Security and Paperwork Keep Prison Researchers on the Outside

By DAVID GLENN

More Americans than ever are living behind bars and beyond the reach of sociologists

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited New York's Sing Sing prison in 1831, he was mesmerized by its powerful culture of discipline, which enabled a few unarmed guards to keep watch over hundreds of prisoners laboring with sharp, heavy stone-cutting tools. But despite his admiration for American prison methods, Tocqueville was not immediately sure that France should copy them. The Sing Sing system, he