The jail: managing the underclass in American society.

THE JAIL

John Irwin's thesis is that American society uses jails to control and segregate the "rebble,' a subset of the poor and disadvantaged. Besides being destitute, the rabble are detached from the conventional social networks and behave in ways that the middle class finds objectionable or threatening. Members of the rabble are jailed not so much because of the seriousness of the crimes they commit as for the offensiveness of their behavior to middle-class sensibilities. Citing the work of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, authors of Regulating the Poor, Irwin tells us that "the contemporary jail is a subsidiary to the welfare organizations' that control the poor and defuse their threat to the status quo.

Knowing this and nothing else, what might you expect the conclusions to be? Right. The most serious crimes (white-collar crimes, industrial pollution) are actually committed by "reputable' people, and the police should be concentrating on them. We should "learn to tolerate a large number of the rabble.' The genuinely troublesome behavior of the rabble should be controlled by informal, extralegal measures "that will foster a new sense of community among strangers.' And, of course: "In the long run, we should work to alter our basic values. Excessive materialism and individualism . . . help maintain a radically unequal distribution of wealth, opportunity and prestige, which, in turn, produces high rates of crime and many forms of repulsive public deviance.'

The good news is that the rhetoric begins only seven pages before the end of the book. The rest of The Jail* is terrific.

* The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society. John Irwin. University of California, $16.95.

John Irwin adds to the debate over the underclass something it badly needs: good debate about what the world of the underclass looks like from ground level. Irwin examines the corner of that world represented by the municipal and county jail, and he's been there. He was a prisoner in eight such jails for periods of up to 120 days and graduated from a five-year term in Soledad State Prison before getting his Ph.D. in sociology at Berkeley.

This sounds like a setup for a memoir masquerading as social science, but Irwin scrupulously avoids trading on his credentials. He occasionally refers to his own experience when it is especially apropos, but the core of The Jail is based on extensive interviews with a randomly selected sample of 200 people in the San Francisco jail system. The value of Irwin's background is that it makes him an extremely credible interpreter. The discussion has none of the geewhiz quality of accounts by observers newly encountering the underclass and not a scrap of condescension toward the people he describes. Nor does Irwin try to cast the police as villains. His prose is workmanlike and all the more persuasive for his refusal to sensationalize naturally dramatic material. That's why the last seven pages do not really matter. Irwin's descriptive writing inspires confidence that the author knows what he is talking about and trust that he is trying hard to be fair.

The Jail is not a quantitative study. Irwin apparently did not approach his subjects with multiple-choice questionnaire in hand but rather covered a predetermined set of topics in openended conversation. This procedure is a blessing, yielding nuance and realism that can be gotten no other way. Its main defect is that it prevents Irwin from establishing a solid case for the jail inmate as a special type of person--part of the rabble--arrested more for being part of this group than for being a criminal. But to treat The Jail as "proof' of anything is to miss its value. I note for the record that I have many quarrels with Irwin's analysis, but they are no excuse for ignoring the book's strong points. Nor need one buy into Irwin's politics to come away from The Jail with some bothersome questions.

For example, what purpose is a jail supposed to serve? One answer is that the jail is a place to keep people who are awaiting trial and would be a danger to the community or unlikely to appear in court if they were released. Many argue, I among them, that the system puts far too few offenders in jail and urge that more jails be built to protect the safety of poor people who now live under an intolerable threat of crime. Irwin describes the ways in which the jail is intolerably punishing as well. The typical penitentiary, he points out, provides a much more humane environment than the typical jail. This should be unacceptable to advocates of more jails, as it is to advocates of fewer ones. It is fundamentally wrong to punish people before they have been convicted (even though everyone in his sample was patently guilty--Irwin speaking, not Meese), and especially when the punishment takes as many perverse forms as it does. Irwin is refreshingly unexcited about the notorious perversities (jail rape was a significant problem in the late 1960s, he writes, but not now), and at the same time manages to convey the pains of the homelier ones. Read, for example, his description of trying to get your car back when you leave jail, or what it means to get started when everything you own has disappeared while you were in jail. If one favors more jails, what else must one favor to make that position conscionable?

I wasn't converted to Irwin's way of thinking. Indeed, The Jail inadvertently provides considerable evidence that the authorities should distinguish the rabble from reputable people and keep the rabble in jail while sending the reputable people home. But very few of us who talk about the crime problem have much first-hand knowledge of what it is like down in the bowels of the system. John Irwin does, and he lets us in on it in dispassionate and illuminating detail.