Maria Russo's review is generally on the mark except when she states that private prisons justify themselves by shaving a few dollars off the cost of operating public prisons. Such is not the case. This is a sensitive topic that, oddly, has not been researched as definitively as it deserves. What data is available, however, indicates there is little or no saving in private prisons. Tennessee, home state of Corrections Corporation of America, has experience with private prisons. The prisons may even cost more to operate and have worse results with prisoners.

Why do we continue to build them? Because very powerful politicians are on their boards and have stock options. That is the rationale pure and simple. Private subcontracts with these prisons are also immensely profitable for the politically well connected. Our prison system is a disaster and needs to be completely overhauled, along with our ridiculous drug laws.

-- Carl Wright

Maria Russo's coverage of "Going up the River" presents some of us with the same old information we've known for years. Criminologists and criminal justice scholars have long discussed the perils of prisons, the horrifying treatment of inmates in both public and private prisons and the frightening reality of the prison-industrial complex. As a professor of law and justice studies, I know any student in any college-level criminal justice program has been exposed to this information for years (decades, actually).

I am dismayed by the fact that academics are continually dismissed while journalists are routinely considered "experts in the field." Criminologists have been talking about these issues forever; only when a journalist writes a book or an article is the information suddenly considered newsworthy. Perhaps someone should talk to those of us who spend our lives studying and conducting research on these topics. We could have told you all of this information years ago.

-- Cynthia L. Line

As the founder of the organization In Our Name, which is in part dedicated to the notion that prison abuses by guards, tier officers and wardens should be prosecuted as crimes against humanity, I was appalled at Russo's "review" of Hallinan's book. Most egregious was her suggestion that one guard described in the book, Jennifer Miller, with her "boundless hatred of men," was somehow an ideal person for the job of guarding male prisoners. Really? And I suppose male rapists would make ideal candidates for women's prisons, right?

Worse still was her tacit endorsement of Ted Conover's whitewash, "Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing." The book is riddled with inaccuracies, sophistry, subjective unreasoning and just plain B.S. For example, Conover claims that most prison sex is consensual, which is a statement so outrageously false that it beggars the imagination. One need only visit the Web site for the organization Stop Prisoner Rape to learn that.

-- Rob Anderson

Americans have always liked the easy answer, the quick fix, instead of going to the root of the problem. We really don't want to know or to deal with the causes of crime: poverty, childhood abuse and neglect, societal attitudes that encourage aggressiveness in males.

If Americans were truly concerned about crime we would devote some portion of our prison budgets to investments in poor neighborhoods. We might encourage idealistic young people to go into social work and then lower their caseloads and pay them a decent salary to help protect children. But that's the bleeding-heart-liberal approach to complicated social problems. It feels much better to be a tough, no-nonsense Republican, with punishment the answer to everything.

-- Dennis Hodges

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"