Introductory Note

• Published date: 01 August 2008
• DOI: 10.1177/0093854808318593
• Author: Hans Toch
• Date: 01 August 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

For years, I have bored groups of indifferent students with the assertion that psychologically

meaningful reform consists of ameliorating damaging disjunctures between human

environments and human needs. Under cover of this cryptic pronouncement, I have been

contending that prisons stand out for me as environments in urgent need of attention (Toch,

1992). This suggestion rarely impresses my students, who tend to vociferously assert that

rapists and cutthroats deserve any discomfort they may experience as prisoners.

My students are far from alone. There is limited sympathy among the public for the tra-

vails of incarcerated malefactors. This sentiment tends to be reflected in political decisions

about prisons—and as a bonus to politicians, starving prisons saves money for which there

are other, more popular uses, including the opportunity to reduce impending deficits.

The courts might correct for this trend, but judges—with some noteworthy exceptions—

do not see themselves as prison reformers, and they have not been rushing to scrutinize

prisons to ascertain whether they measure up to “evolving standards” of civilized penology,

whatever those may be.1Most judges, in fact, have been taking an embarrassingly deferen-

tial stance in appraising the practices of correctional officials that they have been asked to

review. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution admittedly proscribes “cruel and

unusual punishment,” but this phrase tends to be interpreted as covering extreme condi-

tions; it is certainly not seen as applying to prisons as such. (Prisons are routinely designed

to be inhospitable, and they would certainly not qualify as “unusual.”)

Not all conditions of all prison settings, however, meet with a wave of national indiffer-

ence. The average “supermax” dungeon, for example, has not been inviting the admiration

of my students, nor have these austere habitats been earning the unqualified endorsements

of the courts. Concerns in both quarters tend to be mobilized where one can show that in

some of these modes of confinement, we have been callous and indifferent to the predictable

suffering of offenders who are brittle and vulnerable—that we have been tormenting men

and women who have had lifelong difficulties coping and surviving—and where one can

demonstrate that the most needy individuals are disproportionately relegated to environ-

ments that are not only intensely hurtful but demonstrably harmful—where even a sturdy

person’s survival would be jeopardized, given routines and regimes of unremitting and stul-

tifying isolation.

This situation is a core concern of our contributors, who examine the challenges posed by

the prevailing treatment of vulnerable incarcerated offenders—especially by the wholesale

sequestration of emotionally disturbed inmates in the supermaxes I have alluded to. The dis-

tinguished contributors represented below have been widely recognized as the leading author-

ities in the field, and they are known to have been operating on the cutting edges of prison

reform. The group includes a pioneering administrator famed for humanizing women’s pris-

ons (Elaine Lord), a psychiatrist whose testimony has inspired revolutionary changes in

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CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 35 No. 8, August 2008 911-912

DOI: 10.1177/0093854808318593

© 2008 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology