Norval Morris

The Purposes, Practices, and Problems of Supermax Prisons

At least thirty-four American states in the late 1990s operated supermaximum security prisons or units, providing nearly 20,000 beds and accounting for 1.8 percent of the state prison population. Although conditions vary from state to state, many supermaxes subject inmates to nearly complete isolation and deprivation of sensory stimuli. Surprisingly little is known from research on who is sent to supermaxes, why, and for how long; the effects of supermaxes on security and conditions in other prisons; or the effects of supermax confinement on the mental conditions and social skills of inmates. Deleterious effects are likely to be especially acute for mentally ill and subnormal inmates. The recent proliferation of supermaxes appears premised on a belief that prison disorder is the product primarily of disruptive inmates rather than the characteristics of prison regimes; the best evidence suggests otherwise.

Predictions of Dangerousness

Long-term predictions of future dangerousness are used throughout the criminal law in investigation, pretrial detention, bail, sentencing, prison administration, parole, and early release decisions. Explicit use of such predictions by courts and legislatures is increasing. Reliance on predictions of dangerousness raises questions about the definition of dangerousness, the ethical limits on the use of such predictions, and the practical difficulties in proving dangerousness. The use of short-term predictions of dangerousness is much more widely acknowledged and accepted than the use of long-term predictions considered in this essay. Lawyers have relegated predictions of dangerousness to the psychiatric professions, leaving the moral and evidentiary issues untouched. The appropriate application of predictions of dangerousness is not a technical question of how well a prediction can be made, nor is it a question of the burden of proof required to prove elements of a criminal or civil charge. The use of predictions of dangerousness requires a political judgment balancing the risk and harm to society with the intrusion on the liberty of each member of a preventatively detained group. Not all types of prediction are equally satisfactory. Actuarial predictions are preferable to predictions that rely on an intuitive judgment by psychiatric professionals. The use of predictions of dangerousness to alter individual dispositions should be allowed only to the extent that such dispositions would be justified as deserved independent of those predictions. Within the range of punishment or control not undeserved, relative predictions of dangerousness may properly influence dispositional decisions. These principles strike a balance between individual autonomy and state authority. In the paradigm context of sentencing, the controlling principle for the use of predictions of dangerousness is that the base expectancy rate of violence for the criminal predicted as dangerous must be shown by reliable evidence to be substantially higher than the base expectancy rate of another criminal with a closely similar record, convicted of a closely similar crime, but not predicted to be unusually dangerous, before the greater dangerousness of the former may be relied on to intensify or extend his punishment.

Impediments to Penal Reform

In this country, in contrast to Europe, criminology has not found a secure home in the law schools, nor have judges and lawyers manifested esteem for criminological and penological speculations. Happily, for reasons which pertain to the broad sweep of social and political change rather than to any process of intellectual conversion, the days of neglect are passing. The discipline of criminology, if discipline it be or can become, will hereafter play an increasing role in the life of the law schools of this country. For this reason, quite apart from proper reservations about any incumbent of the chair, the establishment of the Julius Kreeger Professorship of Law and Criminology is of importance to this law school, fixing these studies into the structure of our Faculty; of importance to the law schools of the United States as an act of leadership in legal education; and, I hope, of importance to the communities we seek to serve. In an inaugural lecture one is permitted to make a testament about ones field, to offer a broad theoretical statement of an intellectual position. On the theme of penal reform my testament is easy to make and unchallengeable: We need more knowledge of the efficacy of our

Relations between Federal and Local Police

Although sound constitutional policy supports some aspects of federal law enforcement jurisdiction, there remains a vast ambit of overlapping federal and nonfederal criminal jurisdiction guided primarily by political fashions. The lack of a rational basis for delineating these respective jurisdictions inhibits strategic planning for efficient, effective, coherent anticrime efforts. The incentives and disincentives to communication, cooperation, coordination, and collaboration are substantial, with leading contemporary incentives including the need to combat multijurisdictional criminals and the lure of equitably sharing assets forfeited by drug offenders. Considerable progress has been made in fostering a climate of positive interchange between federal and nonfederal police, from information exchange to technical assistance to multijurisdictional operational task forces. Making continued progress in strategic planning remains a daunting task given the powerful mythology and political realities that support the persistence of more than 14,000 local and at least fifty federal police agencies.

Deterrence and Corrections

A commitment to corrections must not lead us to repudiate the notion of deterrence as a legitimate and often obtainable goal of criminal sanctions. Knowledge about de terrence can provide us with more rational means of crime control, and may well liberate corrections from the heavy burdens of unitary assumptions about deterrence and penal sanctions. The necessary beginning of a sustained explora tion of deterrence is the development of sensitivity to the differences in situation, audience, and goal which account for the great differences noted in the effects of threats on human behavior. A few distinctions basic to deterrence research are suggested by the authors.

Madness and the Criminal Law

Madness and the Criminal Law1 consists of two stories and three essays. The stories-written as if the reminiscences of Eric Blair (George Orwell) about his service in the 1920s as a police magistrate in British-ruled Burma 2-are about crimes of passion, and they illustrate some difficult issues of moral culpability and social prejudice that the essays discuss in a more conventional manner. Morris has a promising future as a writer of fiction: these stories are both entertaining and thought-provoking. Both stories suggest that outcomes of notorious criminal cases are governed more by community prejudice or political pressure than by theories of culpability. The Brothel Boy was hanged for rape-murder because both the British and the Burmese wanted him dead, although his mental capacity was minimal. The white Planter who killed his native mistress in a trance was acquitted by a colonial government which seemed to be more concerned with the interracial sexual scandal than the killing. Like Eric Blair himself, Norval

United Nations efforts in crime prevention

T he technology of communication and travel links the world. National borders become increasingly porous, people and information crossing them, impeded hardly at all. In this sense, the movement toward one world accelerates week by week. Yet the significance of our growing together in this increasingly crowded world seems to be appreciated only by the large corporations, and certainly not by the diplomats and legislators, blinded by protocol and the scramble for votes, who adhere mindlessly to the awkward national and regional and tribal divisions that threaten all of us and our children. The oil barons, the computer and software vendors, the car manufacturers, and many other businesspersons have seen the promised financial land of a world market, and those engaged in transnational crime and terrorism have not been left far behind. But, as yet, the work of the police and of governmental agencies involved in crime control

The Best Interests of the Child

It had happened swiftly, safely, and to the noisy delight of the Chinakans. The distance between the beach and their fishing village was about a hundred yards; we were inundated about midway on our journey, providing a perfect view for all. When we pushed off there seemed ample clearance between the calm waters and the gunwales, though the barque was heavily laden with the tins of bully beef, of dried biscuits, of jam and condensed milk and a wide variety of other groceries to which the Burmese villagers were reputed to be partial. I doubt that Mr. Plimsoll would have been suspicious, unless perhaps he was wise in the ways of Burmese fishing villagers. I had built so many dreams around those tins and bottles. Of course I would not bargain; no vulgar barter for me. I would simply give gifts-not all at once, but in a steady flow of beneficence. The natural tendencies of the Burmese to extend hospitality to a European who had unbent to the point of wishing to visit their humble fishing village for a day or two would be powerfully reinforced by my munificence. Images of feasts, of wise old Burmese gentlemen beaming with approval at the young white man come to live temporarily among them, of the less proper passages in The Golden Bough, had haunted me for weeks, and I confess that it had not escaped my daydreams, and even an occasional more real imagining of the night, that one or more of the slender, lovely Burmese girls might take it into her heart and passionate nature to express her gratitude in those ways they were reputed to favor for this purpose. And now. . . now, nothing would remain . . . not a single biscuit . . . not a pot of marmite . . . none of Jardines diverse and, I ruefully remembered, expensive produce remained above the waves. A sinking feeling, I thought as the barque sank, and was amused by the trite pun. Looking, I am sure, a total fool, pith hel-

Who Should Go to Prison

The question of who should go to prison is a serious one, of course, but occasionally it has its lighter side. Not long ago, Chicago heralded the opening of a new jail which is in the modern pattern: a 26-story triangular concrete structure, housing, in relative comfort, people awaiting trial and others undergoing short-term punishment. The decor is “prison stark.” The security system is controlled by computer, federal prison administrators having decided apparently that man is fallible but the computer is not. The computer system controls the elevators in such a way that two elevators cannot arrive at the same level together and that the same weight of person must get out the elevator as got into it, lest an alarm bell ring. It is supposedly foolproof and all very complicated.

Family Environment and Delinquency

The International Library of Sociology (ILS) is the most important series of books on sociology ever published. Founded in the 1940s by Karl Mannheim, the series became the forum for pioneering research and theory, marked by comparative approaches and analysis of new disciplines, such as the sociology of youth and culture. Spanning volumes by Parsons, Dickinson and Ossowski, the history of the ILS is the history of modern sociology.