tical publicly funded interventions that would help the working poor enter mainstream careers. Such interventions include child-care services, stipends for supporting children, and increased job training especially for young black men in relevant industries. The main implication for criminal justice is that the ghetto men now adapted to criminal activities would redirect their energies toward employment and, by extension, a restructuring of currently damaged economic and social arrangements.
2. An important critique of the criminal justice system from the standpoint of corrections is that the philosophy of corrections has hardened in favor of the concepts of punishment and regimentation and against the concept of rehabilitation. That philosophy was an outgrowth of the much-vaunted law-and-order culture and the aggressive war on drugs, which created laws mandating sentences for certain categories of criminal offense. Possession, sale, and use of illegal drugs is a crime, and in recent years, politicians and public-policy advocates have sought to increase punishment for drug offenders, whether violent or nonviolent. But punishment does not necessarily lead to crime prevention, and it provides little guarantee that those who have been punished can contribute positively to society.
The result has been a significant increase in the prison population but not a great increase in either drug treatment programs or rehabilitation programs in the corrections system. That was the observation of Irwin at California's Solano State Prison, where prisoners are "warehoused" and granted very limited access to recreation or rehabilitation. Even release from prison does not restore full citizenship, which prolongs punishment. Released Solano prisoners who wanted jobs could not find them because of the stigma attached to prison experience (Irwin, 2005, pp. 172-3). That was also the experience of Elaine Bartlett, who was imprisoned on a first-offense d...