The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society.

About 3 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, and more than 10 million are received into American jails each year. More than a third of American black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under some form of criminal jurisdiction - on probation, on parole, in jail or prison.

Winston Churchill's 1910 dictum, that the treatment of crime and criminals was "one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country," is therefore more true of the United States than he could have imagined. One of the authors in this volume estimates that over any ten-year period, fully one-fifth of the population may directly experience jail, and in some communities it is the unusual person who has not been in jail. Building, maintaining, and paying for prisons and jails has moved to the very top of the priority list for state and local governments.

Morris's and Rothman's timely book fills a great void in social scholarship. Although the prison has a long history in Western society, intellectuals have been drawn to it more as literary trope, a la Jean Genet and Norman Mailer, than as a subject of serious scholarship. Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum, which appeared only a generation ago, was one of the very first solid works on the history of incarcerative institutions, if one excepts Michel Foucault's more famous, but fanciful, Discipline and Punishment. Morris, while not primarily a historian, may be the leading academic observer of the contemporary prison, and, over the course of more than three decades, has produced a rich lode of practical, empirical work.

The first, and longest, part of this book recounts in fascinating detail the history of official incarceration from ancient times to the present, culminating in a superb essay by Morris on the contemporary American maximum security prison. At Morris's behest, an Illinois prisoner, Simon Gutierrez, kept a detailed diary of a single day of prison routine that captures perfectly the tedium, the noise, and the constant struggle to build a cocoon of physical and psychic privacy within the raw, crowded, volatile mass.

The second half of the book, "Themes and Variations," is less successful. Although the essays are individually interesting, the spread of topics is so vast - from the Australian prison colonies, through the prison in literature, to a world history of political prisons - that it inevitably lacks the coherence of the first section.

The modern penal system is a palimpsest of reform movements over the centuries, springing from intentions that are variously humane, severe, or vengeful. A broad-scale American movement toward using prisons for punishment - as opposed to, say, merely holding debtors so they could not flee their debts - coincided with the era of Jacksonian democracy. It was motivated in part by the desire to replace the lashings and executions that characterized traditional justice regimes, but mostly as an engine of Republican moral reform. A century later, the creation of the "Big House" reflected the Progressive Era's faith in centralization and bureaucratic efficiency.

The crudest theories of society and behavior, of Freudian psychology, of choice-making and moral development, have been pressed into service in the interest of "reform" and "rehabilitation." The gathering of so many people of demonstrated moral deficiency under one convenient roof has proven irresistibly attractive to social and psychological engineers of every stripe.

The very worst cruelties are inflicted for the sake of the prisoner's betterment. The "separate system" pioneered in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania kept prisoners in total isolation - new prisoners wore masks as they were conducted to their cells, and speaking aloud was punished with an iron gag. The treadmill system of the Victorian prison - up to ten hours a day turning a giant hamster wheel - was for the sake of imbuing habits of order and discipline. Anectin, a drug that creates the experience of suffocation, was used for aversive conditioning purposes in California until the 1970s.

On the other hand, a haphazard post-1960s movement to eliminate internal constraints created an unprecedented wave of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, and in many states a shift of institutional control to gangs. Violence seems to have abated in recent years as officials have gradually reasserted control, and perhaps also because of a pronounced shift to more minority, and more female, staff. But maximum security prisons and big-city jails remain overcrowded, sullen, uncomfortably dangerous places. Truly horrific rates of AIDS have penal officials in a state of quiet panic.

If a lesson emerges from Morris's and Rothman's book it is humility. The reality of the prison is nonideological. Crime rates are probably an epiphenomenon of social and demographic disruption, and not materially affected by levels of imprisonment. But there are many very dangerous people in prison, and the rest of us are safer for it. Probably far too many people serve time for nonviolent offenses, but prisons are statistical quicksands, and plea-bargaining makes the offense of record a poor index of what a prisoner actually did. The wildly disproportionate rate of imprisonment of blacks is, at some deep level, a legacy of American racism. But most of the difference in white-black imprisonment rates, some 80 percent, according to Morris, is explained by the greater severity of black offenses against persons.

It is absurd to expect an agency such as a prison to become an instrument of reform and personal rehabilitation. And since the likelihood of imprisonment for any specific offense is infinitesimally low, it is foolish to expect them to have much deterrence value. Prisons incarcerate - that's all - but may be the only solution for dangerous offenders. An ethical society will not employ that weapon heedlessly, and will ensure that incarceration is minimally decent and safe. Morris and Rothman illuminate the tortuous path we have traveled toward that objective and the very long, and very expensive, road that is yet to go.

Charles R. Morris was director of institutions, including adult prisons, in Washington State in the 1970s. His history of the American Catholic church will be published next spring.