The jail: managing the underclass in American society.

• Author: Murray, Charles

THE JAIL

John Irwin's thesis is that American society uses jails to control and segregate the "rebble,' a subset of the poor and disadvantaged. Besides being destitute, the rabble are detached from the conventional social networks and behave in ways that the middle class finds objectionable or threatening. Members of the rabble are jailed not so much because of the seriousness of the crimes they commit as for the offensiveness of their behavior to middle-class sensibilities. Citing the work of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, authors of Regulating the Poor, Irwin tells us that "the contemporary jail is a subsidiary to the welfare organizations' that control the poor and defuse their threat to the status quo.

Knowing this and nothing else, what might you expect the conclusions to be? Right. The most serious crimes (white-collar crimes, industrial pollution) are actually committed by "reputable' people, and the police should be concentrating on them. We should "learn to tolerate a large number of the rabble.' The genuinely troublesome behavior of the rabble should be controlled by informal, extralegal measures "that will foster a new sense of community among strangers.' And, of course: "In the long run, we should work to alter our basic values. Excessive materialism and individualism . . . help maintain a radically unequal distribution of wealth, opportunity and prestige, which, in turn, produces high rates of crime and many forms of repulsive public deviance.'

The good news is that the rhetoric begins only seven pages before the end of the book. The rest of The Jail* is terrific.

* The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society. John Irwin. University of California, $16.95.

John Irwin adds to the debate over the underclass something it badly needs: good debate about what the world of the underclass looks like from ground level. Irwin examines the corner of that world represented by the municipal and county jail, and he's been there. He was a prisoner in eight such jails for periods of up to 120 days and graduated from a five-year term in Soledad State Prison before getting his Ph.D. in sociology at Berkeley.

This sounds like a setup for a memoir masquerading as social science, but Irwin scrupulously avoids trading on his credentials. He occasionally refers to his own experience when it is especially apropos, but the core of The Jail is based on extensive interviews with a randomly selected sample of 200 people in the San...