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61 Prison J. 1 (1981)

handle is hein.journals/prsjrnl61 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial The idea for a volume on jails came to us about a year ago during the American Society of Criminology meetings in Philadelphia where it seemed to us that there was an extraordinary amount of discussion about the American jail, its status, its problems, and its future. This coincided with a growing interest in jails on our own part, prompted by several issues and phenomena. To begin with, here in Philadelphia, we have three very large jails: Holmesburg, the House of Correction and the Detention Center. Together these jails comprise the Philadelphia Prison System and house 3000 inmates. These jails have some unique history. Of particular interest, a lawsuit, the Jackson v. Hendrick case, in 1971 declared the prisons to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Since then, these jails have been operating with a master and with numerous court orders and consent decrees aimed at bringing the institutions up to constitutional muster. A second reason for our interest in jails has come from watching jails in Pennsylvania move slowly from holding tanks, with all of their worst features, to institutions which are attempting in every way to attain professional status. This has come about in several ways. First, the issuance of Minimum Standards and Operating Procedures for County Jails in Pennsylvania in 1971 began a trend that has gathered momentum to this day, so that a new edition produced by a task force in which we participated is eagerly awaited by county jail administrators. Work release is now a fact in nearly every county. Contact visits, for example, have now become the norm in most jails. Access to telephones is fairly frequent for most inmates. Nearly all correctional officers now go through training programs, mainly at the Bureau of Correction. Colleges that have offered criminal justice degrees are now turning out graduates with bachelors and masters degrees who are entering jail systems, often becoming wardens in their twenties and thirties. Despite these advances we hasten to add that the need for prison reform has by no means disappeared. There are still the kept and the keepers; the psychological dislocation between the two will forever require mediation as well as advocacy on behalf of the powerless. There also still exist dungeons reminiscent of the nineteenth century - the time, in fact, when most of our prisons were built. Finally, as jails become more sophisticated in their program administration, we begin to see a near reversal of roles between the jail and the penitentiary. Where the jail was once for holding and the penitentiary was theoretically for rehabilitation, we see some signs of the opposite taking place. For one thing, penitentiaries have often become so large as to be unmanageable; as a result, programs are reduced to a minimum. Penitentiaries have been built mainly in rural 1

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