John Dilulio concludes his review essay' by indicating that he is leaving corrections as his principal area of professional concentration. His brief encounter with the field, as part of his broader interest in public administration, has certainly left it the better for his involvement. This is true whether one counts oneself among the skeptics about his work or one believes his propositions are fundamentally sound. The skeptics cannot help but be stimulated, if only to respond to the information he provides and the exploratory findings he makes. Those who see good sense in his work are encouraged by it to explore what he explicitly leaves open, "the crucial question of what types of prison leadership and management regimes work best under what conditions" (at 85). Any careful work about prisons and how to manage them ought to be taken seriously, and Dilulio's is no exception. After all, we are imprisoning record numbers of people in this country in 1990. We will continue to have large prison populations in the foreseeable future, even though, at least to me, the imprisonment of many of these offenders serves no useful purpose and is in fact destructive of important values which should be promoted by our criminal justice systems. To fail to know how to run prisons in decent, humane ways, and to lack the will to do so, does and will continue to result in enormous cost, in financial and human terms, and in terms of our self-respect. But the fact is that too few prisons in this country are well run, by which I mean they are not safe, clean institutions where prisoners can work and go to school, participate in decent recreation programs, and benefit in whatever ways people can from such environments. The reasons are many. Lack of public commitment and support, history, lack of resources, lack of know-how, and ideology, as well as the simple difficulty of running such complex institutions well are all part of the explanation. But if there is any single truth about corrections, it is that despite the attention it receives at times of crisis, we have too little shared knowledge about it. This is explained in part by the dominance of ideology in policymaking and in research in the field, when we are in desperate need of objective information about it. But ideology dominates now, in the time of emphasis on punishment, just as it did 35 years ago in the heyday of the rehabilitative ideal; and 35 years before that as rehabilitation struggled to push punishment out of its central position in the correctional value system. Had more time and effort been spent in the recent past developing information and knowledge (difficult as that is) about what works with offenders rather than arguing ideology, making extravagant claims for one value system or another, and playing to the politics of the times, the corrections world would not be where it is today: without a sound body of knowledge, leaderless, bereft of ideas, overly bureaucratic, in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by the numbers of inmates, and bankrupt by the cost of imprisoning them. Enter John Dilulio with an admittedly exploratory study which asserts prisons can be run well. This work is heresy to those who would imprison less and a bible for others who have long taken for granted that order is possible in prisons, if only .... But it is neither heresy nor the bible. Dilulio's work should be taken for what it is, not for what it is not or for what others may try to make of it. Read on its own terms, it has value for the information it provides. It should be a starting point for more factbased research, both to test its accuracy and to advance our understanding of these troubling but persistent institutions of our society: prisons. Rather than enter what I believe is a fruitless debate about the accuracy of Dilulio's views, I want to suggest where future research might profitably be done in the prison world and to suggest what I think we will find if we have the opportunity and patience to do it. I choose this course because it gives me the opportunity to reflect on my experience in corrections in relation to Dilulio's work. It also provides an opportunity for me to express a few ideas about the field which I hope are valuable. Finally, it allows me to emphasize an important point Dilulio makes: The challenge for the future is whether information can replace ideology and politics as the basis for policymaking in corrections. Whether this challenge is met turns in part on the quality and value of the information that is developed. I want to share a few ideas about the nature of that information in the hope that I can thereby contribute to its quality.
