Going Up the River : Travels in a Prison Nation
by Joseph T. Hallinan
This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land
November 15, 2001
For the policymakers, the legislator, the budget analyst, the Secretary, the Commissioner, the warden, the union liaison, the Department of Justice and the Attorneys General, the activist, the prisoner, the prisoners' friends and families, Joseph Hallinan has it all in a nutshell and he does it all inside 220 petite pages in 17 highly readable, capsulate chapters.
This is the first book by Joseph Hallinan, a newspaper reporter with stunningly, inarguable credentials. On a "sabbatical" period, he embarked on investigating prisons and the prison system by traveling around the United States and conducting interviews with dozens of people. In this dispassionate, objectively-written book he covers such topics as: how boonie bergs become boon towns, the brutality and exploitation of prisoners leading to federal intervention via the Supreme Court, the rise of the Nation of Islam as a litigating force, the Attica riot and its sequelae among researcher activists, the effect of federal mandatory sentencing and the quizzical and population/building pressures it created, a brief history of punishment in the context of Western "civilization" and the major (failed) "reform" movements of 19th century America, the post WW I "rehabilitation" craze in California, why and wherefor we build prisons, rookies killing inmates, inmates killing inmates, adjudication thereafter, gangs and gang rape, chain gangs and other popular political "solutions", supermax facilities, inmate property lists, classification systems, hiring standards and practices, what makes for prison activists, what makes for prison volunteers, family visitation, family visitation for lifers, work programs and work programs done under private contract, plentiful profits from payphones [the book is footnoted, too], the "new" movement toward profitability (e.g., prisoners on "loan" cleaning chicken houses), the American Correctional Association (ACA) and its conventions, peripheral industries that have sprung up, the private prison and the exportation of one state's prisoners to another state (e.g., Lorton to Youngstown, Ohio), the bad things that can happen (public or private) when the guard force is largely rookie and the prisoner population is largely not, shortcuts at all levels with contracts, unenforceable clauses - especially out of state, influence peddling, wardens becoming rich off stock options, the Oklahoma rodeo, Oklahoma death row, lethal injection, the Oklahoma cemetery, Oklahoma overcrowding, Oklahoma riots ("Easy to forget [during a rodeo] that in the last quarter century Oklahoma's primary penal innovation was inventing a better way to kill."), the impossible distances, the impossible costs, strip searching out of habit rather than purpose, gubernatorial "initiatives" gone stupid, solitary isolation, mental health, farmgirls becoming correctional officers, finally, sunset in the Allegheny mountains of West Virginia with the razor ribbon glowing gold.
Anyway, it was a great book. It's a cross between "Travels with Charlie" by John
Steinbeck and "This Land is Your Land" sung by a children's choir. Hallinan has really
gone "from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream water". From California to Alabama, from
Pennsylvania and D.C. to Ohio (with a great deal of the innards of Texas), this "Prison
Nation" has been made for you and me.