What's tough enough.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: Prisons

In response to the public's perception that prison life is too easy, new policies are designed to make life there as unpleasant as possible.

Alabama hasn't seen anything like it since the heyday of the 1960s civil rights movement: journalists and TV camera crews flying in from all parts of the world, spirited and sometimes angry public debate and well-known civil liberty groups filing lawsuits against the state itself.

But the center of Alabama's most recent cyclone is not the church in Montgomery where Martin Luther King Jr. exhorted his followers to give of themselves for the civil rights movement, nor is it Selma where those same followers confronted a violent and bloody local reaction.

Today the controversy in Alabama is about the men in uniforms moving along the state's highways and the chains that bind them: Alabama has reinstated the chain gang, one of the most powerful, and some say brutal, symbols of the Southern past.

The man in charge of the program, Prison Commissioner Ron Jones, says it is all part of an effort to hold down prison costs.

"The tougher prison time gets, the more likely it is that you'll see the number of repeat prisoners decrease," says Jones, who has the solid backing of Alabama's Governor Fob James for his chain gang idea. "And as that number decreases, so will the enormous costs of running our prisons."

CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES

Although Jones' chain gangs have won the enmity of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of Alabama, which has filed a class action suit to end them, one other state - Arizona - has also brought back chain gangs. And Florida is planning a similar effort next year.

Of course, the chain gang concept may prove to be short-lived if the lawsuit against it succeeds. Rhonda Brownstein, a staff attorney with the SPLC in Montgomery, said she expects the courts to prohibit such prison practices because they are a form of 'cruel and unusual punishment' that is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.

Brownstein said the SPLC suit would also challenge, on the same cruel and unusual punishment basis, Alabama's practice of chaining to hitching posts prisoners who refuse to work. "They have just gone way overboard with all of this stuff. I think if we defeat them on it, it will provide a precedent for other states," she said.

But the legal challenges haven't stopped Jones' chain gangs, where prisoners are connected by lightweight leg irons in crews of five as they dig ditches and clean up the debris along the state's highways. There are currently some 800 repeat offenders working on such gangs, but Jones hopes to bring that number up to about 1,200 by the early part of next year.

Because the nation's prison population is growing rapidly, the chain gangs represent only the most recent, if still highly controversial, answer to holding down costs. They also represent a trend toward making life tougher for prisoners as one solution to recidivism.

PRISON POPULATION BURGEONS

Just the sheer number of inmates seems to demand some sort of...