What the environment of prison does to its inhabitants can be better understood if we listen to the voices of men in prison, and the rise of the prison writer gives us a new and deeper data base for hypotheses to guide research. Jack Henry Abbott, as the best of these writers, raises disturbing questions about the functional utility of the maximum security prison. The most alarming suggestion of Abbott and others is that men being punished do not know why. No positive learning can derive from an experience so unreasonable, so lacking in compassion, as the realities of our prisons.
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