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    Review of:
    Joseph T. Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation. New York: Random House, 2001.

  1. In this cogent, wide-ranging study, Joseph Hallinan examines the ways in which the American penal system has been transformed during the last twenty years. Working-class Americans who used to protest when state officials announced plans to build prisons in their communities now compete to attract new penitentiaries and the jobs they create. The incarceration of convicts--once perceived as a grim governmental responsibility--has become a thriving, recession-proof industry. Prison officials have shifted their priorities from inmate rehabilitation programs to budgetary concerns; instead of focusing on the prevention of recidivism, they focus on the reduction of "average daily inmate costs." Perhaps the most startling feature of these institutional changes, Hallinan observes, is the fact that they have been implemented without substantive public debate. Although incarceration rates have reached levels that would have seemed inconceivable as recently as the early 1980s, the public seems virtually unaware of the ways in which the aims and methodologies of the nation's penal system have been revised. Going Up the River will disappoint readers in search of a polemic against what Hallinan calls "the prison-industrial complex," but it provides an ideal starting place for readers who want to understand how the confluence of economics and punishment has reshaped the prison culture of the United States.

  2. Throughout Going Up the River, Hallinan (a Wall Street Journal reporter and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University) emphasizes that the most significant recent change in America's approach to criminal justice is an increase in the size of its prison population. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, "three strikes" statutes, and a panoply of other "get tough on crime" initiatives, Hallinan writes, have increased the nation's total number of prisoners to an estimated 1.3 million. (This is a conservative estimate; other recent commentators have posited that the total is nearly two million.) Accordingly, even though crime rates have fallen in the last five years, the per capita incarceration rate in the United States is now second only to that in Russia. This increased reliance on imprisonment has no precedent in the history of the American criminal justice system. In the 1930s, at the height of the Prohibition/Al Capone era, the government cracked down by raising the national incarceration rate to 137 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens. This figure was considered extraordinarily high at the time, but recent developments make it seem moderate:

    [The 137 for every 100,000 citizens figure was] a high-water mark that stood for four decades. But in 1980 we broke that record, and we've been breaking it ever since. By 1999, the U.S. incarceration rate stood at a phenomenal 476 per 100,000--more than triple the rate of the Capone era. So common is the prison experience today that the federal government predicts that one of every eleven men will be imprisoned during his lifetime. For black men, the figure is even higher--more than one of every four. (xiii)

    This rapid increase in the nation's incarceration rate has, of course, necessitated the constant construction of new penal facilities; Texas alone has filled more than one hundred new prisons since 1980. Several states that have been unable to match Texas's prison-construction budget have hired the Corrections Corporation of America, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, and other private prison firms to incarcerate convicts that the states' prisons are unable to hold. In 1983, there were no private prisons in the United States; today, Hallinan observes, the demand for private prison services is so high that states can choose from among 150 firms.

  3. The business community has worked aggressively to capitalize on the expansion of the nation's prison population. Telephone companies have found rising rates of incarceration especially lucrative. Although prisoners do not earn much income, they make a staggering number of phone calls. Hallinan notes that a single prison pay phone can earn its owner as much as $12,000 per year. According to a study commissioned by AT&T, American inmates spend $1 billion per year on long-distance calls. Instead of limiting this corporate windfall, state regulatory agencies have forged profitable business partnerships with the phone companies:

    AT&T and its competitors learned that the way to get inmates as customers was to give the prison a legal kickback: on a one-dollar phone call, the prison might make forty or fifty cents. In no time, corrections departments became phone-call millionaires. In 1997, New York rang up $21.2 million from phone-call commissions. California made $17.6 million. Florida earned $13.8 million. (xiv)

    While no other industry has matched the prison-house revenues of the phone companies, numerous firms that sell products to inmates (shampoo, soap, toothpaste) and to prison administrators (televison sets, weight-lifting equipment, security cameras) have also developed strategies to enlarge their shares of the prison "market."

  4. One of the most striking transformations highlighted in Going Up the River relates to public attitudes regarding prison construction. A generation ago, residents of economically depressed small towns often dreamed that the arrival of a new factory or military base might restore their communities' fiscal health. The arrival of a new penitentiary, by contrast, was seldom viewed as welcome news. No one wanted to live with the threat that convicts might escape into their neighborhoods. No one wanted to raise children in the vicinity of razor-wire fences and guard towers. Prison employment, moreover, was widely considered dangerous and unpleasant. But after years of corporate downsizing and post-Cold War base closings, many residents of small towns have concluded that they can no longer afford misgivings about living in a "prison town." This change has occurred, Hallinan explains, because prisons are now regarded as invaluable sources of jobs and overall economic stability:

    Young men... who might in another generation have joined the Army or gone to work in a factory were now turning to prison for their livelihood. I saw job-hungry towns, desperate for something to keep their young people from leaving, compete for prisons the way they once had for industries, offering tax abatements and job training.... (xi-xii)

    Citizens of Beeville, Texas are so delighted with the economic effects of the town's two existing penitentiaries that they are attempting to "turn their community into a prison hub, becoming roughly what Pittsburgh is to steel or Detroit is to cars" (4). When Hallinan asked a Beeville native why he was training to become a prison guard, the young man replied, "it's a secure job. It's always going to be here. It's good pay. You can move up. Good benefits. Secure. What else do you need?" (9).

  5. The new emphasis on prison economics is especially conspicuous in the attitudes and practices of prison officials. Throughout the United States, Hallinan points out, wardens are canceling educational, job training, and drug treatment programs and cultivating a corporate CFO's eye for cost reduction: "Warden after warden would recite to me not the recidivism rates of the men who had left their prisons (this was seldom measured), nor the educational levels of the men still there (most are high-school dropouts), nor any other indicator of 'rehabilitation.' But every warden I met could tell me his average daily inmate cost" (xvi). Today's prison officials do not concentrate on bottom-line calculations because they fear that they may be wasting taxpayers' money. They are committed to managing prisons "like a business" because that commitment can make them rich. Before the advent of the prison-industrial complex, successful prison officials often began as guards, earned promotions into a series of administrative jobs, and then--if they reached the top of their prisons' hierarchies--occupied their positions as wardens or prison superintendents for many years. That career trajectory became obsolete when the private prison industry began to flourish in the 1980s. The six-figure salaries and stock options of private prison officials marked the first time that prison employment in the United States was associated with considerable financial rewards:

    Private prisons... created a new, previously unimaginable category of individual: the prison millionaire. These men were almost always former wardens or superintendents who had jumped ship to work in the private sector. The ranks of big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America are peppered with them.... The staffs of public prisons have become, in effect, farm teams for private prisons. Public prisons are now places where the ambitious can hone their financial skills before moving on to the really big money in the private sector. (173-74)

  6. The transformation of the American penal system has given rise to a number of ominous problems. First, the system's obsessive concern with cost reduction has exposed inmates to unusually dangerous prison conditions. One of the most common strategies for the management of unruly--and therefore expensive--inmates, for example, is a heightened reliance on solitary confinement, which today's wardens have renamed "administrative segregation," or "ad seg." The psychological impact of ad seg, which generally involves locking individual prisoners in empty cells twenty-three hours a day with no work or other activities to fill the time, can be catastrophic. Prisoners confined in this manner in Texas in the 1990s became so distressed that a federal district court judge characterized ad seg cells as "virtual incubators of psychosis" (5) and banned the use of ad seg on the ground that it violates the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

  7. The atmosphere of racial discord in America's prisons has also become more pervasive than ever before. Although approximately two thirds of the nation's inmates are African-American or Hispanic, the majority of new prisons are constructed in rural communities that are virtually all-white. As Hallinan asserts, it would be difficult not to interpret this practice as a combination of racism, recklessness, and corruption:

    A century ago, when most inmates were white and lived on farms, this might have made sense. But not anymore. Today, most inmates... come from the cities. Sticking them in the boondocks, where family members have a hard time visiting, where guards have likely never encountered anyone like them, almost always leads to problems, often violent ones. Yet this is where we build our prisons. These communities profit most from the prison boom: from the construction jobs and the prison jobs and all the spin-off businesses that prisons create. [It is] hard to ignore that those getting rich are usually white and those in prison are usually not. (xiii)

    If prison administrators have any say in the matter, the practice of shipping urban minority inmates to places like the Texas panhandle and southwestern Virginia is unlikely to change any time soon. American wardens have traditionally expressed a strong preference for rural locations, which allow them to hire what a New Jersey prison official once called "competent white guards" and "the very best kind of white, mid-American line staff" (85).

  8. Moreover, Going Up the River illustrates that when prisons are viewed as "for-profit factories" (143), prison officials are likely to alter their practices in profound and unsettling ways. If the nation depends on public prisons to ensure the economic well-being of hundreds of rural communities and private prisons to strengthen the portfolios of thousands of investors, for instance, that dependence will produce a powerful incentive to keep the prisons filled. Half-empty prisons--like half-empty restaurants and hotels--do not create jobs or profits. Should the government commit itself to maintaining today's unprecedented rates of incarceration, regardless of future crime rates, simply because the economy may suffer if the nation's supply of convicts becomes depleted? If wardens believe that their main responsibility is cost reduction, their highest priority will be to develop strategies to limit their prisons' expenditures. (Hallinan observes that the purpose of Correction$ Cost Control & Revenue Report and several other industry publications is to help wardens do just that.) Why build a wall around the prison, prison officials will reason, if you can save a great deal of money by building a fence? Why invest in a guard tower to prevent escape attempts? Guard towers are very expensive. Why provide drug rehabilitation and job training programs? They, too, are very expensive. Although the private prison industry has expanded enormously in recent years, most American prisons are still built and maintained with public funds. Do taxpayers know that the nation's prison officials are under intense pressure to cut corners? Do they know that many prison officials no longer feel obligated to prepare convicts to lead productive lives after they are released? Throughout Going Up the River, Hallinan suggests that the public should be uneasy about these modifications of the professional responsibilities of wardens and the stealthy manner in which these modifications have become part of the nation's penal system.

  9. The strengths of Going Up the River are rooted in Hallinan's considerable skills as a reporter. Although Hallinan discusses a number of national trends, he also stresses--through a wide array of anecdotes, interviews, empirical data, and firsthand observations--that America's penal system is extremely complex and multifaceted. While some prison farms in Texas seem to be descendants of antebellum plantations, the prisons in several other states are managed with cutting-edge technology and administrative strategies. Moreover, Hallinan writes, while some states have conceded that their prisons provide nothing but punishment, several others--most notably Washington and Iowa--remain committed to the principle that prisons must at least attempt to rehabilitate inmates through educational programs and employment opportunities.

  10. Hallinan also shows an admirable ability to illuminate shifting public attitudes concerning prisons and imprisonment. For instance, he relates some of the ways in which many Americans like to feel a sense of connection to local penal institutions. In Tamms, Illinois, the owners of a restaurant are so pleased with the town's new "supermax" (maximum security) prison that they have added Supermax sandwiches to the menu. In Florence, Colorado, Hallinan encountered residents wearing t-shirts that read "Florence: Corrections Capital of the World" (83). And citizens of Polk County, Texas commemorated the grand opening of a new prison by paying for the adventure of spending a night there just before the first inmates arrived: "So proud were the people of Polk County... that three days before the prison opened they held an open house inside the Terrell Unit. For $25, members of the public got to eat real prison food, wear real prison clothes, even spend the night in a real prison cell" (86).

  11. Although much of this enthusiasm can be attributed to the fiscal benefits of new prisons, the residents of Tamms, Florence, and Polk County appear to be demonstrating more than a keen interest in their local economies. More specifically, Going Up the River illustrates that many Americans simply enjoy the aura of power, danger, and folklore that surrounds America's prisons. This is a rather puzzling phenomenon because few Americans are truly knowledgeable about the nation's penal system. How many could discuss the expanding influence of the private prison industry? How many are familiar with terms like "supermax" and "administrative segregation"? This superficial awareness has at times caused the public to misinterpret the state of the prisons. In the 1970s, a few highly publicized prison riots caused millions of people to draw the unwarranted inference that America's entire penal system was out of control. Similarly, in the 1980s, anecdotes about racquetball courts and other hospitable features of minimum security facilities led millions of people to the absurd conclusion that America's prisons had become "country clubs." Hallinan's observations about public attitudes convey some of the most intriguing messages in Going Up the River. Many recent commentators have argued that the U.S. government and a cabal of major corporations are to blame for the advent of the prison-industrial complex. Hallinan appears to agree, but he complicates the discourse regarding contemporary prison administration by underscoring the public's role in "the merger of punishment and profit" (xi). If the public had paid more attention to the realities of the nation's prisons, he suggests, the transformation of the nation's penal system might not have been quite so mercenary and all-encompassing.

  12. There is much to admire in Going Up the River, but it seems to me that Hallinan's analysis is flawed in two significant ways. First, although Hallinan devotes a chapter to the history of imprisonment from antiquity to the present, he seems unaware of the British roots of the American penal system. He discusses private prisons as though they were a new phenomenon, but they are only new in the United States. Britain's county jails, debtors' prisons, and houses of correction were privately owned and operated until well into the 1800s. Parliament was reluctant to depart from its traditional approach to prison management, but the writings of John Howard and other leaders of the English prison reform movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gradually persuaded English society that its penal system had become unacceptably corrupt and inhumane. Similarly, Hallinan exposes his unfamiliarity with the English prison reform movement when he discusses the Pennsylvania Quakers' role in establishing Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829. Hallinan suggests that the Quakers invented the prison's "hub-and-spoke design," which ensured that "the occupants could be observed at all times" (62), but the Quakers were obviously drawing on the ideas about prison architecture and surveillance that Jeremy Bentham had introduced in The Panopticon, or Inspection House (1791). Hallinan's assertion that the modern penitentiary was invented by the Quakers is equally startling:

    [They] wanted each inmate to have a cell to himself--an extravagant and novel notion--and wanted him to spend every waking hour there, alone with his thoughts. Such solitude, the Quakers thought, would lead to meditation, and meditation would lead in turn to penitence. For this reason they called their new house of detention a "penitentiary," and a distinctly American institution was born. (xvi)

    This passage is simply inaccurate; as anyone who has read Parliament's Penitentiary Act (1779) or John Bender's Imagining the Penitentiary (1987) can attest, the "penitentiary idea" is distinctly British. The Quakers did an estimable job of importing the most progressive British discourse about criminal justice and using it as the blueprint for a remarkable prison, but their ideas about confinement, penitence, and rehabilitation were hardly innovative.

  13. Hallinan's analysis is also weakened by his perplexing reluctance to foreground his own conclusions. As a consequence of his extensive travels and his interviews with dozens of inmates, guards, and prison administrators, Hallinan is in a position to speak with authority about the prison-industrial complex and its discontents. In spite of his high degree of expertise, however, Hallinan strives throughout the book to avoid seeming partisan. This would not be a problem if Going Up the River were a strictly empirical, informative study, but in light of Hallinan's relentless exposure of the institutional exploitation of America's prisoners, his self-effacing rhetoric often seems disingenuous. To put it another way, Going Up the River would be akin to a study of the Vietnam War that systematically outlines the U.S. government's errors and deceptions and then calls upon the reader to decide whether America's involvement in the war was a success.

  14. In the early eighteenth century, Parliament responded to the overcrowding of England's prisons by promulgating the Transportation Act. This statute provided that debtors and prisoners convicted of petty crimes were to be shipped to the American colonies, auctioned off to the highest bidder, and required to make amends for their past offenses by performing years of unpaid labor. At the time, this approach struck many observers as an inspired idea: it moved thousands of prisoners out of Great Britain and brought substantial profits to the sea captains who transported the prisoners, the auctioneers who brought them to market, and the colonists who purchased their services. Going Up the River demonstrates that the American criminal justice system has not moved far beyond the attitudes that gave rise to the Transportation Act. The federal government and the states still treat convicts like toxic waste by doing all they can to ship them far away. And in the past twenty years our representatives have mimicked early eighteenth-century British society by transforming the confinement of inmates into a prosperous industry. Perhaps the most sobering aspect of Going Up the River is the fact that Hallinan does not appear to have found a single national leader who believes that we are in need of an American prison reform movement. In spite of all the abuses Hallinan has witnessed and documented, no one seems interested in preventing the excesses of the prison-industrial complex.

    15. Department of English
    Appalachian State University
    pitofskyah@appstate.edu

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