two months later after two more racial fights at Reidsville, E vans wanted an extension to the 60-day deadline.

Gov. George Busbee supported Evans in his request for a delay in the reintegration of the dorms. The governor said to reporters, “I assume that the commissioner felt that the commissioner felt that we would be anticipating more violence if they were to be integrated at this time, before we were able to come up with the changes that we’re making down there in order to make this a maximum security facility.” At the same time the newly appointed warden of Georgia State Prison, Charles Balkcom, was suggesting that the cell blocks follow the segregation pattern of the dormitories. The confusion resulting from the contradictory statements – opposing segregation but wanting it continued and even expanded finally caused Evans to deny that the state had requested segregation and prompted the state Board of Offender Rehabilitation to reaffirm its commitment to integrated prisons.

The uncertainty surrounding the state’s position on segregated facilities was partially produced by statements prison officials and the governor made last spring before segregation occurred. While Busbee and then Reidsville Warden Joe Hopper said they countenanced integrated prisons because it’s “the law of the land,” they also made clear they thought that integration had caused much of the violence at the state prison. Following four racial fights one night in mid-March which killed one prisoner and injured 16 more, Hopper said, “I really don’t think they (federal judges) understand the problem. It’s not because they haven’t been made aware, because they know what the problem is. It is just that the law of the land of this particular philosophy (of civil rights) has to be enforced at all costs,” which he estimated as the lives of at least five inmates and many sleepless nights for him. Two weeks later Busbee told reporters, “I don’t think it’s humanly possible to totally prevent murder in prisons. The problem is coming because of integrated sleeping quarters.”

A critic of the state’s handling of problems at Reidsville disagreed with the governor’s explanation of the violence. After a fight in the prison gymnasium in June which injured nine men, Atlanta Voice columnist Charles King Jr. wrote, “Last week’s violence served the state well. It reinforced the official position taken by Reidsville officials and Gov. Busbee that Reidsville problems stem from forced integration. It is a thin alibi that pretends, ‘If the courts had not ordered us to integrate, we would have no conflicts.'”

Paradoxically, the most violent riot of the year and the first murder of a guard by inmates inside the prison in the history of Reidsville occurred three weeks after segregation was ordered to prevent more killings. On July 23rd a group of Black inmates being escorted to dinner overpowered their guards and took the keys. The inmates rampaged through two dormitories for nearly an hour, burning mattresses, killing the guard and two prisoners and injuring another guard. All the victims were White. In a racial attack on Black inmates less than a month later, White inmates in an integrated cell block killed one Black man and wounded three more while they were preparing for work.

The incidents show that segregation clearly doesn’t work to hold down violence, says Winter of the LDF. “If anything,” says Passmore, “it created greater power struggles.” Knowles of the National Prison Project says, “Once you segregate, you’re only asking for suspicion, paranoia, hostility and accusations that one group is given privileges

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that the other isn’t.” Warden Balkcom insists, however, that the segregation had a quietening effect.

Regardless of Balkcom’s observation, the state’s assignment to provide protection for every inmate may well prove as difficult to fulfill after the interlude of segregation as it was last summer. The obvious improvements have been made: the population has been reduced from 2,800 inmates to 2,100, and 125 additional guards have been hired. The state is under court order to maintain a 55 percent Black and 45 percent White population in the dormitories until single cells are constructed. But the problems of providing adequate facilities, meaningful activities and humane treatment at Georgia State Prison remain. The more immediate concern of dealing with people who may not want to sleep next to members of another race lingers. It is not clear that the state can fulfill its obligation.

One reason for the state’s difficulty may lie with its crew of predominantly rural, White guards who are paid to protect a predominantly urban, Black population. Suspicion and hostility exists between the two groups. Black prisoners have complained that the guards encourage tension and mistrust by allowing White inmates to keep weapons; the guards protest that they are wrongly blamed for the violence of the prisoners.

After repeated accusations that guards were passing weapons to prisoners, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted an inquiry at Reidsville. Two guards were fired and 16 more resigned, primarily for smuggling drugs to prisoners, says Passmore. During the investigation Busbee said at a press conference, “There is, in my opinion, some evidence that a very limited number of these crudely fashioned weapons made in the prison, that their presence was condoned by a limited number of correctional officers.”

Winter cites the state’s lack of vision as another problem. When attorneys filed the state’s plan for reintegration last fall, it essentially said, ” ‘Trust us. We’ll do it by July 1979,’ ” says Winter. “Our experience is that the state hasn’t come up with a sophisticated response to the problem.” Expenditures support Winter’s contention that the state’s primary thrust has been the improvement of security for guards at the prison. The state appropriated $1.2 million after the guard’s death, primarily for equipment to protect the employees.

The guards won priority in another decision concerning inmates – their role in the process of reintegration. During the 1974 integration of the prison, community relations specialists worked with inmates to prepare them for the change. “The idea was to work from within and give inmates the feeling that they have a role in their destiny,” said Winter.

Such an active role for prisoners in February’s integration did not happen because of the abortive life last spring of the Inmates Unity Council, an integrated group of prisoners who wanted to reduce the violence and also negotiate for improvements in living conditions. The guards opposed the warden’s recognition of the IUC and threatened to sue the state. In August, Hopper, the warden who recognized the inmate council, was replaced by Balkcom, who stated he would never negotiate with inmate representatives. With Balkcom directing the reintegration process, it is doubtful prisoners will be given much responsibility for maintaining harmonious race relations. Yet, without seeking the help of prisoners in eliminating racial antagonism, it is difficult to foresee a reign of peace.

The ironies abound in this case of court-ordered segregation. A federal judge, the symbol in the 1960s of the federal government’s efforts to ensure equality, returned in the 1970s to the Southern way of segregating the races by law; indeed, the very judge who ended segregation at Reidsville in 1974 was responsible in 1978 for its resurrection. A civil rights group responsible for many landmark desegregation cases accepted the order to segregate without protest. A “New South” governor elected with the support of a majority of Black voters relied on an old refrain for explaining the cause of the violence. Finally, the racial violence, which segregation was expected to end, viciously reoccurred.

The judge’s decision to segregate the dormitories at Reidsville becomes one more example of the public retreat from a national commitment for racial equality. As one observer noted, “It’s interesting that a federal judge has recognized that at least in one institution a remedy against an old injustice is now itself a source of danger … (and) it’s very, very sad.”

The court’s experiment in partial segregation has proved as ineffective as wiring a fat person’s jaws to vary regular eating habits. With the artificial barrier removed, the prisoners must still try to live with members of the other race without fighting them, and prison officials must proceed with their attempts to contain violence. Segregation could not eliminate racial attacks at Reidsville unless it was expanded to include complete separation of the races at all times. No one, not even the White prisoners who want the checkerboard dormitories to continue, has suggested total segregation.

Unfortunately, the absence of moral leadership in this situation provides little encouragement that the state will be ready to adopt more costly and politically unpopular alternatives to preventing violence. Segregation has only succeeded in stimulating that dark racist side of humanity to manifest itself. For once segregated conditions are created, especially in a place where men react to problems through violence, it becomes more difficult to return to integration.

The one possibly hopeful result is that the state will finally abandon its unhealthy reliance on separation of the races as a means for overcoming racial antagonism. Surely the events of the past eight months have discredited such simplistic reasoning as integration causes racial violence, or segregation prevents it. If not, our public officials will be conceding that they lack control over the prisons and fostering inevitable triumph of racism.

Ginny Looney is a researcher studying the effects of rape on women and the ways they resolve problems caused by the assault.

Games Prison Bureaucrats Play: The Story of the Olympic Prison

By Andy Hall

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp.22-25

In 11 short months the small village of Lake Placid, nestled high in the Adirondack mountain range of upstate New York, will provide the setting for the 13th Winter Olympiad. President Carter will preside at the opening ceremonies to symbolize the Olympic tradition, and, no doubt, to enunciate the desire of the American people for world peace and freedom for all people.

The best athletes of some 40 nations will live together for three weeks of intense competition. The Olympic spirit of international cooperation and community, perhaps most tangibly represented by the Olympic Village, will captivate radio and television audiences around the world. Then the contests will end, the medals will be awarded, and the participants will head home. And finally, if all goes as planned, the Olympic Village will be quickly converted to the latest addition of what the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, minister at New York’s Riverside Church, recently described as the American Gulag. Olympic Village will become a federal prison!

For some the idea makes sense. For Olympics organizers, it is a free ride on the federal government. For area politicians, a federal prison may mean a few jobs for unemployed mountain people as prison guards. For prison bureaucrats, the Games provide a quick and easy means of further expansion. But as news of the Olympic Village-to-prison idea has spread, many others have been instantly appalled.

The prison conversion scheme was brought to life in early 1976 when Congressman Robert McEwen, representing the people of the Adirondack region – though perhaps

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more specifically the interests of the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee (LPOOC) began going door-to-door among the federal agencies in Washington hoping to find one that would consider using the athletes’ housing complex planned for Lake Placid Games. It seems that Congress had appropriated construction monies for the complex and the other sports facilities on the condition that an appropriate afteruse be guaranteed upon the completion of competition.

McEwen and the LPOOC were beginning to become desperate in the Spring of 1976, since construction for a facility to house, feed, entertain and provide medical care for 1800 athletes and trainers in February 1980 needed to be funded and scheduled right away. Then McEwen heard ft Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Norman Carlson had Congressional authorization to build a prison somewhere in the Northeast. Carlson, as it happened, had a plan from a prison the Bureau had just built in Memphis, but he had located no site in the Northeast for the youthful offender prison he had convinced Congress he needed.

Carlson listened to McEwen’s eager description of International Olympic Committee requirements for an Olympic Village, including the security features deemed necessary in the aftermath of the tragic attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games. He then opined as how it sounded just like one of his youth facilities.

For McEwen it was, “the answer to our prayers”. And though Norman Carlson had stated his firm philosophy in the June 1979 Congressional hearings, “that new institutions should be as close, as we can humanly get them to where the offenders are from, and where we can find staff and other resources,” on the other hand the Adirondack Enterprise quoted the opportunistic prison bureaucrat at a June 1, 1976, news conference at Lake Placid as saying, “As far as the location (of the proposed prison) goes, it’s great.” Lake Placid Mayor Robert Peacock voiced his approval that day as well. “It’s the most sensible idea anyone’s come up with yet,” he said.

Still, for months the prison afteruse plan floated quietly through various executive channels as an obscure budget item. Republicans McEwen and Carlson, and the minions of the Ford Administration developed a simple, effective strategy. Through the magic of bureaucratese the prison plan was artfully designated as a “secondary use”. The Olympic Village, as a facility to house contestants for only three weeks, became termed the “primary use”.

The word play would afford Director Carlson a handy and needed alibi when the conversion deal bobbed to the surface early in 1977 in President Jimmy Carter’s first budget. At that point Carlson claimed that, due to the unfortunate absence of any other federal need for the facility, the immediacy of the scheduled Winter Games, and the purely “secondary” nature of the prison afteruse, the Bureau of Prisons had no apparent choice but to concede the feasibility of using the building and, with great reluctance, take possession. Also, as the so-called “secondary” user, Carlson could also profess innocence and ignorance of the transmission of the budget request to the Hill for the needed $22 million appropriation. This was the perfect ploy to bypass a sometimes troublesome step for ‘the Bureau in the legislative process.

Representative Robert Kastenmeier’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties and the Administration of Justice, with responsibility for federal prison policy oversight, posed a threat to the Carlson-McEwen plan. Carlson knew from bitter experience that the oversight panel would not take kindly to the idea of locating a 500-bed prison in the remote hills of upstate New York.

In 1975 he had been called down by then-Subcommittee member Herman Badillo (D-NY) for locating a 500-bed prison in Otisville, New York, some 120 miles from new York City. Badillo had angrily criticized the Otisville location as far too distant for prisoner relatives and friends, and without needed local resources and a racially representative workforce pool.

The Director had been forced to promise the Subcommittee “. . . that we will consult with you in the future.” Thus, the Kastenmeier panel would undoubtedly be a tough row to hoe for a proposed prison not 120, but 350 miles from New York City or Boston, the urban centers from which the facility would draw the bulk of its young population over the years.

In early 1977, just before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, the $22 million appropriation to locate a 500-bed youthful offender prison in the Adirondacks was cloaked as a “secondary use”, inserted in the budget as a supplemental appropriation for the fiscal year already half over, and slipped past the important policy oversight panel.

For there on it was a laugher for the fellows at the Bureau: Kastenmeier and fellow subcommittee members read about the Lake Placid prison in the papers – a fait accompli. Kastenmeier himself fumed but remained silent. Father Robert Drinan, also on the oversight panel, was infuriated. But he would be the only panel member to publicly condemn the supplemental budget secondary use maneuver. Father Drinan drew up a lengthy statement protesting the Olympic Village afteruse decision as made without benefit of full discussion or careful planning. He called the process “irresponsible.”

But with the Judiciary Subcommittee neatly sidestepped, the Appropriations Committee passed on the plan, disregarding Drinan and the criticisms of two of its own members, Yvonne Burke of California and Joe Early of Massachusetts. Though Burke and Early warned the disadvantages of the plan far outweighed the immediate, convenient short-term benefits, they were paid no heed. Construction was scheduled to begin the next month, in

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April 1977.

The remarkable history of the federal prison system since Richard Nixon’s ascension to the White House in 1969 is appreciated by few. It is, or has been, the least visible of the virtually invisible prison empires across the country. It is the largest of all incarcerating agencies in the U.S., operating 51 prisons and holding approximately 27,000 people at an annual cost (this year) of over $330 million.

The Bureau has led the national prison boom throughout the decade, adding 24 new prisons more than 9500 bedspaces – since the inception of the Nixon/Mitchell/Carlson Long Range Master Plan for prison expansion in 1969. That Master Plan generated federal prison construction over the last ten years equalling that of the previous 40 years of the Bureau’s history, with the agency pushing huge requests for bricks and mortar through the Congress in the early 70s with no real opposition.

Prison crowding has served as the most consistent rationale for the Bureau’s annual expansion requests, as it has for nearly every other prison system in the nation. Conservative politicians have voted for expansion, convinced that judges would fail to imprison dangerous criminals if prison capacity became insufficient. Liberals have supported prison growth, seeing no other way to alleviate a lack of individual cell space and the attendant health, privacy, and security problems.

Yet, no jurisdiction in the nation has been successful in resolving prison crowding through construction projects, as prisoner numbers have quickly swelled to fill added capacity, leaving prisons crowded once again. At this point, approximately 175,000 jails and prisons beds are planned across the country at a total cost in excess of $5 billion. The Southern states, traditionally the most dependent on imprisonment, account for 40 percent of known expansion plans.

The size of the 18-30 component of the population (particularly the minority segment of that group), worsening unemployment, and generally increased use of incarceration, have combined to inflate American jail and prison populations by 50 percent in the last five years, to nearly 600,000. This phenomenon has outstripped the most ambitious expansion programs. All the new American prisons have left the U.S. with the highest rate of incarceration among Western nations, with the sole exception being South Africa. (Georgia, now apparently the nation’s most enthusiastic user of prisons, even significantly exceeds South Africa, with one of every 234 Georgians behind bars at last count. One of every 47 Black males in Georgia is in jail or prison.)

The proportion of minorities present in the federal prisons has grown steadily since 1969, due to the quite unsurprising fact that sentences given Black and brown offenders are much more severe than those given Whites, even for first offenders. In fact, simple racial parity in sentencing would empty six 500-bed prisons in the federal system.

In January of 1975, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee decided to fund an office in Washington, D.C., the National Moratorium on Prison Construction (NMPC). The National Council on Crime and Delinquency, which had earlier called for a halt to additional prisons, joined in support. The Moratorium office was founded in the belief that prisons did little but exacerbate the problem of crime and that crime victims and the public in general had nothing to gain from the imprisonment of increasing numbers of persons. Prison construction requests were seen as the most strategic occasions in the crime policy process at which to advocate drastic curtailment of the practice of caging. The Moratorium project immediately began to investigate Norman Carlson’s agency.

If only beginning to fathom how the Lake Placid plan had come to pass, prison moratorium advocates in Washington and New York immediately recognized the significance of the government’s plan. It was a clear violation of Carlson’s stated policy on the location of Bureau institutions. The 500-bed youth prison could be guaranteed a Black and Puerto Rican population of 65 percent or higher, practically cut off from families and friends.

The campaign to “Stop The Olympic Prison” got underway in the Fall of 1977 as the National Moratorium office and its affiliate organization in New York (NYMPC) began working intensively. In New York, the leadership of the New York State Council of Churches moved to support a STOP organizing staff. From Washington to New York, STOP began the process of rallying broad support in order to bring the Olympic Prison plan to national atten

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tion.

Little by little, the David versus Goliath effort began having an effect. Due to the persistence of STOP and NMPC organizers, and the usual media interest in the staging of an Olympic competition, the plan involving the Olympic Village quickly gained stature as a significant controversy.

Criticism also spread quickly through the religious community, generating scores of resolutions opposing the prison from churches and regional denominational organizations. Many athletes and former Olympians were shocked by the conversion plan.

Significantly, athletes, religious figures, and prison critics from several of the countries sending participants to the Winter Games have also joined the STOP protest. Italian, French, Dutch, East German, Swedish, British, and Canadian opposition has been registered with the Carter Administration, Congress, the Bureau of Prisons, and Olympic officials.

As principal STOP organizer Brian Willson points out, the Olympic Prison controversy presents a clear international issue. “Other nations are wondering about our integrity and our dedication to the spirit of the Olympic Games in light of the U.S. decision to let this building become a prison,” Willson says. Indeed, the Carter Administration is very much aware of the contrast between U.S. afteruse plans and those made by the Soviet Union for the Moscow Summer Olympics later next year. The Moscow Olympic Village will be used to provide needed housing for Russian citizens after those Games.

The Soviet plans are doubly ironic for Americans approaching next February’s Games; First, it was known that a critical shortage of low-cost housing existed in Lake Placid. Yet, that need was rejected in afteruse deliberations, resulting in the appropriation of additional federal and local funds to build housing for senior citizens on another site in the area. Second, there have been many political rumblings about the idea of a U.S. boycott of the Moscow Summer Games due to the treatment of Ginsberg and other dissidents. One must wonder how Americans would react if the Russians went so far as to plan to convert their Olympic Village into a prison.

As the Winter Games draw closer, “Stop The Olympic Prison” organizers and supporters have considerable hope that the prison conversion plan will be averted. Two important factors may interact to cause Bureau of Prisons Director Carlson to relinquish the prize he grabbed three years ago. Illustrating the purely speculative venture of projective prison populations, the number of people held by the Bureau has fallen sharply over the past 18 months. At the same time, the desire of the U.S. Olympic Committee and associated amateur athletic organizations to establish a permanent athletic training center at Lake Placid has become clear.

The U.S.O.C.’s training site selection committee notified New York Governor Carey that its conditional selection of the full committee is expected soon. Although U.S.O.C. officials have not openly sought use of the Olympic Village as a part of the complex they envision, an athletic afteruse appears more and more attractive to others involved due to the heightening controversy over the ill-conceived prison plan.

Last December, Jim Anderson, Director of the quasi-governmental New York State Task Force on Sports and Physical Fitness, detailed the needs of such a permanent training center to STOP organizers. Adequate housing, medical, dining, and administration facilities would be required. Also, space would be needed for a planned sports physiology diagnostic center, a facility to improve exercise, dietary, and medical practices for athletes in training. Anderson said he could see no reason why the Olympic Village could not be easily adapted for such purposes instead of the planned prison use. Another large complex would need to be constructed in the area if the Village could not be used. A distinctly unwelcome prospect for those already outraged at the extensive environmental damage done in the construction of the Village facility.

Letters to President Carter and Kastenmeier have come in great volume from all over the country. The Wisconsin Congressman has reportedly received more personal letters on this issue than on any other during his II terms in Washington. Still, protest leaders believe Kastenmeier is waiting to see if anti-prison sentiment is sustained in the early months of the session before deciding whether to take a STOP amendment to his colleagues. And even if the prison is stopped, the larger issue of the need for thorough inspection of sentencing practices and the lack of community alternatives to imprisonment throughout the federal criminal justice system must come to the fore if the STOP campaign is to achieve its real goal.

For prison moratorium forces the Olympic Prison plan has presented an unexpected opportunity to reach more people in their effort against more prisons in the U.S. The STOP protest has already resulted in greatly increased visibility and support for the moratorium idea. Hundreds of letters to the Congress against massive prison building proposals and attempts to draft a harsh, new federal criminal code (last year known as Senate Bill 1437) have brought at least temporary success on the federal level. While the Lake Placid conversion plan represents only one in a long line of new federal prisons, it now serves NMPC and others as a perfect case in point of haphazard and cost-defective practices on the part of a federal bureaucracy just now receiving the close scrutiny they feel it has long deserved.

The Olympic Prison has brought the spotlight to a critical national question: Should scarce public resources continue to be invested to build further to America’s jail and prison capacity, or should the public and policymakers use the information and alternatives at hand to build paths away from the prisons? In just a few months, the world can learn whether “the land of the free” will open another lonely outpost in the American Gulag. Or will Jimmy Carter’s words at the opening ceremonies about the Olympic tradition ring true? The STOP folks hope you won’t sit and wait to find out.

Andy Hall was a coordinator in Unitarian Universalist Service Committee’s National Moratorium on Prison Construction, for the Washington, D.C., office for two-and-a-half years before moving to Atlanta recently to work for NMP in the Southern states.

Southern Women

By Liz Wheaton

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 22

After July 2, 1976 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executions could be resumed under certain circumstances, state legislatures clammored to enact “constitutional” death penalty statutes and, as of June of this year, 512 people inhabit America’s Death Rows. Six of the condemned are women, and each of these is a Southerner.

Their sex is but one of the factors that make these women unique residents of the Southern executioners’ holding pens. Although Black and other minorities make up more than 47 percent of male Death Row inmates, all of the women are White. And while death sentences are not uniformly given to men who murder their wives or lovers, half of the condemned women were convicted of killing men with whom they were intimate. Two of these women received the death sentence in North Carolina (for the same method of killing, poisoning) and the others are from Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Texas.

If their court appeals are rejected, the North Carolina women will die in the gas chamber; the women in Florida, Georgia and Alabama will be electrocuted; and Texas will have the distinction of killing the first American woman by the “scientifically superior method” of lethal injection.

While much of the death penalty’s barbarity lies in the act of execution itself, the conditions of confinement on Death Row may well be more brutal than the final agony of death. “To wait like this is to die every day,” says one woman. And for the women, it may be worse because there are so few of them.

All Death Row inmates are isolated from the rest of the prison population, but the men can take some small comfort in the fact that because none of them are solitary residents they have companions on the cell block. They are within hearing distance of other human beings at all times, and most of them need only look up to see another’s face across the corridor.

Women’s prisons were not built to house Death Row inmates, so the women are confined in isolation cells which are ordinarily reserved for violent or psychotic prisoners. Customarily prison administrators recognize that minds snap quickly when deprived of human contact and therefore, rarely hold inmates in isolation for longer than a month or two as punishment. The women under sentence of death, however, are in permanent isolation.

With the exception of a guard who slides the meal tray under the steel door three times a day, most Death Row women may not see or hear another person for days. Their outside contact is limited to their attorney, a minister or psychologist, and a few family members – if their families will have anything more to do with them. For the most part, though, they eat alone; sleep, read and cry alone; and live in near-solitude in a cinder-block dungeon which may or may not have a window.

Remarkably, the women on Death Row for the most part have not been debilitated by their experience. Seventeen-year old Debra Bracewell in Alabama has experienced a religious conversion and is taking a high school equivalency course. Becky Machetti corresponds with and offers encouragement from her isolated cell in Georgia to any prisoner who writes to her. Sonia Jacobs has become a jailhouse lawyer and has filed suit against the Florida State Correctional Center for Women charging sex discrimination in her treatment as a female Death Row inmate.

Velma Barfield, however, has indicated that she will not allow her appeals to go beyond the North Carolina Supreme Court. The state’s gas chamber has been freshly painted, new leather straps have been secured to the sturdy wooden chair, and a woman may lead the ghoulish procession of death.

While different from the men of Death Row, the women also show their own diversities. They are teenagers and grandparents. They are high school dropouts and college graduates. Some are gentle and others are violent; sane and insane, weak and strong. They’re really not so different from free people.

Male or female, Death Row inmates do share a common trait: they are poor, powerless… and they shall die to serve as an example to the rest of us that killing is wrong. By this bizaare standard, states have a deadly equality.

Liz Wheaton is a staff associate for the ACLU Southern Women’s Rights Project in Richmond, Virginia.

Mandatory Sentencing

By members of The Law Project

Vol. 2, No. 4, 1980, pp. 5-7

There is a great push on, in the media and among politicians, to institute mandatory sentencing and to otherwise impose more stringent sentences. Unless strongly opposed, this effort will likely be successful in the next session of the Georgia General Assembly. People are concerned with crime and the uncertainties of modern living, and they crave certainty. However, mandatory sentencing is not the answer. It will merely aggravate the present problem: too many people, particularly young men, are being sent to prison.

The Georgia penitentiary system is a crime. It brutalizes people, gives graduate instruction in crime and is seriously dangerous to your health. The United States regularly incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the so-called free world except South Africa, and Georgia is regularly at the top of the list of states in per capita incarcerations. (We’ve also had more executions and lynchings than any other state.) Why do we pay such a price for social order when others don’t seem to have to do so?

Most “crimes” in Atlanta and elsewhere are committed by young men from about age 15 to 25. (We use quotes here because there is more white collar and board room stealing, but a good part of that goes unpunished, is lightly punished or isn’t even against the law.) A large number of persons caught and sentenced are Black. Blacks make up 60 percent of the prison population but only 25 percent of the general population. The Black incarceration rate nationwide is about eight times more than White incarcerations.

Poor Blacks are particularly apt to get a time sentence when for the same offense, a middle class White person would skate

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by. (Lawyers have a motto: innocent till proven broke.) Poor Blacks will be particularly affected by harsher sentences, too. For example, the Atlanta Journal & Constitution (September 9, 1979 at 5-D) reports that in 1974 only 18 percent to 33 percent of those convicted of embezzlement, fraud and tax fraud went to prison and only for a year to a year-and-a-half. But 38 percent to 60 percent of the people convicted of burglary, larceny and auto theft went to prison for an average of two-and-ahalf to five years.

The prison system is one of the last bastions of raw White racism. Middle class Blacks don’t like to make an issue of this because they don’t want to be accused of being soft on crime (much like moderate Whites in the 50s and 60s didn’t want to be tagged as a “nigger lover”). But, it is time for all concerned citizens to be upset by the inequities of the so-called criminal justice system.

If putting more people in jail for longer periods would promote social order, it might be justifiable. But it won’t. Statistics show that the rate of recidivism for persons who have been incarcerated is much higher than for persons who are given alternate methods of treatment, such as work release. And keeping people in prison is expensive in itself. This society will lose all the way around. A few years ago we did away with jury sentencing in Georgia on the ground that there was too thuch disparity in sentences. Judge sentencing did not solve the problem and has resulted in just as much disparity (and it allows the State to pistol whip defendants into guilty pleas, sometimes, by holding over their heads the certainty of a harsh judge-imposed sentence if they don’t give in).

If anything, we need to go back to jury sentencing which allowed a community voice in punishment after hearing the mitigating and aggravating circumstances – rather than going further down the slippery slope to mandatory sentencing. The proponents of most of the mandatory sentencing plans try to make them more palatable to people of conscience by saying they are merely trying to eliminate “disparity” in sentencing. The media has avidly purveyed this line. But a principle sponsor, State Sen. Bud Stumbaugh of DeKaib County, blew this cover by declaring “that determinate sentencing would help cure ‘judicial leniency’.” (Atlanta Journal, Sept. 18, 1979 at 10-A.)

David Evans, Georgia’s Commissioner of Offender Rehabilitation and not known as a bleeding heart, sees mandatory sentencing and attempts to repeal the good time allowance for what they are. He opposes the proposals, saying “I don’t want the State to overreact and start changing laws to say that we have to keep people in prison longer.” (Atlanta Constitution, October 10, 1979 at 3-C.

As anybody who reads the Atlanta newspapers can see, they are cultivating an air of hysteria over the “rising crime rate”. For example, the Journal, on September 17, 1979 ran a frontpage story under a headline claiming that “Leniency Trend Thwarts Justice”; an accompanying story was headlined “Disparity Marks Prison Terms.” The thrust of the “Leniency” story was that in a half-dozen or so cases the recipients of short sentences went on to commit another serious crime. The existence of recidivism is hardly news; it would have been much more interesting for them to have told us what percentage of the people receiving various kinds of sentences become recidivists. In our experience, for example, a great majority of our clients who receive probation haven’t entered the criminal justice system again.

The newspapers’ recent scare articles never seem to mention a September 9, 1979 reprint in the Journal/Constitution “Perspective” section of a report by the director of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s Information Center. That author makes a convincing case that it is the reporting rate, not the crime rate, that is on the rise. Citing statistics gathered by the Bureau of the Census from crime victims, rather than from police reports, he concludes that the overall rate of serious crime has remained essentially stable for many years. “Thus,” he says, “the phenomenon of drastic increases in crime rates is explained by the fact that law enforcement agencies have been dipping ever deeper into the vast reservoir of unreported crime.”

One thing everybody agrees on is that the mandatory sentencing proposals will cost us taxpayers a lot of money. More judges, courtrooms, prosecutors, bailiffs, clerks, jurors, and other functionaries to handle the

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increased number of trials will result from the lessened opportunities for plea bargaining. And the longer sentences will require more jails, prisons, wardens, guards, and bureaucrats.

If the legislators are really interested in reforming sentencing, reducing disparities, and saving money, they would do well to study California’s fairly new sentencing law This law holds almost all sentences below about six years and removes a good bit of the judges’ discretion. We don’t know whether we believe California has the answer or not, but it’s at least better than the double digit sentencing proposals we’re seeing here.

The preceding article was provided by members of The Law Project in Atlanta.

Vengeance and Justice

By Steven Hahn

Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 22-24

Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century South. By Edward L. Ayers. Oxford University Press, 1984.384 pp. $24.95

The glass and steel that now form the skylines over Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, Houston, Greensboro, and a good many smaller cities may symbolize the South’s new found cosmopolitanism, but the recent spate of executions in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia reminds us of the cultural peculiarities that began to distinguish the region by the early nineteenth century and still manage to leave their imprints. The code duello, lynch law, the convict lease, and the county chain gang have of course, passed from the scene. Yet, in the incidence of violence and the meting out of harsh justice the South continues to hold invidious distinctions: the highest homicide and assault rates, the greatest number of handguns, and the most inmates on death row. This is a nation experiencing unprecedented rates of violent crime and renewed acceptance of capital punishment.

The apparent continuity of Southern distinctiveness of these regards cannot fail to impress. It should not, however, obscure significant changes in the nature and conceptualization of crime and punishment, particularly during the 19th century as the South moved from slavery to freedom. For it is in the very changes that the meaning of Southern distinctiveness may be discovered. So Edward Ayers, a talented young historian at the University of Virginia, suggests, and his new book, Vengeance and Justice takes us far along the route of discovery.

The route is difficult and treacherous, replete with wart paths, false leads, and blind alleys. Much is shrouded in the haze of myth and shibboleth. Ayers is mindful of the dangers and respectful of those who have made the journey before him. Nonetheless, he pushes ahead boldly and ambitiously, shedding fresh light on older trails while charting many new ones. His scope is at once regional and local, sweeping across the Southern states and then focusing in upon three different areas of Georgia so as to explore patterns of crime and punishment in considerable detail: Greene County in the Black Belt; Whitfield County in the Upcountry; and Chatham County along the coast and dominated by the city of Savannah.

Ayers begins with the antebellum period and an examination of the social and cultural underpinnings of Southern violence and justice. Like Bertram Wyatt-Brown before him, he finds a system of honor-wherein one’s own worth was determined by the judgment of the community -to be the prevailing field of force, encouraging extremes of behavior, acute sensitivity to insult, and personalized settlement of disputes. Unlike Wyatt-Brown, he situates honor within a specific grid of social relations while recognizing the strong countervailing currents produced by the South’s links to the increasingly bourgeois North and the increasingly important market economy. Honor, Ayers

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reminds us, thrived historically in hierarchical, economically undiversified, and localistically-oriented societies, and its roots in the South would have withered, as they had withered in the North, were it not for slavery. More than anything else, the master-slave relationship helped insulate the South from the economic and cultural forces associated with the alternative system of dignity and self-worth. But the insulation was never complete, and although traditional patterns of crime and punishment persisted in many areas up to the Civil War, Southern states began to build penitentiaries and white Southerners began to debate the issue of institutional confinement in a language of republicanism that touched the entire nation.

Ayers highlights the parameters of continuity and change in his meticulously researched local studies, where he utilizes quantitative and literary evidence. Thus, in the rural plantation and nonplantation counties, violent crime loomed largest, relatively few cases went to trial, and convicted offenders normally received fines as penalties. Defendants, for the most part, came from middling economic ranks and if they had not committed an act of violence it was likely that their offenses involved drinking, gambling, or sexual misconduct. Indeed, fluctuations in the “crime rate”had little to do with the cycles of the marketplace and a good deal to do with various campaigns against “immorality.” Crimes against property-ever pronounced in the North- were rare, but at the same time punished most severely: of the few rural offenders sent to the state penitentiary, the majority had committed property crimes. The affected parties, of course, were white and usually male; slaves were subjected to plantation justice lest their offenses were capital or committed off the plantation when the state stepped in and, significantly, devoted careful attention to proper procedure. Significantly, too, when cases involving slaves reached the courts, the conviction rates were about the same as for whites.

In antebellum cities such as Savannah, where ties to the market economy and bourgeois world were more extensive, the dimensions of crime came nearer to approximating the North. White offenders tended to be outsiders, often immigrants, from the poorer classes; property crime proved more common; authorities resorted to the penitentiary more frequently; and the onset of economic depression, as in the late 1850s, triggered a dramatic rise in incarceration rates. Still the majority appearing before the local courts had committed an act of violence, testimony to the power and pervasiveness of the South’s code of honor.

If Savannah anticipated some of the vectors of social change, the Civil War and Reconstruction propelled them forward while giving them a distinctive aspect. With the bonds of enslavement severed, black people entered, however ambiguously, the South’s civil society; and the relations of the marketplace spread, however haltingly, through the region. With the plantation system in disarray, landowners surrounded private property with newly defined and sharpened hedges so as to limit the economic alternatives available to ex-slaves. The result was a rather different “configuration of crime and punishment,” yet one that would “endure for generations to come.” The ebb and flow of crime, in town and country alike, came to follow the fortunes of the economy, with a considerable surge evident during the depression ridden 1870s. Offenses against property furthermore, became increasingly common, and defendants in the plantation counties were now overwhelmingly black. Finally, institutional confinement, especially for the swelling number of convicted black offenders, emerged as the first rather than last resort.

The numbers soon overtook the institutions, however, and although Southern legislatures planned to build larger penitentiaries, county and state officials looked for alternatives to the already crowded jails. They eventually found one in the convict lease. But as Ayers demonstrates in an excellent chapter-length account, there was nothing automatic or inevitable about the rise of the lease, and its early history was filled with irony. Indeed, while many Southern states turned to the lease as a temporary expedient, blacks as well as whites, Republicans as well as Democrats, share some responsibility for perpetuating it. The 1860s and 1870s saw “cautious experimentation,” as leases ran for relatively short periods and convicts worked chiefly as agricultural and railroad laborers. By the 1870s and 1880s, the lease’s moorings had been firmed and convict labor concentrated most heavily in mining, particularly in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee. Handsome profits there were, both

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for the state governments and the lessees.

Yet Ayers perceptively views the lease as more than one of the many parvenu schemes befitting the “great barbecue”; he views it as an integral part of the larger transition from slave to capitalist social relations. For in the South, as in other post-emancipation societies, various forms of forced labor bridged the path from the old order to the new. It required a lengthy campaign on the part of free workers and the urban middle classes before the lease was laid to rest; even then the death throes were protracted and the legacy ambiguous.

Ayers concludes his study with a close consideration of the vigilante violence-lynching and whitecapping-that swept the Black Belt and Upcountry during the 1880s and 1890s. Reluctant to “over-explain,” he nonetheless sees the contradictory intersection of honor, republicanism, and the market provoking a social crisis. Intensifying white dread of black men violating white women did reflect the premium that honor placed upon female chastity, male virility, and the integrity of the patriarchal household. But by the 1880s a new generation of whites and blacks eyed each other across an ever-widening chasm, adding fears born of ignorance to the deeper fears born of the tenuous social balance that had characterized relatively insulated and hierarchical communities. Lynching harked to the tradition of retribution and public humiliation, and it was no accident that black victims were often considered outsiders by both races in a particular neighborhood. The great upsurge in lynchings, however, also dramatized the disintegration of relations and norms that had given the antebellum system of honor some structure of order. And it was not simply a question of race, for the increasing penetration of the market into white counties turned the wrath of communities against whites who violated local custom or represented the intrusive forces of the outside world, whether they be Mormons or federal revenue agents. If slavery served as the foundation of Southern distinctiveness before the war, the gradual and peculiar transition to capitalist relations continued to set the region apart. Jettisoned by the educated middle class, honor and its code of vengeance were perpetuated during the twentieth century by smalltown folk, and the lower classes, white and black.

Vengeance and Justice is at its weakest in examining the legal re-definition of crime after the Civil War and the very specific social contexts in which “crimes,” as distinguished from general acts of violent retribution, occurred. We learn relatively little about what Ayers acknowledges to be a wide-ranging process whereby the law mediated the transformation of social and property relations: changing patterns of crime provide evidence more of the impact than of the substance and historical meaning of the transformation. At the same time, we do not get much of a feel for the subjects or circumstances in the story; we are, by and large, offered aggregate statistics instead. It should be said, of course, that the court records leave much to be desired in this regard and Ayers has done an impressive job simply in compiling the cases. Nonetheless, given the challenging insights into the social dimensions of crime that have come, most notably, from recent studies of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century Europe, Ayers could have culled a bit more even from his limited resources. That he did not do so in part reflects some of the book’s thematic ambiguity: Vengeance and Justice is both about more and about less than crime and punishment in the nineteenth century South.

Shortcomings aside, Edward Ayers has written a book of enormous interest and genuine importance. His work contributes compellingly to the debate over the character of the South and the transition from slavery to freedom, and will serve as an indispensable guide for students who wish to pursue the many lines of inquiry that Ayers has opened up. Without question Vengeance and Justice helps to raise the discussion of Southern distinctiveness and the South’s painful legacies to a new level of sophistication.

Steve Hahn teaches history at the University of California at San Diego. He is author of The Roots of Southern Populism. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1983).

Cells for Sale

By Harmon L. Wray, Jr.

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 3-6

The rush to transfer government services and functions from public to profit-making hands has lately found its way to the “field” of incarceration and corrections. The current leader in this new growth industry is the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, chartered in January of 1983 and financed by Hospital Corporation of America founder Jack Massey of Massey Burch Investments, Inc., the South’s largest venture capital company. According to CCA president and former Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Tom Beasley, the Corrections Corporation of America alma to ~be to jails and prisons…what Hospital Corporation of America has become to medical facilities nationwide.”

Declaring that “the market is limitless,” Beasley (age 43) hopes to “solve the prison problem and make a lot of money at the same time.” CCA currently has seven contracts to own and/or manage detention centers, treatment facilities, jails and workhouses for federal and local jurisdictions in several Southern states–three in Tennessee, one in Florida, two in Texas (for illegal aliens), one in North Carolina. But this is small potatoes compared with what CCA intends to do: take over the entire prison system of particular states, and prepare for a bid on the federal system. “The private jail market is ripe,” reports Barron’s, the business weekly. “And it is brokers, architects, builders, and banks-not the taxpayers-who will make out like bandits.. In less than a year, CCA has more than doubled the size of its staff, now at 500.

The proposal CCA made to the State of Tennessee in the fall of 1985 was the boldest move yet in prisons-for-profit and showed why the company is considered the most aggressive and well-connected of the capitalist corrections firms. CCA initially proposed to buy out and operate the state’s prison system, under federal court order since 1982, as well as build and manage two new prisons (later expanded to five new institutions). Thanks to effective lobbying by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the CCA bid was tabled last year by the Democratically-controlled state legislature. The action came during a special session called for the prison crisis by Republican governor Lamar Alexander, a CCA supporter who once rented a garage apartment to law student Tom Beasley. Alexander has spent seven years overseeing an unconstitutional prison system but has never set foot inside one of his state’s prisons.

This year, the General Assembly, under the influence of nine full-time, high-powered CCA lobbyists paid an estimated $100,000, passed a more moderate privatization bill. Before the session Tom Beasley had

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said, “I intend to get a chunk of this system.” Soon he will: the 180-bed Carter County work camp opens September 1, probably under CCA operation. But the legislation (which AFSCME plans to challenge in court) prohibits further privatization of Tennessee prisons for three years.

The ambitions of Beasley and other prison entrepreneurs are not limited to Tennessee. In fact, once CCA lost its bid for all Tennessee prisons, it pursued a smaller “chunk” primarily in order to avoid the embarrassment of having no home-state contracts to advertise in its sales pitch to other jurisdictions. Last December Beasley said that if the Reagan administration decided to sell the federal prison system (as the The Wall Street Journal had just reported it might), CCA would make an offer. CCA was one of three firms bidding for the multi-million dollar Moundsville, W.Va., prison, site of a New Year’s Day prisoner rebellion. Reportedly, CCA has been working on proposals for state prison systems in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Misissippi, and Kentucky, as well as several western states. At this writing, CCA contracts to operate jails are pending in Sante Fe, N.M., and Key West, Fla. Meanwhile, CCA’s Tennessee competitor, Corrections Associates Inc. (CAI), recently landed Tennessee and Alabama county jail contracts and a prison consulting contract with the Alexander administration. CAI’s good fortune came on the heels of the resignation of its new president, Hubert McCullough, as Governor Alexander’s finance commissioner.

The McCullough-Alexander connection is only one of many personal, business, and political linkages evident in the prisons-for-profit field. Like CAI’s McCullough, CCA lobbyist Tom Ingram, 39, a former journalist and social worker, has been a prime mover with the anti-labor Tennessee Business Roundtable. Ingram also managed Alexander’s two winning gubernatorial campaigns and served as his chief-of-staff for four years before forming his own public relations and business consulting firm. Others in the CCA-Alexander circle include CCA stockholders who are current and former Alexander cabinet officers, CCA administrators who are former state GOP chairpersons, a CCA lobbyist who was a Democratic state senator, and two prominent public figures who in 1985 sold their CCA stock to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest: Honey Alexander (the governor’s wife held $5,000 of stock) and House Speaker Ned Ray McWherter ($33,000), the Democratic nominee to succeed Alexander. In this fall’s general election, McWherter faces former Republican governor Winfield Dunn, a Memphis dentist who became a multi-millionaire as an executive for Hospital Corporation of America. Both Dunn and McWherter have called for the state to experiment with private operation of some prisons.

Another connection is the US Military Academy. Before graduating from Harvard’s law and business schools, CCA treasurer and major investor Doctor R. Crants was Beasley’s West Point roommate. CCA stockholder Samuel W. Bartholomew, of the Nashville law firm Donelson, Stokes Bartholomew, was their classmate (’66).

Three of Bartholomew’s children are also stockholders. Another West Point alum and major CCA investor is T. Don Hutto, the corporation’s executive vice-president. Hutto, an ex-prison guard who became commissioner of corrections in Virginia and Arkansas, has since 1984 been president of the American Correctional Association, which oversees prison accreditation standards. Unlike other corrections-related professional associations-the National Sheriffs Association, the National Conference of State Trial Judges, the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners, and the American Bar Association–the ACA under Hutto’s tenure has supported prison privatization.

While the prisons-for-profit trend has national dimensions, CCA leadership has focused much of the attention onto the South, where all of CCA’s current contracts and most of its financial backers are located (investors include Vanderbilt University, Hospital Corporation of America, and that symbol of public service delivery, the Tennessee Valley Authority, itself often the target of privatization initiatives). Many members of CCA’s management staff have worked in corrections departments in Southern states, including Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama.

Critics of corporate punishment have raised a number of issues which call the privatization trend into serious question. Tennessee Attorney General Michael Cody and the ACLU National Prison Project note that the state would retain ultimate legal and fiscal responsibility for assuring private prisons’ compliance with state and federal constitutions and court orders. It also appears clear that governments cannot contract their civil liability to private concerns. Noting CCA’s lack of a track record in operating a state prison for long-ternm adult offenders, Cody also questions its estimates of operating and capital expenses and doubts the state’s

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ability to buy back its prisons in case of a private firm’s bankruptcy, incompetence, or unwillingness to continue. Cody suggests that privatization might encourage the public to believe, mistakenly, that Tennessee can solve its corrections problems simply by building more prisons.

A 1985 Tennessee legislative report points out that privatizing does not mean that construction costs are not a liability of the state; rather, the liability has been deferred.” Mark Gray of AFSCME wonders if an artifically low cost presented in an initial contract would lead to government dependency on the private firm, making it “impossible to resume operations in the future without huge capital investments. The private contractor is then in a position to raise its prices” in order to maximize profits. Former Minnesota corrections chief Ken Schoen has pointed to “defense” contractors’ use of similar tactics as a way of “capitalizing on the public’s fears to assure an ever-expanding system, while the basic insecurities remain.”

Closely associated with such economic concerns is the question of just how a private firm will be able to operate prisons as inexpensively as it claims. Public employee unions like AFSCME and the Tennessee State Employees Association point to workers’ loss of civil service rules and benefits under private prison managers, along with the possibility of lower wages, a minimal workforce, an anti-union atmosphere, and inadequate training of correctional officers. It may be no accident that corrections capitalists’ favorite hunting ground for contracts has been the historically low-wage and under-unionized South. And, whether they are called “prison guards” or “correctional officers,” those workers who staff our society’s cages are already among the lowest paid of all government employees.

Certainly, prisoners themselves could suffer harmful effects from possible cost-cutting for the sake of profit maximization. CCA’s initial proposal to Tennessee proclaims the intention of developing a “full-employment economy within the correctional system.” Given the history of Tennessee’s and other Southern states’ “privatization” and “profitization” of prisons, one might be excused for expecting some contemporary variations on the old convict lease systems and chain gangs. Journalist Ronnie Dugger’s discomfort over the proposed privatization of the Texas prison system might also apply to other Southern states: “In the company prison, we will be putting state-sentenced inmates under the command of the employees of the corporation and forcing the state-sentenced inmates to labor for the profit of the corporation. What will keep a privately-owned Texas prison from being in its very nature a state-created system of slave labor for private profit?” Constitutionally, slavery is legal as punishment for crime, and our Southern prison populations are, of course, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black and Hispanic.

Apprehensions on the part of prisoner advocates and those who abhor slavery may not be unfounded when one considers the professional history of T. Don Hutto, the man CCA touts as its foremost corrections expert. The CCA’s executive vice-president’s career includes a stint as warden of the Ramsey Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in the 1960s, when the system of using inmates to guard and discipline other inmates, later outlawed in federal court, was “at its strongest,” according to the Texas Observer. A 1985 article in The Nation reported that during Hutto’s tenure as corrections commissioner in Arkansas the US Supreme Court ruled that state’s prison system unconstitutional and found that officials “evidently tried to operate their prisons at a profit.” “Inmates were required to work on prison farms ten hours a day, six days a week, often without suitable clothing or shoes, using mule-drawn plows and tending crops by hand….Punishment for minor misconduct included lashing with a wooden-handled leather strap…and administering electric shocks to ‘various sensitive parts of the inmate’s body.’ The trial court called the prisons ‘a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world.'” When confronted with this criticism, a CCA offical responded that The Nation essay was “a libelous article” and that Hutto had in fact cleaned up the unconstitutional Arkansas system.

The questions raised by Hutto’s track record and by a look at the history of profit-making out of the hides of prisoners were echoed by Michael Walzer in The New Republic: “Helpless men and women have never fared well at the hands of profit-seeking entrepreneurs. The incentive system is all wrong. Who will look after the interests of prisoners? Who will be watching the prison owners as they run their ‘own’ business?”

Prisoners and their advocates in many Southern states lock at the decades of class-action litigation efforts to remedy their unconstitutional prison systems (now ten years in Tennessee) and wonder how much longer it would have taken had the prisons been

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privately owned during that time. The potential for foot-dragging and buck-passing would surely increase substantially under private ownership and implementation of state functions. The Tennessee Senate Speaker’s favorable response to the privatization concept speaks volumes: “If somebody else ran it, somebody else would be in court. We wouldn’t.”

An analogy with recent corporate mobility trends, another point made by Walzer, is especially striking when seen in a Southern context: “This is probably the chief economic advantage of privatization-that it offers a (temporary) escape from the enforcement of constitutional norms. The resulting savings are like the profit added when a factory moves from a union to a non-union territory. If the union catches up, the old situation is restored. Similarly, if the courts catch up, we will find oursleves again where we are now, with judges struggling to do what state legislatures and Congress ought to do-reform the prison system.”

Perhaps the most critical flaw in the privatization move is that it is inherently expansionist. A corporation paid per prisoner and per diem will look to lock up more and more people for longer and longer stretches. Recall the historic Southern practice of determining the county sheriffs’ pay according to their jail counts. CCA’s Tennessee proposal assumed a steadily expanding prison population (despite the falling crime rate), and its preferred per diem method of being paid has already led to cost overruns for local taxpayers at its Chattanooga penal farm.

The US locks up a larger percentage of its population than any country in the world, with two exceptions: South Africa and the Soviet Union. Some of our Southern states rank even higher than those nations. We ought to be reducing our costly, ineffective, cruel, race- and class-biased overreliance on incarceration in favor of community-based alternative sentences for non-violent offenders, such as victim restitution programs. Other effective alternatives to incarceration include intensive probation, community service work, victim-offender mediation, and required drug and alcohol treatment, GED preparation, vocational training, and job placement. Such options are used frequently with white collar criminals, but perpetrators of street crimes are scarce in these programs.

Organizations such as AFSCME, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Sheriffs Association, the Vera Institute of Justice, and the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners have all voiced the fear of an inevitable expansionism in this new “growth industry.” Vera Institute’s Michael Smith, noting that “the private sector has an enormous investment in stimulating demand,” fears corporate advertising campaigns to heighten the public’s fear of crime and trigger a “lock ’em up” reaction resulting in an increasing number of cages, captives, and dollars.

NACJP director Mark Cunniff, calling CCA’s Tennessee takeover proposal “incredible,” points out that “private contractors can lobby in ways that a public agency cannot.” When those doing the lobbying are close friends and political advisers of governors and legislators, many of the traditional lobbying techniques will be unnecessary.

Perhaps Ken Schoen has put it best: “Private operators whose growth depends upon an expanding prison population may push for ever harsher sentences. With the public’s unabating fear of crime, and the lawmakers shrinking from any move that appears to be soft on criminals, the developing private prison lobby will be hard to resist. Any drop in the crime rate will be attributed to long prison sentences. An increase will add weight to the call for more prisons. And the taxpayers will finance the profit-makers while double-locking their doors at night.”

Michael Smith says that the scenario sketched out above “worries me enough so that I want to look first at making government innovative and responsive.” This points toward a possible third option, between the inefficient and incompetent status quo and the CCA-type prisons-for-profit. Walzer suggests, “…we should deputize nongovernmental agencies to perform some prison-like functions….we all might benefit, prisoners, too, from a little flexibility, unorthodoxy, experimentation. But this will have to be the work of nonprofit agencies, with publicly recognized programs and explicit authorization. We should not be contracting out, as if these were not our prisoners; we should be bringing new ideas into the orbit of public service.”

The most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from all this is simply that the citizens and legislatures of our Southern states should avoid the new “dungeons for dollars” game like the plague. The privatization debate distracts us from the real issue of our society’s failure to deal with crime in any way other than a knee-jerk, repressive fashion. This is especially true in the South, which tends to have the highest incarceration rates, the longest sentences, and the most executions.

Most citizens-white and black, rich and poor, male and female-regularly report that crime and punishment constitute one of the most salient and urgent issues in their lives. Almost no one, however, is satisfied with our criminal justice system as it is.

As I have suggested, there are alternative approaches to the issue of crime and punishment, but only a few prisoners, lawyers, academics, and prison reform advocates seem to know or care much about them. As in the field of health, our society’s primary approach to crime ought to be a preventive, environmental, “public health” strategy. The implications of this approach reach beyond even such a necessary action as the denial of easy handgun access. We must resist and recast the media glorification of violence, insist upon economic and political equality irrespective of race and sex, confront the climate of national militarism, and reconstruct an American culture and economic system propelled by human greed. Meanwhile, we will continue to have to lock up violent, dangerous offenders, but, for the many others, our motto should be “from the cage to the community,” which is largely where the problem is and must be dealt with. We must refuse the exploitation of public hysteria and institutional fatigue by the entrepreneurs of captivity.

Harmon L Wray, Jr., lives in Nashville where he is a staff consultant with Project Return and teaches prison ministry at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Empty Rituals in the War on Drugs

By Hal Crowther

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 14-15

Two months dead and Len Bias is still making headlines. When cocaine claims a victim who’s young and famous and a gifted athlete, it has to be someone else’s fault. Find the dealer–some other black kid on a Washington street corner who might have made twenty sales that same night, and who still may not know that he had the honor of selling the coke that killed one of the most amazing atheletes I’ve ever seen. Shake down all his friends, bring charges agains the kid who rolled up the dollar bill, or the one who owned the little spoon that carried the fatal spoonful. Fire his coach, Lefty Driesell, whose greatest fault is that he always tries to protect his players when he’d be better off protecting himself. Turn over the whole Maryland athletic department, test a lot of urine, find some players who can read.

That’s the way we do it here. They tried to pin first degree murder on the poor woman who assisted in the messy departure of John Belushi, a notorious glutton for drugs of any description. Because he was a celebrity, I suppose, and her prosecution satisfied some kind of national hunger for a scapegoat. Everyone who knew Belushi knows that it would have taken a women’s volleyball team to keep him away from the drug, once it was in the same room with him.

It’s a waste of police work, an empty ritual like most of the speeches that are mumbled over the dead. Bias and Don Rogers, like Belushi and all the uncelebrated cadavers before them, took the drugs because they wanted it, because they thought they needed it. Putting the blame on their suppliers is just as dishonest as putting the heat on Mexico, and on Panama and Columbia. It’s the United States that’s the world’s great cocaine consumer of the world, a market so rich that the economies of several countries depend on our insatiable habit. We are the John Belushi of nations. We should have Belushi and John Delorean on our stamps and coins.

While we threaten Mexico for its modest exports, our domestic industry is in a growth spiral so colossal that thugs in Miami will be purchasing Fortune 500 companies before the year 2000. With cash. In the last two years agents have seized fifty major cocaine laboratories in this country, some with a weekly capacity of one thousand pounds of cocaine. The largest, in upstate New York, was discovered by accident when a neighboring building caught fire. The cocaine hotline in a New Jersey hospital gets fourteen hundred calls every day. The Coast Guard in North Carolina admits that it’s losing the battle against cocaine smugglers. Monster profits have inspired unprecedented daring and ingenuity among smugglers. Agents have found packets of cocaine under the tongues of fish. A small boat can earn its owner $25,000 on one major smuggling mission; a drop site for a major shipment is worth $100,000.

In New York City, dealing cocaine has become almost legal–only one of three people arrested on felony drug charges is ever indicted, far less jailed–simply because there are so many cases that the courts can’t begin to deal with them. New York’s elite narcotics task force, Operation Pressure Point, has made eighteen thousand arrests since 1984, fifty-eight hundred of them felony arrests. Fewer than twelve hundred cases have resulted in indictments, and only 476 dealers were sentenced to as much as a year in jail. Judges, with rapes and murders backed up (last year they got through half of one percent of their cases), tend to snarl at presecutors who waste their time with cocaine.

“A lot of judges feel narcotics cases are second-rate cases,” complains the police inspector who runs Pressure Point. “They don’t care for low-level cocaine sales. At the plea-bargaining stages, they ask “Why did you bring me this garbage?”

Like bootleg liquor during prohibition, cocaine in America is distributed on such a scale that law enforcement is becoming a joke. It takes a lot of nerve to blame Mexico. If you were a Latin American, with an attitude toward the United States that might range

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anywhere from loathing to ambivalence, could you resist the opportunity? They’ll never stop us with money or rifles, but they can help us burn ourselves up from the inside out. As much as anything else, I think they’re motivated by morbid curiosity about our capacity for this terrible stuff. How deep is the American nostril? And it’s not as if the United States has ever neglected a foreign market on moral consideration. When our scientists decided that cigarettes were hopelessly poisonous, our tobacco companies raced to exploit the foreign markets before word got around. The baby formula scandal, an American company’s attempt to eliminate breastfeeding in the Third World, is still one of the classic stories of greed and cynicism. In most years, the United States leads the world in the sale of guns and armaments, which are somewhat more controversial than cocaine. In countries where we have special interests, we give the guns away.

Any Latin who sells drugs to Americans can call himself a patriot. Cocaine is the “now” profession in the Western Hemisphere, for any youngster with the courage to pursue it. Maybe it’s only timidity that keeps me from emulating John Delorean myself. To get rich, and at the same time to contribute to the self-destruction of affluent fools? It would be hard to imagine a more satisfying career. Show me the philosophy that makes it more objectionable than selling chocolate to the obese, or selling Wild Irish Rose to wings.

It’s time Americans quit pointing fingers and owned up to their habit, as individuals and as a society. Alcoholics don’t cure themselves by blowing up distilleries and bashing bartenders. Why should we pay the police to protect us from ourselves? When a kid dies on cocaine, the correct question isn’t “Where did he get it?”, it’s “Why did he want it?”

Any progess has to start there. Cocaine has been around a long time. When I tried to trace the authorship of the cocaine song that Mike Cross sings (“Cocaine…runnin’ round my brain…”) the trail led way back beyond Leadbelly and the Rev. Gary Davis, into dim unrecorded music history. The song is in the public domain. Why is this disreputable old standby the glamor drug of the Age of Reagan? Overpriced, addictive, lethal, brief in its promise and long in its revenge.

It has something to do with risk, with gambling. A rational human being, faced with the uncertainty of existence, will try to improve the odds. Americans, with an increasing level of obsession, will try to beat the odds. Supporters of North Carolina’s Shearon Harris nuclear plant wrote an incredible number of letters comparing the odds against a nuclear accident to the odds against death by snakebite, or yellow fever. You can’t convince me that those letters weren’t written by morons, but I can see that they were distinctly American morons. When the novelist A. G. Mojtabai visited Amarillo, Texas, which sits on top of all the nuclear weapons assembled in the United States, she found the locals more than happy with their odds. More alarmingly, she found that the city was home to most of the fundamentalist “Rapture” sects, which believe that Armageddon is O.K. because the Lord is going to snatch them up just before the bombs go off. Figure the odds those guys are playing.

When reporters asked a bunch of street kids if the death of Len Bias had changed their attitude toward cocaine, most of them said “No.” It was as if the death lottery was over, Bias had lost, and their odds were just as good, if not better, for the next one. “I think of Len Bias as a person who just had bad luck,” said one kid in Brooklyn.

The spiritual capital of the United States is Las Vegas, and Las Vegas is the spiritual armpit of the world. Gambling is a wide streak in the national character that’s being exploited as it was never exploited before. The gambler’s fatalism and machismo make a potent speedball. It’s the age of the quick fix, elation without foundation, a bloated stock market where crazy gamblers thrive, windfall profits at the expense of everybody’s future. Cocaine is its drug. Sure things and safe drugs are for old maids. Fly now, pay later. And don’t be afraid. The odds may be narrowing, but the odds are still on your side.

Hal Crowther writes for the Spectator of Raleigh, N.C., from which this article is adapted.