This research paper examines the recent trend toward the reduction and elimination of privileges of the inmate prison population in the United States. This trend, which is accelerating, stems from a variety of legal, economic and political causes. In the short run, the net effects of these changes has been to reduce operating costs in prisons and to increase prisoner unrest. Over the longer term, some of these changes, especially the reduction of educational and counselling programs, may make more difficult the prevention and control of crimes committed by repeat offenders.
In 1963, Hibbert surveyed the uneven progress made by the movement to reform prison conditions in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. He concluded that "conditions in many American gaols had improved little in more than a hundred years." The Wickersham Report in the 1920s stated that the prison system in the United States was "antiquated, unintelligent and frequently cruel and inhuman."
According to Hibbert, the basic impediment to prison reform was the widespread conviction of prison authorities and the public that "prisons should primarily be places of detention and punishment" and that "the reform of the criminal was considered of negligible importance compared with the protection of society." The impetus for reform gained momentum, especially after World War II, because of a combination of humanitarian considerations and studies showing that it was possible to rehabilitate a certain fraction of inmates. In most prisons, sanitary, dietary and other living conditions were improved. Draconian forms of incarceration and punishment such as chain gangs and solitary confinement disappeared or became much less common. Reforms included the introduction of drug and alcohol treatment and counselling programs and the adoption of vocational training and work programs, which eventually came to include 91 percent of federal and 70 percent of state pri...