prisoners freedom within broad bounds. Prisoners may have rooms with opaque doors rather than cells that are under constant surveillance. Visits are usually private and rarely monitored. Close contact with visitors is encouraged in order to enhance the prisoner's ties with family and community. In 1945 approximately 133,000 persons were confined in state and federal prisons and reformatories. Today, there are one-and-a-half million people in prison and another three-and-a-half under penal control outside prison. The US incarceration rate is the highest in the world, partly because of the high crime rate, partly because of mandatory sentencing policies. Many people believe that American prisons are unnecessarily brutal places, more likely to teach hatred and violence than remorse. All prisons have a culture of some sort, but it is generally violent and abusive, based on gangs. Prison staffs are aware of this culture but are helpless to change it. There has been an increase in prison violence over the past few years coinciding with big cuts in educational and vocational programs at all levels. In recent decades most state prison systems in the United States have come under legal scrutiny, and the courts have found them severely deficient. Many have been declared unconstitutional in the sense that the conditions-including idleness, overcrowding, poor medical care, substantial violence, and lack of rights accorded prisoners-render confinement in these institutions "cruel and unusual" punishment and hence in violation of the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution. Such judicial decisions have increased the pressure on state prison authorities to replace their antiquated prison facilities with more modern and humane institutions. Prison systems around the globe all seem to share in the same problem of overcrowding. Amnesty international condemns Russia for overcrowded prisons, for incarcerati...
