Penal Reform

Report Outline
Prison Riots and Penal Administration
Slow Change in American Prison Systems
Institutional Rehabilitation of Prisoners
Treatment of Offenders in the Community
Special Focus

Prison Riots and Penal Administration

Under ordinary circumstances the American public is completely unaware of what happens to men and women after conviction and sentencing for crime. A jail break or prison riot may stir temporary interest in the community affected, but on the whole the prison population of the United States is about as remote from the national consciousness as Devil's Island from metropolitan France.

But the national concern over organized crime, as revealed by federal and local investigations, may now be turned to concern for effective treatment of criminals as the result of a series of outbreaks in prisons which has extended back more than a year. Recent prison violence has been neither so widespread nor so serious as the bloody riots of 1929–1930 which brought major reforms in some areas. However, the large-scale convict mutinies in New Jersey and Michigan in April, and the danger that they will be followed by similar outbreaks elsewhere, have directed serious attention to the need for different methods of handling inmates of the country's prisons.

New Jersey and Michigan Convict Mutinies

April 1952 saw a series of prison outbreaks in New Jersey, first at the state prison at Trenton, then at the prison farm at Rahway. New Jersey's pioneer work in methods of rehabilitating younger prisoners has won praise from many quarters, but the physical limitations of the maximum-security prison at Trenton (located in the middle of a city, on a site occupied since 1798) have made any serious attempts at rehabilitation for all the inmates nearly impossible.