Jack Baldwin-LeClair of Legal Studies was part of a group of students and faculty who took a tour of East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, led by Illya Lichtenberg of Sociology. Here, LeClair shares his experience and observations about the visit.

On Sept. 28, my colleagues and I, along with justice studies and sociology students, braved a gray early morning sky appropriate for our tour of East Jersey State Prison (EJSP). EJSP provides maximum, medium and minimum security programs for adult male offenders. Professor Lichtenberg and prison staff treated faculty and students to a glimpse into what Gore Vidal called the "belly of the beast," the underbelly of the crime prevention system. The tour followed the pattern of Lichtenberg's well-known and respected tours for the New Jersey Institute for Continuing Legal Education in which the main attraction is the lifestyles of the snitch and heinous, and the detritus of humanity.

On approach, the prison complex communicates in a '50s architectural vernacular of institutional brick and steel. The chilling severity of the exterior of the prison reveals its soul in swirls of razor wire embracing tall thick metal fences. Visitors enter through a corridor leading to an administrative area, a tunnel turns the light of day into despair, even the gray from the overcast sky appears brighter than the dim yellow fluorescent lights following the hallways.

Prison administrators, friendly but haggard, took time out of a stressful day managing the frustration of men who lost both hope and liberty to speak with us. The initial orientation was a short history of the prison. One administrator did an elementary school show-and-tell that challenged us to guess from what material or source various homemade weapons came. The ingenuity of the inmates was extraordinary. Metal from clipboards became knives. Bed springs were fashioned into short stabbing devices. One professional killer who was described as a really nice guy by an administrator had made a knife that looked so well manufactured that it might have been offered for sale in a cutlery shop.

Questioning, which had been a bit hesitant at first, seemed to hit a pace and revealed both the interests of faculty and staff as well as the beliefs of the prison administration. New Jersey prisons once had active and optimistic rehabilitation programs and educational opportunities. Tax resistance and resentment of benefits given to men who had transgressed social norms were justified by studies that suggested the rehabilitation was ineffective. The administrators favored activities that occupied, diverted and fatigued.

Although the tour was a journey into the hearts and minds of "lifers," much in the way the program "Scared Straight" was designed to encourage a meaningful exchange between teen-agers and prisoners, the facility told its own tale. In rooms the size of urban apartments, two men share bunk beds. Small televisions are hooked to the foot of the bunks. Lighting is overhead and controlled by the guards. Magazines and clothes are evident and stored wherever possible. According to one of the guards, the inmates spend about 20 hours each day in their cells. Students commented that even the most crowded dormitories looked spacious in comparison.

Guards and trustees (prisoners with privileges because of good behavior) shadowed faculty and students as they were escorted, women always preceding the men for safety, according to a well-coordinated procedure from section to section on the way to points of interest. All the clichéd prison staging and props were evident. The cafeteria with its gated and screened vantage points for guards evoked scenes in which the anger and frustration of hundreds of desperate men reached a critical mass ending in food fights of death; the dingy and seldom-used theater reflected the emptiness and loneliness of many of the prisoners, men in whom a spark of creativity could be seen but who were destined to never realize that potential.

At the theater, we met the lifers. The guards left us quietly. Sitting in hard metal theater seats in the front rows facing eight inmates of ages ranging from late teens to early 50s, the lifers introduced themselves by name and offense. Felonies and murders followed by their names seemed to be a weary litany and confession. The lifers were affable and almost cheerful in a subdued manner that suggested an inner emotional control or suppression of impulse that most of us cannot imagine but which may be a survival skill when locked in a tiny room with someone for 20 hours a day.

Our questions ranged from the banal to the esoteric: Can incarceration be considered punishment once a prisoner learns to do the time? Why did you describe yourself as a murderer but in a different way than the other prisoners? What do you do to pass the time? The questions and answers had a decisively human quality. Genuine concern and compassion could be heard in the voices of faculty and students. The lifers answered with an unexpected nobility and dignity perhaps the result of feeling that they were making an overdue social contribution, perhaps leaving a legacy of knowledge as an articulation of their lives and regrets.

We emerged from the prison tunnel into daylight. The sky had brightened during our trip through the institutional badlands. With more questions than answers about the nature of humanity, punishment, social responsibility for criminality, and the state's obligation to rehabilitate, we re-entered our everyday lives in our respective roles as faculty, staff and students.