an editorial by Ben Bova

born to lose

The kid wore a classic black leather jacket and the kind of sneer that spells instant trouble. He was too short to swagger, but he tried anyway. On the back of his jacket, silver studs spelled out: BORN TO LOSE.

He sure was.

Memories of that kid come flooding back while the television news shows the bodies being hauled out of Attica State Prison. Maybe that particular kid was one of them. The tragedy of our prison system is that we—all of us—are losers: Prisoners, guards, government officials, families, taxpayers. Born to lose.

The prison system today is a classic example of saying one thing while meaning another. For example, we all know that prisons are meant for criminals. When a man or woman breaks the law, he or she is apprehended by the police, tried by a jury of peers, and sentenced to a prison term when found guilty.

Oh yeah? Most of the real criminals in the country have seldom, if ever, seen the inside of a jail. These are the professionals, the people who make illegal activities their life's work.

Professional men are marked by certain standards, no matter what the profession. They strive for a high degree of quality in their work, and they frown on shoddy, sloppy performances. They don't tolerate freelancers gladly, and do their best to get rid of them. (Medical doctors frown on chiropractors; scientists loath directives from politicians.) Professional people also band together in professional organizations, which serve to further the aims of their chosen field of endeavor. The American Medical Association, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Mafia are three examples of such organizations.

Although its principles of organization and qualifications for membership are somewhat different from most professional organizations, the Mafia qualifies in most regards to be ranked with the AMA, IEEE, and similar professional groups. The Mafia has been running continuously in this country for most of this century, although it has changed its name from time to time—once it was called the Syndicate, today some call it the Cosa Nostra—and it has had abrupt changes in leadership. But over the years, despite its internal problems, the Mafia has been able to nurture, protect, enhance and even glamorize the work of the professional criminal. Top entertainers owe their careers to the organization. Magazines owe their distribution to it. Most of the goods that are bought and sold in this country have a tithe of their retail price sluiced off to the organization. Motion picture stars leap at the chance to portray professional killers. Captains of industry and leaders of labor unions both must reckon with the organization in just about everything they do.

Professional criminals seldom go to jail. They steal, they sell narcotics, they run brothels, they murder. They also bribe, extort, torture and kill anyone who might threaten their empire. But the prison system has relatively little to do with professional criminals. It's the amateurs, the free-lancers, the ignorant ones who find themselves in jail.

So—point number one about the prison system: it isn't for professional criminals.

There are "chronic offenders," men who have spent most of their lives behind bars. When they finish a sentence or get paroled, they quickly stumble into another felony and get shipped back to prison. Psychiatrists have often pointed out that these are men who are crying out for help—a kind of help that society as yet doesn't know how to give.

When a baby very deliberately knocks over a glass of milk, right before his mother's eyes, it's not because he's a hopelessly rotten human being. He's trying to get his mother's attention, trying to show her something that he can't express in words. A fifty-year-old man who gets caught knocking over a gas station two weeks after being released from the state penitentiary is trying to tell us something, too.

Many of the chronic offenders who have spent most of their lives in jail simply can't cope with the outside world. Freed from prison, they quickly get caught at something petty or outright stupid, and end up behind bars again—where they have been since childhood.

Point number two about the prison system: many of the inmates are mentally ill.

Sex offenders are another large class of prison inmates that can also be considered mentally ill. Our prison system puts them into a situation where they usually get worse, not better.

Point number three about the prison system is very simple, but not very often understood: most prisoners want to get OUT. Even the many-time-loser who will get himself thrown back in jail as soon as he's freed, usually wants—consciously—to get out of jail just as fervently as anyone else.

Now, the average citizen spends a measurable amount of his time talking about freedom. Our nation was established on the basic concept of individual freedom. We have fought wars to maintain not only our own freedom, but the freedom of other people, other nations. We applauded the bravery of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters in 1956, we plunk down hard cash to watch movies about Prisoners of War trying to tunnel past the barbed wire.

A man in jail wants to be free. Yet we are usually shocked when prison inmates put up a battle to obtain freedom. They're not supposed to do that! Why are we surprised? Do we think that, because a man was legally tried and convicted, he's going to enjoy living in jail? He's going to forget about being free? For many convicts, only the thought of escaping, or somehow being freed, keeps them going from day to day.

All prisoners dream of being free. All prisoners inevitably come to regard their jailers as inhuman swine, whether the jailers are Nazi SS, Russian labor camp guards, or the correctional officers of a prison like Attica.

Inevitably, the prisoners and jailers are cast into the roles of enemies. The prisoners want to get loose; the jailers must keep them in prison. In the Siberian labor camps, the jailers themselves had to replace any man who escaped—even though the escapee almost invariably died in the wilderness.

The prisoners of any jail far outnumber the jailers. So the jailers must be armed. But more important than any guns or clubs they can carry, the jailers' most important weapon is intimidation. Some call it respect, some call it fear. What it amounts to is the ability of one man to loom dominant over another. Many others.

The best jailers, like the best top sergeants and the best football coaches, can dominate a group of men with hardly a lift of an eyebrow. Lesser men, cast in the role of jailers, must use force—or the constant threat of force. Add to this the fact that the role of jailer is a natural one for someone with unconscious sadistic tendencies, and you have trouble brewing.

Add to that the racial tensions that are racking this nation, and the trouble erupts. In Attica. In the Tombs. In San Quentin and elsewhere.

Point number four about our prison system: it depends on the ability of a small number of armed men to control the behavior of a large number of—relatively—unarmed men. This is a breeding ground for hatred and violence, first class.

On the other side of the coin, the prisoners and their jailers do work cooperatively in some areas. There is a flourishing narcotics trade in most large jails, for example. Strictly illegal, it works to the supposed benefit of both the prisoners and the jailers, so there is cooperation. The jailers allow the junk into the prison, get paid for this kindness, and the prisoners receive all the gloried benefits of pot, hash, smack and what-have you—usually admixtured with sawdust, tobacco, backyard dirt and tons of microbes, courtesy of the friendly regional pusher.

There are other areas of activity where the prisoners and jailers work cooperatively. These usually involve improving the jailers' financial well being and the prisoners' physical comforts. This underground system of cooperation, all in violation of state laws and prison regulations, goes on regardless of incidental one-on-one bursts of violence. Escape attempts, beatings, suicides—these rarely interrupt the exchange of contraband goods for money or other considerations.

Point number five about the prison system: the laws and regulations on the books don't run the prisons, people do; and people can be bribed, as well as threatened.

What can science and technology do to help fix this mess? An enormous amount—or practically nothing. It depends hugely on the political decisions made by our elected officials. Which, in turn, means it depends on the good old reliable tax-paying voter, who has shown a marked tendency to believe all the myths and avoid all the realities of the prison system.

But suppose that the recent stir that resulted from the Attica massacre actually causes real public concern. What could science and technology do for the prison system?

Quite a lot.

First, there's the matter of security systems. Why do prisons have to be built like medieval fortresses? Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage; but every prison I've ever seen has plenty of both. And guards armed with clubs and guns.

Is it any coincidence that this sort of physical setup is accompanied by a medieval attitude toward the prisoners? A jail is a grim, foreboding place where men are locked away from society. For what end result? Rehabilitation? Reform? That's the mythology. Actually, they're put in jail for punishment, for revenge, or just to get them out of circulation.

There's no reason why a jail can't be built more along the lines of, say, a military base. Modern electronic and surveillance systems can watch the prisoners much more effectively than human guard patrols. Electrified wire, nonlethal gas, automatic gun stations guided by radar and infrared sensors—such as those mounted on military aircraft—and firing nonlethal darts—all these can make much more effective barriers than high, stone walls.

Some might say that nonlethal weapons aren't much of a deterrent to desperate men. Well, the lethal weapons haven't stopped breakouts. The real deterrent to escape is the knowledge that it won't work. And an electronic system that's scanning twenty-four hours a day, that can't be bribed or held hostage, that can't even be turned off by the prison authorities themselves should make a much stronger deterrent than a fallible human being with a shotgun.

All right, modern technology can help to keep the convicts inside the prison. What do we do with them while they're guests of the state?

Change them, of course.

The techniques for changing human behavior fall under the very general heading of education. Now before you start muttering "bleeding heart" or "do-gooder," think about the problem for a moment. Certainly there are many convicts who cannot be reached by any means we know of today. Put them in a classroom and they'll mug the teacher. Beat them over the head and they'll nurse their revenge until they get a chance to return the compliment. These are hopeless cases. Today.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are an even larger number of offenders who can be reached. First-timers, youngsters mostly. In our present prison setup, the things they learn best are how to deal with a corrupt system and how to become more proficient at illegal activities. They can be taught, trained, educated, brainwashed—use any term you like. They can be changed. Not by sitting in a cell, or walking around an exercise yard, or making license plates. But by using all we know today about teaching. Not the school way, the industry and military way. If high school dropouts can be taught to program computers, prisoners can learn, too. If we use what we know about teaching, we might be able to change a large number of those prisoners.

Think of the benefits to taxpayers!

For one thing, we will have a laboratory for teaching techniques. It might seem callous to use convicts as guinea pigs in this manner, but it's an opportunity for them and for us. Convicts have often volunteered—sometimes unwillingly—for medical experimentation, testing new vaccines and such. How about getting them to volunteer for new psychological techniques? They have little to lose, and we have much to gain. For this psychological-teaching laboratory has a built-in feedback loop. If the "student" returns to jail after being released, the technique failed.

"Teaching" in the context we're using here, doesn't mean handing out geography lessons. It's a broad panoply of psychological and educational techniques, designed to radically alter the "student's" outlook on life and his behavior. It might include the necessity to remove the "student" from the environment that he originally came from. That is, when released, the ex-prisoner might be "deported" to a totally different part of the country for a new start in life. This fractures most of the prisoner's civil rights, of course. But it's demonstrably true that all the hard work in the world can be useless if the convict is returned to the same dirty streets, the same dead-end jobs, the same incentives for law-breaking that got him into jail in the first place.

The toughest thing in the world is to change somebody's mind. But it's done every day, by experts who work in television studios as well as schools. If we can pull together what we know about computer-assisted instruction, motivational research, and other modern educational techniques, we might start to make a dent in the steadily-growing prison population.

Such an approach would be enormously expensive. But if we look at the total cost of our present way of dealing with criminals, we'll find that the cost of maintaining prisons is just a small fraction of the whole. Organized crime costs us billions per year. Unorganized burglary, mugging, armed robbery, and miscellaneous mayhem—much of it due to the high cost of narcotics—cost more than we pay for prisons. If we can use our high technology to reduce these costs, then the high-technology approach could well pay for itself, in the long run.

There's another high-technology technique that might be used as a sort of ultimate weapon with incorrigible prisoners.

Today we teeter on the brink of a dilemma. Crimes of violence are going up, death penalties are going down. It is morally distasteful to many citizens to sentence a fellow human being to death—even though he might be a murderer.

Now then—there are people living today who have arranged to have their bodies cryogenically frozen when they're pronounced clinically dead, in the hope that some future developments of medical research will allow them to be thawed and cured of whatever killed them.

We could consider murder as a symptom of deep-rooted psychological illness. Instead of executing a murderer—or jailing him and eventually paroling him—we might consider freezing him, until such time as his disease can be cured. This fractures all the civil rights on the books, but then, executing a man is perfectly legal, isn't it? Is putting him in cold storage better, or worse, than killing him?

We can improve our prison system enormously, merely by applying some of the aspects of our high technology. The cost will be considerable, but the profit should be even larger.

And until we stop worshiping the myths of our prison system and start paying attention to the realities, we are all born losers.

THE EDITOR