'Altermative They're EDITORS NOTE Kandra Hahn, city clerk of Lincoln, of a growing number of self styled aiter. native politicians, dissatisfied with the quo, working through elective politics to change it: She was not a 160s radical; and she is unknown outside Lincoln. But she has a nunsher of more famous colleagues, Tom Hayden among them, trying to do the same thing. JONATHIAN WOLMAN AP Urban Affairs Writer LINCOLN, Neb: (AP) Kandra Hahn, a young Nebraskan who gave up a good job to risk running for the obscure post of county court clerk, is an unlikely political maverick. In the 1960s, when other students were gearing up antiwar or civil rights campaigns, Ms.
Hahn was studying Faulkner. When others left the Wheat Belt, heading for MAY BAN SMOKING COMPLETELY ABOARD AIRCRAFT FOLLOWING ARE A PEN EXAMPLES OF AIR TRAVEL ANNOYANCE WHICH, AS YET, ARE NOT 3 CONTROLLED. BUT WHICH MAKE MERE SMOKING SEEM HARDLY AN ANNOYANCE AT 0 policymakers' believe mavericks working ole coast or the other, she came home to Lincoln. There was' 'a brief stint with Nebraskans for Peace, but 071 the whole, the 1060s were quiet years for her. There was marriage, a child, a divorce, a good job as a city' hall reporter for the Lincoln Journal.
But she quit the job in 1974 to run for office because she didn't like what she saw officeholders doing. Now 30, Kandra Hahn is a political comrade of the likes of former antiwar leader Sam Brown and Florence McDonald, the feisty 60-year-old socialist auditor of Berkeley, Calif. In the past year, Ms. Hahn has been enrolling in workshops on "alternative public policies" with people like Brown and Mrs. McDonald.
All'are part of a growing network of alternative politicians. "I I covered. county and city government, silling through boring meetings and watching outrageous livilies not the least of which was incompetence," THE LADY WITH THE GAGGING PERRINE AS HE SAGE! RE2 PARENT WITH THE ROTTEN LITTLE "WHO THE ALWAYS PASSENGER SITS IN WITH THE THE TINY WINDOW BLADDER SEAT THE INDULGENT Sunday, December they can do the job more through recalls Ms. Hahn, who ran as a vemocrat. "finally it occurred to me that I could do it better." political force emerged several years ago with leadership from a handful of former campus activists who had moved into the traditional political arena.
Now there are an increasing number of officials, like Ms. Hahn, who never were really active in civil rights or antiwar campaigns, who are working to create alternalive public policies. Alternalive: policymakers are a loosely organized group with little in common except a view that the corporate establishment has loo much influence on public policy, and the average people too little. They are traditional Democrats like state Rep. Barney Frank in Massachusetts; prairie populists like North Dakola lax commissioner Bryon Dorgan, avowed socalists like Mrs.
McDonald. Their major goals have been to find allernative approaches to investment of public funds, tax reform, energy policy, farm ownership and urban revitalization. Many alternative politicians are oblaining real influence, ironic for those like Marion Barry, a civil rights activist who marched and boycotted and organized his onto the District of Columbia city council; or those like Tom Hayden, who began their public careers in frequent clashes with the government, piling up criminal charges and often "anti-American" repulations as they challenged the system. Some of the alternalive politicians are well known because of their backgrounds, because of the jobs they have today and because of key "alternative policy" accomplishments. Chief among them: Sam Brown: The antiwar, anti-Olympics activist was elected President state treasurer in Colorado and then appointed by Carter to head the ACTION agency which runs Vista and the Peace Corps.
Brown left Colorado reluctantly and only after itiating efforts to enforce "public control" over state money, a major thrust of the movement to find alternative approaches to public policies. 4, 1977 Journal-News, Hamilton Fairfield, Page effectively the system them: There already have been some successes. Among -In Madison, local lawmakers created a cilyowned Conumunity Development designed to channel federaturban aid and private investment dollars into projects like buying up land for public use and haps setting up a small business to provide job training. perwhich -In banks Colorado, which then Treasurer Brown set up a policy in demonstrated "socially responsible" financial policies were favored for the deposit of state money, Il has become a model in the movement for an activist view of "public use of public -In L.inco!n, ITs. Hahn moved quickly to streamline procedures to ensure that single parents receive child support payments as ordered by county judges and opened the court clerk's office to the public.
-In Washington, D.C., Marion Barry led the fight to titeir ensure neighborhoods by property homeowners tax are not increases. forced from thal low- -income Alternative policymakers also are examining now proposals for properly tax relief, severance taxes to compensate slates for fuel and minerals extracted by private investment firms, and analyzing incentives for maximizing to rejuvenate central city neighborhoods. Tom Hayden: One of the defendants in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, Hayden tested his analysis of California's future at the polls, tallying more than a million Democratic votes In his primary challenge for a U.S. Senate nomination. He was defeated by incumbent John Tunney, who subsequently Republican S.1.
Hayakawa. John Froines: Another Chicago Seven alumni, Froines Is an accomplished chemist whose appointment as 0c- cupalional health director of Vermont created a furor. On the basis of the jab he did there, Froines has taken over as head of the federal Office of Toxic Subslances. Alternative policymakers are attempting to lake the locus off the well -known personalities, to concentrate instead on finding new answers to old problems that icies plague public officials and then working to have the pol-. implemented.
0 dourna News A page dala el and analysis, diverse background, opinions Page of Opinions Punishment: a historical perspective Banishment or public embarrassment preceded imprisonment as punishment for committing a crime (EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the 13th in a series of 15 articles expiring "'Crime and Justice in Today David J. professor of history Columbia University, discusses the history of. the penal, systent fat America. This series was written for Courses by Newspaper. a program2 developed by University' Extension, University of San Diego, -and funded by grunt from the National Endowment the Ammanities.
Supplemental funding for this course was provided by the Center for Studies of Crime nad Delinquency, National Institute of Mental Fealth. Copyright 1977 by the Regents of thie University nt California.) Ry DAVID J. ROTHMAN The sight of the monumental walls and high towers of an American stale prison conveys such an impression of fixity and permanence that one easily forgets lhat incarceration is a comparalively modern practice. Penitentiaries do have a history. They have not always been wilh us.
A sensitivily to this history, an understanding of the causes for their creation and perpetuation can help to clarify for us what we can and cannot expect of these institutions. Our colonial forefathers relied upon very different methods of punishment. Convinced that the threat of deviant behavior came mostly from outsiders, they guarded town boundaries with all the diligence we reserve for an international frontier. To preserve their insularity, towns regularly banished or expelled suspicious characters and petty offenders. When neighbors committed minor offenses, the courts had recourse to fines or to the whip, or, more 'commonly, to shaming the offender by displaying him in the stocks.
The local jails served only the purpose of detaining those charged with a crime until time of trial, The colonists, as tough minded Calvinists, did not anticipate the reformation of the criminal or the eradication of crime. And they understood, too, how limited their powers were: if a whipping did not deter the offender, there was little they could do, little, that is, except have recourse to the gallows. The result was an unbalanced system, vacillating belween harsh and mild punishments. Such procedures could not survive the growth of cities, or the rise in the number of immigrants, and the frequency migrations westward in the carly 191h Century. With the insularity of the community destroyed, and with Enlightenment and republican ideology making capital punishment seem a barbaric remnant of a cruder age, some kind of new sanctions would have to be created.
THAT THE ALTERNATIVE became the penitentiary reflects the very special outlook of its founders, the Jacksonian reformers of the 1820s and 1830s. The questions (EDITOR'S NOTE: The following questions arc based on the accompanying article -Punishment: A. Historical Perspective." Answers appear elsewhere on this page.) 1. On what different melhods of punishment did OUT forefathers rely? 2. What were the grandiose ambitions of the Jacksonian reformers of the 18205 and 18305? 3.
What had happened to the penitentiaries by the 1890s? 4. llow da the goals of recent prison reformers differ from their predecessors? JUSTICE COURSES BY NEWSPAPER Eager to do good, determined to rehabilitate the deviant, they continued to fry to transform the prison into a place of reformation. PRISONS: USA SING SING. Inmates of 19th and carly 20th cnetury prisons were often forced to march in lock step and observe strict rules of science. BUT SUCH FUNCTIONAL considerations were not 15 central to the continuing legitimacy of incarceralion as the persistence of reformers' hopes that prisons could rehabilitate the offender.
Each successive generation of weli-intentioned citizens set out to upgrade the penitentiary. The problem was not with the idea of incarceration but with its implementation. Thus, the Progressives in the period 1000-1920 tried to "normalize" the prison environment. They abolished the rules the lock step, and the striped uniform, and looked instead to freedom of the yard, prison orchestras, schools and vocational education to rehabilitate the deviant. In the 1920s and 1930s psychologists urged the adoption of more sophisticated systems of classification 30 that prisoners could be counseled on an individual basis.
New modes of therapy would readjust the deviant to his environment. Both groups of reformers welcomed the indeterminate sentence and parole. Rather than have a judge pass a fixed sentence at time of trial, the offender should enter a prison as a patient would enter a hospital. When he was cured, not before and not later, he would be released. Again and again, the translation of these programs into practice was disappointing.
No matter how keen the effort, prisons could not become normal communities. Classitication schemes were not well implemented; parole became a guessing game. anything but scientific or fair in its decisions. Nevertheless, cach lime a prison riol occurred or another example of brutalily was uncovered, reformers insisted that the fault lay with the poor administration of the system, not with the system itself. The answers NOTE: The following are answers to questions based 011 the accompanying article "Punishment: A Historical Perspective." The questions appear elsewhere on this page.) 1.
Banishment, fines, the whip, stocks. 2. To climinate crime through the reformation of the criminal. 3. They became over-crowded.
brutal, 'and corrupting places. 4. The new relormers admitted their inability to work miracles and cure flic criminal and eliminate crime. BEGINNING IN THE mid-19G0s, a new gencration of reformers began to question the very idea of incarceration. For the first time, well-intentioned observers began to wonder whether the basic concept of the prison was faully.
These reformers were frank about their inabilily to understand the roots of deviancy or to rehabilitate the deviant, Armed with so few answers and suspicious of inherited truths, they contended that punishment should aim, not to do good, but to reduce harm; that a system of sanctions should abandon grandiose goals and try to avoid mischief. Perhaps fixed sentences of shorl duration to the avowed goal of punishing the criminal would create a more just and no less effective system. Clearly this agenda is not a very exciting banner under which to march. Prior generations of reformers, afler all, had promised to eliminate crime. And today's less idealistic outlook is particularly liable to misunderstanding: it we cannot reform the criminal, why not lock him up and throw awuy the key? An historical analysis does not provide us with many clues as to how this latest reform effort will turn out.
Indeed, an historical analysis does not offer answers as to how punishment should be meted out in our society. What it does offer, however, is a dynamic as opposed to a static perspective on incarceration. Penitentiaries were the response of one generation to its specific problems, and later generations experimented with their own solutions. If we now find inherited practices unsatisfactory, we are obligated to devise our own answers. NEXT WEEK: John Irwin, associate professor of sociology at San Francisco State University and an exinmate, discusses the prison community: These innovators shared grandiose amhitions.
They would not merely deter but eliminate crime: they would not punish but reform the criminal. The Jacksonians were the first to announce the theme that would persist to our own day: prisons should be places of rehabilitation. These reformers were at auce oplimistic about the perfectability of man and pessimistic about the ability of a democratic society to cohere. Criminal behavior, they reasoned, reflected the faulty organizalion cf society. Judging their own cities by exaggeraled notions of the stability of colonial towns, they saw the easy morals' of the thealers and saloons replacing the authority of the family and the church.
To counter what they took to be this rampant It was to be a model, almost community that disorder, they invented the penitentiary. would both inspire the society and, at the same lime, instill habits of obedience oud regularity in its inmules. From these notions the penitentiary (ook its first form. To isolate the inmate from all contaminating influences, prisons were not only located at a distance from the cities, with visits and mail discouraged, but prisoners, living one to a cell, were under strict rules of silence. A bell-ringing punctuality prevailed.
At the sound af a gong, inmates marched in lock step lo work, then Lo cat, and then returned to their Isolation. As acute an observer as Alexis de Tocqueville concluded: "The regularity of A uniform a deep impression on his mind." If the inmate was not released an honest man, at the least "he has contracted honest IT DID NOT TAKE- long, however, for the good order of the prisons. to degenerate. By the 1850s, even more clearly by the 18805, the institutions became overcrowded, brutal and corrupting places. State investigations uncovered countless examples.
of inhumane treatment prisoners bung by their thumbs or stretched out on the rack. Clearly, incarceration was not reforming tre deviant, let alone eradicating crime. And yot, the systern persisted. Part of the reason may reflect sceming practicality of confinement; al least for a time the incapacitation of the offender protected society, Further, the prisons were filled with immigrants (first with Irish, later Eastern Europeans, still later the blacks). The confinement of a group that was both "alien" and "deviant" seemed appropriate, no matter, how unsatisfactory prison conditions were, The views those of the reflect those the funding newspapers expressed in this article arc author and do not necessarily of the Chiversily of California, agencies or the participating and colleges.
The author ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David 5. Rothman is professor of history and director of the National' Institute of Mental Health Training Program in Social Ilistory al Columbia University, where he joined the faculty in 1964. Ile WAs a fellow of. the Hastings Institute of Society, Ethies and the Life Sciences, and received the Albert J. Beveridge Prize from the American listorical Association for Discovery of the Asylums." fle is olso the nuthor of "Politics and Power: 'The United States Senate.
1860- 1901," and editor of "The World ci the Adams 20 Chronicles." Ile is cOllipicting a study of in'. carceration and its alternatives 11 201k-Century Anterica..
