OVERCORRECTION

On the abolition of prisons.

- ADAM GOPNIK

Every age treats its penal system as natural, inevitable, and regrettable. When men were hanged in the public square, intellectuals explained that the practice was as helpful to the hanged as it was instructive for the audience. Samuel Johnson, as instinctively humane a man as might ever be found, was indignant when, in mid-eighteenth-century London, hangings-often for crimes as petty as pickpocketing-were moved from Tyburn, today's Marble Arch, to more discreet premises inside Newgate Prison. "Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators," he said. "If they do not draw spectators, they don't answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it." Public hangings were simply part of street life. Pickpockets attended the hangings of other pickpockets in order to pick pockets.

In retrospect, the hangings are only very partially described as justice done, and much more accurately described as power and class hierarchy enforced. To those born poor, a life of thievery seemed as rational as any other; if it led to the gallows, this was, as horrible as it sounds, a reasonable risk. There were men of the cloth and higher ranks executed-the famous Dr. William Dodd, a friend of Johnson's and a confidant of the King's, was hanged for forgery, in 1777-but mostly just to décourager les autres.

Yet the spirit of abolition eventually grew to the point that in the West we now have zero public executions-even prison hangings have been replaced by pseudo-medical procedures-and we are appalled when we learn of them taking place as an instrument of political persecution in Iran. What we do have, however, is incarceration on a scale that, despite recent efforts at reform, boggles the mind and shivers the heart. More people are under "correctional supervision" in the United States today than were in the Stalinist Gulag at its height.