Prisons: Paroling the Warden

James V. Bennett, director of the nation’s federal prisons, is a gentle man of 70 who often sounds like a movie warden with a heart of gold. He speaks of his 22,000 charges as “individuals with hearts, lungs and emotions like everyone else.” He frets that “our criminal laws are the most severe in the world.” Yet in his 27 years of guarding the likes of Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelley, Bennett has been as hard as he has been soft. Of 700,000 federal prisoners during his tenure, only six have flown the coop and never been recovered.

Last week, Bennett, who may be the best penologist in U.S. history, retired from a career that he began in 1927 as an obscure Government efficiency expert investigating federal prisons. What he found was 19 scandal-tainted Siberias jammed with idle, desperate cons and untrained, underpaid guards. Bennett’s reports led in 1930 to creation of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, which he took over in 1937. A measure of his devotion is eight pioneering federal penal laws with which he has been associated, including the 1964 Criminal Justice Act financing legal aid for federal defendants.

Tumbling Walls. “The purpose of prison,” says Bennett, “is to transform unhealthy attitudes into healthy ones.” To that end, Bennett cut the work week of federal prison personnel from 60 hours to 40, raised average pay from $1,680 a year to $6,000. Armed guards are giving way to a higher proportion of specialists in remedial reading and vocational training. Overcrowding has ended with 14 new institutions, including camps and reformatories. Last year Bennett closed grim, antique Alcatraz, replacing it with a far more efficient installation in Marion, III., which embodies the best in prison architecture, a subject on which Bennett has written the only available book.

When Bennett arrived, all federal prisoners were being tossed combustibly together, murderers and rapists with income tax evaders and car thieves, and lock-stepped to meals that were eaten from a tin plate under a guard’s glare. Bennett’s monument is “individualized” treatment that separates prisoners by degrees of dangerousness and redeemability. The vast majority are given only as much restraint as they require. Today, more than 40% of federal prisoners are in prisons virtually without walls—working outside at everything from roadbuilding to reforestation.

Home Leave? One result is the Bennett-invented Federal Prisons Industries Inc., which does a $40 million a year business with other Government agencies and turns a $4,000,000 annual profit over to the Treasury. Another Bennett innovation is saner sentencing. In the old days, all federal sentences were for fixed periods, and a parole board could not even consider a case until one-third of a convict’s term had elapsed. Bennett inspired the 1958 Omnibus Sentencing Act, which allows far greater parole flexibility and permits a judge to jail a man for three to six months of observation before final sentencing, thus encouraging courts to tailor the rap to the man. As a result of Bennett’s pioneering, only 10% of federal prisoners serve more than five years. And the prison population is declining: there are 1,359 fewer cons this year than in 1963.

Bennett is now pushing for a law that would allow some prisoners to leave jail during the day to work and see their families (similar to systems long used in other countries, notably Sweden). On the other hand, Bennett’s tolerance stops at the death penalty. Unlike other reformers, he wants it kept on the books for particularly heinous crimes, such as high treason, murder for hire and airplane bombings.

Bennett’s mission is hardly finished in a country with 3,043 county jails that are generally still almost as repellent as federal prisons were when he started. But Bennett is anxious to let younger hands take over. “No man is ever really satisfied with the job he has done,” says Bennett. “But I leave with no regrets.”