A World Behind Bars.

Americans of the 1950s did not like to dwell on one aspect of the growing crime problem: the nation's increasingly crowded prisons. By the end of the decade, the U.S. prison population — 22,492 men and women in federal penitentiaries, 185,021 in state facilities — equaled the population of a city the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma. They made sure, often in violent ways, that the outside world could not ignore them. Between 1950 and 1953 people were shocked by a succession of riots in federal and state penitentiaries around the country, twenty in 1952 alone. With a few shameful exceptions, prisons in America were more humane than they had ever been. Yet convicts from New Jersey to Louisiana to California were demonstrating that something was fundamentally wrong with the penitentiary system.

An Abiding Question.

Were prisons intended to reform convicts, to...