TWI-116 Newcocks

Introduction

In his “COMMENT” in “Trans-action,” Editor-in-Chief Irving Louis Horowitz states that “The sad paradox is that ‘law and order’ are nowhere at a greater premium than in America’s prisons. The idea of serving time as being fit punishment is a simplistic formula that forgets that time gets filled with activities. What is needed is a criminology that will face the consequences of classical penology head on, that will reexamine the very notion of punishment. The prisons of Pennsylvania have become penal colonies, not corrective institutions. Men are sentenced to serve time, but instead they find themselves in servitude to other men. They are convicted by judges and punished by fellow inmates.”

He goes on to state, “No serious person can imagine any prisoners being ‘rehabilitated’ by the prison system or by its brutalized sex system. The caution of the judiciary in sentencing men to prison must be considered an act of elemental decency to society no less than to the offender. Men’s aggression is not destroyed by their incarceration. They only redirect it toward one another. Prisoners are the black men of the total institution. As long as aggression remains an in-group affair, with society’s victims assaulting one another, then it apparently arouses little animosity from the social world. But the larger society, for its own future, should recognize the inevitable consequences of prison corruption.”

Thus, this book The Newcocks does not deal with prisons in Pennsylvania in particular, but with prisons in general. It is intended to show in minute detail that such conditions do exist, and the sooner such conditions are exposed, rocking the public out of its apathy, only then can the proper corrective measures be taken!