Cruel but Not So Unusual

Lest the lesson be lost, we point out the irony in the release of two Cleveland policemen, one from the Ohio State Reformatory, and the other from Ohio Penitentiary, an irony all too obvious to scores of men still in prison.

The policemen were convicted of abducting a woman for immoral purposes. They served less than two months and then were released, ostensibly on shock probation.

But the judge who let them out ruled that it was "cruel and unusual treatment” to keep them in prison because they were in fear of their lives and could be protected only by solitary confinement.

As a series by Plain Dealer reporter Richard C. Widman has indicated, such fear is not uncommon in the Ohio prison system.

Many inmates live in constant fear of beatings and homosexual assaults. Guards fail to protect them, and they are sometimes in danger of punishment if they try to protect themselves.

If the two policemen are entitled to freedom because of personal danger in prison, so are hundreds of others.

Listen to part of a letter written a few weeks ago by a reformatory prisoner who had been attacked:

"It seems like the walls are coming together around to squash me to death and I'm scared to death. I can't help it. This is the first time I've had anything like this

happen to me and I don't know how to face it . . . I lay up here in my cell listening to the inmates yelling around the blocks what they are going to do to me when they get ahold of me, and I'm scared to death twenty-four hours a day. It's a living nightmare. Help please!! Please help me please. Please help me please .

""

Any time a series such as Widman's appears, some readers wonder why newspapers worry so much about convicted criminals.

One reason is that prisons, as society has known and tolerated them, are personality wreckers whose graduates are confirmed in crime, not cured of it. Indifference both corrupts society and produces a stream of vengeance seekers.

The other reason is that it is simply unjust for the state not to protect the physical and emotional health of persons under its close and prolonged custody.

The Ohio correctional system makes some progress. The old penitentiary in Columbus will close in a few months. There is hope that the equally dated reformatory, home of the world's largest cell block, will be broken into smaller institutions. The populations of both places were reduced sharply after a period of dangerous overcrowding several years ago.

Some of the reforms urged by a task force which studied the prisons last year have been undertaken. But far more needs to be done, much faster, and with more resolution.