"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."
George Bernard Shaw

With stern voices and a great deal of desk-pounding, politicians vow to build more prisons, throw away the keys and stop coddling criminals. It's good rhetoric and bad judgment. And yet to say that our prison systems are out of control, given over to gangs and have lost any hope of their mandate to rehabilitate, is to mention merely tips of icebergs.

Twenty thousand dollars a year and in some cases twice that, the cost of a Harvard education, is wasted in little else but warehousing each inmate.
Perhaps it's time to run the prisons on the model of Army boot camp. My old drill sergeant could run a prison, make a profit and still motivate inmates, all this with his baton neatly tucked under his arm. One thing sarge had down pat was motivation. Arriving at Fort Leonard Wood, hotshot young college graduates with minds of our own and country kids with minimal educational skills, it didn't take the sarge long to get our attention. We didn't call him the sarge, except well out of hearing, we called him Sir, often and loud. The military is a useful role model for what prisons can be and with the reduction in armed forces due to the end of the cold war, there may be a lot of drill sergeants around available to implement the itinerary.

The Army takes young punks, wise guys and college graduates and makes them into an integrated force, trained to produce. The prison system takes the same raw material and turns it into further hardened criminals, unfit for any kind of useful work. The Army instills respect for authority and job skills while the prisons are run by druglords and gang-bangers, tacitly allowed by the system.
Civil rights are left at the train station when a recruit enters the Army, because he's no longer a civilian. Civil rights need to be left at the prison gate, not for punishment, but for enough control to give prisoners a shot at making it on the outside. Civil rights are just that, rights that are voluntarily abandoned when one commits a felony, restored once more at the end of a period of incarceration that is proscribed by law.

The military model works and the reason it works is because it has been developed over the years, without the interference of lawyers and civil libertarians. It becomes the father of the fatherless and the teacher of the uneducated.

Remember boot camp? I remember it from 1957 and the first thing lost was the shuffle, the downcast look, the slumped shoulders, earrings, smirky look and hair. Head shaved, scared and dehumanized we spent our first night in a barracks, wondering what the hell lay in store. What lay in store was the restoration of pride, discipline in every corner of our lives, respect and challenge. If I make it sound great, it wasn't. It was tough love at its lowest denominator, but it worked in the Army and it can work in the prisons.
We didn't wear floppy prison garb, we wore uniforms. No slop for meals either, we had decent simple food and plenty of it. No time on our hands to get into trouble, we were marched, trained, schooled, praised, degraded and tired-out to the point of exhaustion every night. At the end of eight weeks, we knew what the program was all about and were able to ease into further training programs that developed a full range of skills, valuable in today's outside world. We got rank and pride and hope and help. We worked as a unit and supported each other and walked straight with our eyes up. We knew if we could get through boot camp, we could get through anything. Not a bad message for some hopeless kid behind bars or his white collar counterpart either.

A prison is as much a community as an Army base and our base was entirely self-sustained with jobs and responsibilities for everyone, supporting the military structure. Prisons, with nearly identical needs, are perfect testing grounds for military style communities. We need to recognize the damage we're doing to society by withholding this kind of training and discipline from inmates. We owe them and ourselves something better than twenty months or twenty years of useless and expensive warehousing. In a decent environment, even a six month sentence will have lasting and beneficial purpose.

Pride and self worth are missing characteristics in street punks and jailbirds, learnable in a military style experience. Add the various schools offered in the military and you have a prescription for useful re-admittance to society instead of a mindless and humiliating sentence.

Are prisons for punishment or rehabilitation? It's time to stop the debate and come down four square on the side of rehabilitation. We can ill-afford to return habitual criminals to the streets.

Prison inmates have been punished all their lives by the deprived life of the ghetto and the missing fathers, families and schools that most of us take for granted. It's time to teach self worth and self pride, while we've got the physical and mental control of the lawless for a period of months or years. What we choose to do with those years will have a tremendous impact on their futures after parole. It's our choice to turn out a man with a chance or a more hardened and desperate criminal.

The business and industrial communities would not be so reluctant to hire ex-cons with education in the very skills that, by their withholding, put them in the slammer in the first place. It's time to turn hate into hope, time to get on with the work of redeeming a criminal society.

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