All the world’s a prison

Lindsay Lohan wearing her ankle bracelet.
It’s an eschatological dream: open the prisons. Let at least nonviolent offenders out and give them a chance to build an honest life in society. Free at last, right? Well, yeah—except for the odd beepers strapped onto their ankles and the boxes on their belts, which broadcast their position (and the chemical composition of their sweat) to an office park in Indiana. The contraptions even periodically issue verbal commands at their wearers. Step away from the liquor store.
Atlantic correspondent Graeme Wood, in his new article “Prison without Walls,” is sold. The United States has one of the world’s most brutal, inhumane, and disastrous incarceration industries, with currently around 2.3 million people locked up in prisons and jails—perhaps half of whom, if ever released, will be back again within three years. The answer? A growing (private) regime of total surveillance by electronic monitoring. Emerging technologies now allow contractors to track offenders better than ever, to the point now that, in many cases, walls, bars, and a jumpsuit are becoming obsolete. Wood imagines that
if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.
He has a point. American prisons are horrific and utterly counterproductive places, where inmates learn to live in fear of their guards and each other. Those who get out bring that logic with them into society outside. The fewer people we need to keep in prisons, without doubt, the better off we’ll all be. And the process that Wood describes, of course, is hardly radical, as already two-thirds of those being punished in this country are on probation or parole. But, like most dreams, it carries the ingredients of a nightmare.











