ABSTRACT
In pursuit of the elusive “truth” the author have dipped into the vast literature on prisons, much of it, alas, as forbidding as the jailhouse itself, couched in the mind-glazing language of sociology: “ the prison is a formal or complex organization, a large-scale, multi-group organization characterized by a task orientation, functional specialization, and role-reciprocity,” as one writer puts it. The uninitiated are prone to take the new nomenclature at its face value. There are various schools of thought about prisoners. To their keepers, they are a sort of subspecies of the human race. No doubt prison administrators sense that to permit the media and the public access to their domain would result in stripping away a major justification for their existence: that they are confining depraved, brutal creatures.
