It isn’t the horror of the time at hand: It is the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia, anxiety, boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded.

Dylan sings:

“Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard,

Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards…”

It isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too.

As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment.

For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than 400 teenagers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest…

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones.

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.

There are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery period. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to  731 prisoners for 100,000 US citizens.

No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that States spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “ incarceration State,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer. Conrad Black is now imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one”.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least 50,000 men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)

Prison rape is so endemic—more than 70.000 prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing.

The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chilling sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.

Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teenagers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelment, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions.

There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition. And a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. (to be followed)

Note 1: In Israel, over 60% of Palestinian youth (less than 16 years) have passed in correctional institutions, not for any crimes committed, but for intimidation purposes and instilling fear in them…