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63 Prison J. 1 (1983)

handle is hein.journals/prsjrnl63 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial This issue of The Prison Journal on Prison Violence has been planned over a period of years. It has turned out to be one of the longest issues ever in terms of the number of pages, and we expect it may rank as one of the most provocative issues we have published. The contents range from analyses of prisons and various forms and causes of violence to the philosophies in correctional thought, and finally to a look into the future of corrections in an attempt to assess their social value to the community, the nation, and to the world. We have been fortunate in assembling among the writers some of the finest minds in corrections today. One of the themes that emerge from the essays in this issue revolves around the axiom which is becoming more and more apparent to psychologists and social observers: violence begets violence. The whip is not the answer to incorrigibility; rejection is not the answer to delinquency; abused children become child abusers. And yet in the course of administering a prison, it is not always apparent that the axiom is accepted; it is not clear that the lesson has been learned. We continue to act as if our measures of control and oppression are a defense rather than a cause of the violence we fear and sometimes experience in our institutions. There are many forms of violence. We recall Gandhi's statement that poverty is the worst form of violence. I remember hearing Robert Kennedy, speaking at a memorial on the day after Martin Luther King's assassination, say that social ills and racism constituted the most raw kind of violence. And in this issue, Paul Keve speaks of the violence fostered by the prison itself in those inmates who have not been particularly violence-prone on the outside. Thus, he says, we sustain the correctional quicksand . . . and the prison's criminogenic character. If this issue of The Prison Journal can somehow persuade the correctional world that our developing understanding of violence and its causes has deep implications for how we should run our prisons, then we will have done what we set out to do. RA.D. 1