How America Disguised 65,000 Prison Beds
Fifty years ago, as the U.S. began building the world鈥檚 largest infrastructure for human caging, many Americans envisioned a future without prisons. Prisons, in the eyes of many, were irrevocably broken and incompatible with democracy. A by Lyndon B. Johnson to study law enforcement wrote that 鈥渓ife in many institutions is at best barren and futile, and at worst unspeakably brutal and degrading鈥� and lamented that many prisoners labored 鈥渦nder conditions scarcely distinguishable from slavery.鈥�
In 1970, a group of judges spent a single night at Nevada State Prison, and emerged to of 鈥渕en raving, screaming and pounding on the walls.鈥� A Kansas judge said, 鈥淚 felt like an animal in a cage鈥� and urged the state to 鈥渟end two bulldozers out there and tear the damn thing to the ground.鈥� A said imprisonment in that state amounted to 鈥渂anishment from civilized society to a dark and evil world.鈥� A predicted that 鈥渢he institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational.鈥�
Mainstream outlets such as and The asked whether prisons should be abolished. As a mass movement for deinstitutionalization forced mental asylums 鈥� the nation鈥檚 other and, at the time, institution for involuntary confinement 鈥� to , it seemed that prisons might crumble, too.
Of course, instead of disappearing, prisons expanded over the next 40 years to become defining features of American life. Not only did U.S. criminal legal systems grow large enough to confine and surveil American adults, their logics of came to define and permeate of .
Why did prison systems metastasize so devastatingly when they seemed so vulnerable? And what can we take from this history as a massive social movement again challenges the legitimacy of U.S. criminal legal systems?
Part of the blame, as I lay out in a recent article in , lies with so-called 鈥渁lternatives to incarceration,鈥� which the public and policymakers 鈥� especially liberals 鈥� embraced with zeal. And no alternative to prison was more ubiquitous and insidious than the correctional halfway house.
Though they had humble religious origins 鈥� Episcopal, Catholic, and Quaker groups opened the first halfway houses in the 1950s in order to help people reenter society 鈥� halfway houses caught the imagination of many policymakers in the 1960s and 1970s. They offered a model of 鈥渃ommunity treatment鈥� that promised to address crime, drug addiction, and other social ills more effectively, cheaply, and humanely than traditional prisons.
Enthusiasm for community treatment brought millions of dollars in government funding for halfway houses. Funding poured in through President Johnson鈥檚 Great Society programs, and millions more would come through the and the Nixon administration鈥檚 wars on drugs and crime. Halfway houses numbered only around a dozen in 1960, but by the late 1970s, they were more common in the U.S. than roller skating rinks. The capacity of the nation鈥檚 2,000-plus halfway houses totaled more than 65,000 beds 鈥� roughly the contemporaneous prison capacities of California, Texas, and New York combined.
The major appeal of community treatment 鈥� then as now 鈥� was that it seemed not just an alternative to the prison, but even its opposite. The Johnson administration鈥檚 Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice halfway houses as an 鈥渆ntirely new kind of correctional institution鈥� that would be 鈥渁rchitecturally and methodologically the antithesis of the traditional fortress-like prison.鈥� In some ways, halfway houses did look like opposites to prison. They were small (generally around 20 beds), located in urban areas rather than far from them, and for a time elided the power dynamics characteristic of prisons. Residents, for instance, usually wore their own clothes rather than uniforms, and the earliest halfway houses were organized around discourses of 鈥渇amily.鈥�
These superficial qualities, however, belied the structural similarities between halfway houses and traditional prisons. Like prisoners, the 65,000 people in halfway houses were involuntarily confined. They were subject to systematic surveillance. Their movements were tightly controlled. And they were forced to labor for others鈥� benefit. Indeed, one reason for the proliferation of halfway houses was their ability to appeal to reformers and prison administrators at the same time. They departed from what were seen as prisons鈥� most objectionable characteristics while maintaining systems for surveillance and control.
Just how closely halfway houses resembled traditional prisons changed over time with modifications in how they were funded and administered, but even the least coercive halfway houses suffered from their proximity to the rest of the criminal legal system. Despite the promise that they would be an alternative to prison, community treatment initiatives tended to expand the reach of the carceral state.
Not only did they dramatically expand the capacity of states to confine people against their will, their promise of 鈥渢reatment鈥� encouraged judges, prosecutors, and other policymakers to apply these interventions to groups of people who had not been in the system before. To give just one example, after the Texas Youth Commission embraced the halfway house model in the 1970s, it began to incarcerate hundreds more children each year in community-based facilities, including who had not committed a crime.
Today鈥檚 discontent with prisons and policing closely resembles that of half a century ago. Many of the solutions being proposed are also near carbon copies. Community-based alternatives, rehabilitation, education, drug treatment, and mental health interventions were all part of the appeal of halfway houses. New technologies for face recognition, , online surveillance, and electronic forms of identification threaten to make the next iteration of 鈥渁lternatives鈥� even more harmful.
As we work to combat mass incarceration and create what comes next, it will be important not to be fooled by superficial differences or by changes in rhetoric. Ending mass incarceration will require dismantling 鈥� not replicating, reproducing, or relocating 鈥� systems for involuntary confinement, surveillance, and control.
