Say hello to the new chain gang–and Mississippi isn’t alone. From Albany to Sacramento, lawmakers have discovered that bashing prison inmates is this season’s easiest and most disingenuous way to exploit voters’ anti-crime sentiment. Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina, among others, have enacted or proposed bans on telephones, televisions, basketball, boxing, wrestling and martial arts. California, eroding the Jerry Brown-era “Prisoners’ Bill of Rights,” is charging inmates $8 to initiate court actions and has banned R-rated movies. South Carolina has banned conjugal visits for minimum-security inmates, ending a 50-year tradition. New Jersey is considering a “people’s prison” where inmates would do 10 hours a day of hard labor, with no educational programs, no gyms, no TVs. Congress has also struck a blow against crime, eliminating educational grants for federal prisoners. Says Jonathan Turley, director of the Prison Law Project: “It’s difficult to imagine a measure draconian enough to satisfy the public desire for retribution.”

In this election year, the politics driving the trend is risk-free. There’s no prisoner PAC, so it’s a no-brainer for elected officials to display anti-crime resolve by cracking down on prison conditions. Indeed, Some of the action is symbolic. Louisiana passed a law banning martial arts in prison even though it offers none. Mississippi banned conditioners though few inmates have them. Many proposals were offered but didn’t pass. Still, supporters insist that making prisons harsher will somehow deter crime. “Knowing there’s no televisions here, maybe they’ll think twice before committing a crime,” Sgt. Dan Smith of Clay County, Fla., suggested to The New York Times after the Sheriff’s Office removed TVs from county jails. Others maintain that prison life has grown soft and too inviting for some down-and-out people. “We have !too many benefits and too little punishment,” says New York state Sen, Michael Nozzolio, who wants to revoke scholarships for prisoners. Although studies show education is one of the few programs that cuts recidivism, Nozzolio says: “We have lifers getting two and three master’s degrees at taxpayer expense.”

Critics say those arguments simply add up to mindless retaliation. There’s no evidence that something like banning TVs will give pause to someone contemplating, say, a drive-by shooting or a walk-by mugging. “Does anyone really believe that taking away a television is going to affect the crime rate?” asks David Rothman, a Columbia University historian of American prisons. How about barbells, which are a particularly popular target for get-tough lawmakers? Citing the 1993 riot in Lucasville, Ohio, where prisoners used barbells to smash a cinder-block wall, legislators argue that bulked-up inmates cause too many problems in and out of prison. Experts scoff at this contention. “We haven’t seen any 98-pound weaklings bulked up into 210-pound behemoths who rob and rape people,” says William Turner, a San Francisco lawyer who has won several suits forcing states to clean up their prison systems. And, inmates say, weight lifting acts as a tension-reliever. As one parolee in Wisconsin explains: “People that lift iron have a fixation with themselves. They just sit there. and lift, and they don’t cause no problems. They’re so big, no one wants to mess with them.”

With most prisons already dangerously overcrowded, wardens and experts worry that idle inmates are dangerous, first to other convicts, but also to prison staff. Prisoners are “like kids who need an electronic babysitter,” says New York state correctional spokesman James Flateau. Just ask Harvey Garlotte, 36, who is serving a life sentence for murder in the South Mississippi Correctional Facility. He says that last week guards began confiscating private TVs. Most of the individual TVs are in death row, psychiatric wards and isolation quarters, leaving only communal areas where dozens of inmates can gather to view one set. Claims Garlotte: “If they’re going to take the TVs and all, things are going to blow apart.”

Do barbells and TVs really amount to coddling?. To a prisoner in the 19th century, complaints the likes of Garlotte’s would sound pretty farfetched. Then, prisoners had a cell and a Bible and not much more. But the definition of acceptable conditions has changed with the times. In the early 1900s leg shackles came off and athletics were allowed as part of “normalizing” the prison. After World War II rehabilitation was the buzzword, and by the end of the 1960s the Supreme Court established certain minimum rights for prisoners, like the right to worship, hold property and contact lawyers. But since the 1970s the notion of rehabilitation has lost Found. While for some inmates prison is a shelter from urban streets, a place where they can get three square meals and clean clothes, few people who have studied prisons would contend that even the nicest ones are pleasure domes. Says Turley, “We no longer pretend to have a prison policy other than retribution, no philosophy other than warehousing.” And after the new laws, a pretty bare warehouse at that.

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