Has the Prison a Future?

Abstract

The prison may or may not be always with us. Only time will tell. Half a century ago, it appeared to be in terminal decline. Imprisonment rates were falling inmost developed countries, including theUnited States. Prison abolition movements were emerging, particularly in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and a call for a “national moratorium on prison construction” was being heard in the United States. Foundations were being laid for what later became known as the restorative justicemovement.New community programs for diversion of cases from the criminal justice system were everywhere proliferating. Most of what we now think of as communitybased penalties—community service, victim-offender mediation, home confinement, day reporting centers, intensive probation supervision, electronic monitoring, financial penalties including day fines, prosecutorial diversion—were being invented or greatly expanded. From the 1940s through themid-1970s, leading practitioners and scholars believed the prison’s days were numbered, except possibly residually for the very most serious crimes and most troubled offenders. In 1942, Hermann Mannheim of the London School of Economics, then and in following decades Britain’s most influential criminologist, observed, “The days of imprisonment as a method of mass treatment of lawbreakers are largely over. What remains of it will have to employ much more scientific methods of selection and treatment in order to survive” (1942, p. 222).