Prison Life in the 1950s

A World Behind Bars.

Americans of the 1950s did not like to dwell on one aspect of the growing crime problem: the nation's increasingly crowded prisons. By the end of the decade, the U.S. prison population—22,492 men and women in federal penitentiaries, 185,021 in state facilities—equaled the population of a city the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma. They made sure, often in violent ways, that the outside world could not ignore them. Between 1950 and 1953 people were shocked by a succession of riots in federal and state penitentiaries around the country, twenty in 1952 alone. With a few shameful exceptions, prisons in America were more humane than they had ever been. Yet convicts from New Jersey to Louisiana to California were demonstrating that some-thing was fundamentally wrong with the penitentiary system.

An Abiding Question.

Were prisons intended to reform convicts, to punish them, or simply to separate them from...

[The entire page is 1097 words long]

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