America’s Prisons Aren’t Fit for Purpose

T he infamous Boston gangster Whitey Bulger did not deserve to be bludgeoned to death by a padlock. Jeffrey Epstein deserved supervision that would have prevented his suicide by hanging. And hundreds of prisoners around the country deserved a form of custody that would have prevented them being numbered among the scores of thousands of fentanyl overdose victims.

I’m not a bleeding heart by any means. In my opinion, Whitey Bulger should have been put to death years ago. But by legal means. As it was, he was meant to serve out the rest of his life in prison. And in prison he deserved special protections because he was under a special threat: Prisoners are known to murder federal informers — rats — like Bulger.

Bulger was killed within hours of his transfer to a West Virginia prison in 2018. Security-camera footage showed the wheelchair-bound Bulger being moved by two prisoners into a corner of a room, out of view from the cameras. There, a heavy padlock stuffed into a sock was used to brain him. He was “unrecognizable” by the time his murderers were finished with him.

An inspector general’s report this week showed that Bulger’s death was preventable and resulted from “staff and management performance failures; bureaucratic incompetence; and flawed, confusing, and insufficient policies and procedures.” Inmates at the prison were taking bets on precisely how long Bulger would live after his transfer.

Some of the mistakes included prison staff members speaking openly of the upcoming transfer of Bulger, against the policy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Prison staffers openly speculated with prisoners about how long it would be until Bulger was murdered. Additional problems included Bulger’s medical reports before the transfer, which falsely made him out to be fit enough to be with the general population of Hazelton prison, known for its violence. Nobody assessed the risk to his safety posed by other Boston organized-crime figures in the prison. It also took hours before guards even noticed the body of Bulger.

What the report really shows is that many prison guards and prisoners have internalized the view — common in our culture — that prisons are supposed to be madhouses of criminality, neglect, and disorder. They accept that the criminality and disorder within prisons is somehow part of the punishment meted out to convicts. While people have spent a decade denouncing “rape culture” on college campuses, a real rape culture exists in our detention facilities, where scores of thousands of men, women, and children report being sexually abused annually.

Of course fixing prisons is notoriously hard. Obviously, they’re filled with violent criminals. And guard work necessarily requires hiring hard men willing to face danger and the nastiest realities of life among the forgotten, the neglected, and the hateful.

But America has more people in prison than exist in Montana and Rhode Island combined. The cruelty of prisons and size of a prison population are among the ways we measure societies and by which they are condemned in human memory.

What this system is screaming at us is that our idea of justice has been shattered. On one side are those who want the system to be rehabilitative-restorative, and against them are those who want it to be retributive-punishing. In fact, these people are arguing past each other. Plunging a criminal into more criminality worsens him by vindicating his cynicism about society. Treating a criminal as a mere social victim worsens him by making him contemptuous of justice. A properly retributive system of justice does the work of rehabilitation. The next movement for law and order needs to start with the penitentiary.