Introduction
As an institution, our penal and "correctional" system is an abject failure. The conditions in America's jails and prisons virtually ensure psychological impairment and physical deterioration for thousands of men and women each year. Reformation and rehabilitation is the rhetoric; systematic dehumanization is the reality.
Public attention is directed only sporadically toward the subhuman conditions that prevail in these institutions, and usually only because the prisoners themselves have risked many more years in confinement, and in some cases even their lives, to dramatize their situation by protest. The uprisings in Attica and New Mexico were but two examples of an undercurrent of tension, hatred, and hostility that threatens to rip apart the uneasy rule by fear which prevails in most penal institutions today.
In assessing the development of prisoners' rights law, one must keep in mind that it has been accompanied by the most massive prison population explosion ever experienced in the United States. On 30 June 1986, the sentenced prison population was 528,945; more than double what it was ten years earlier. The current rate of increase of over 10 percent per annum represents a prison space demand of about one thousand new beds a week, far in excess of new beds being supplied.
It was not until the nineteenth century that the use of prisons became widespread. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, European penology was motivated principally by punishment and retribution. Most crimes were dealt with by corporal punishment and a great many by execution. Imprisonment was thought to be a deterrent to criminal activity and was considered more humane than corporal punishment. Moreover, prisons were also built with the idea of reformation: the penitentiary was intended to serve as a place for reflection in solitude leading to repentance and redemption. But these prisons served.......
