Tennessee jails crisis

In the long ago – so long ago, in fact, it was when I started to do these talks – I had a producer, a talks producer, I can never forget.

People on the outside, that's to say people not in broadcasting, must wonder what talks producers do. Well, some of us would be in trouble without them, apart from timing a talk and seeing it gets on the air and seeing that you don't run over into the religious half-hour or 'Melodies For You', they act as watchdogs, as intelligence agents, so that when you've done, they can come into the studio from the control room and say, 'By the way, you know Hitler was not a German' and you say, 'That's right!' and amend your script to Austrian and then do that bit over again.

In the days before recording, when everything went out, as we say, 'live' no matter how dead the material, it was necessary, of course, for the producer to read the script over ahead of time and spot mistakes like saying Hitler was a German or Napoleon a Frenchman, but in the early days at Broadcasting House, in my early days, anyway, a talks producer was a good deal more than a man – always a man – with a stopwatch and a knowledge of the birthplaces of dictators.

He was trained to be a sort of schoolmaster. Of course, there were good schoolmasters but the one I have in mind was a lulu. I don't believe he, himself, had ever broadcast. He was a perfect example of the old Shavian line, 'Those who can do, those who can't, teach'. When he was assigned to me, he used to telephone me several days before the broadcast and say, 'I trust you've been making notes. What topics do you intend to talk about this week?' I would recite four or five items I had dutifully taken down. It was not my nature to do this and it was years before I was allowed to let nature take its course and go to the microphone and talk about something I very much felt urged or attracted to talk about.

Anyway, before we adopted this weekly routine of going over proposed topics of the week, this dedicated teacher had explained to me the two principles of a successful radio talk. You must first, he'd say, go over in your mind the list of topics you've put down, assess their relative importance and then strike a balance. Secondly, he'd say, you must begin each talk by saying what you're going to talk about, then talk about it and end by summarising what you've talked about.

He came to regard me as a pupil with a barely passing mark because I was never able to do this. I couldn't rid myself of the feeling that broadcasting, whether you're talking about politics or sport or how to raise cucumbers, is an exercise in suspense, in at least keeping people wondering what's coming next. After obeying his prescription for several weeks, I had ample evidence from protesting letters to prove it dead wrong. If you begin by saying, 'I am now going to talk about the American trade deficit and its effect on the unpaid interest on Third World loans', you will hear and will deserve to hear, several million knobs being turned off.

However, the one instruction which made me bristle – and in those days, mere broadcasters did not go beyond bristling with anyone as important as a talks producer – was his constant parroting of his favourite line at the end of every phone conversation, 'Don't forget now, strike a balance!'.

Well, the poor fellow has been gathered to his fathers, but I sometimes wonder if he'd lived in the United States and looked over, week after week, the news of a whole continent, how he would strike his balance. It all depends where you live. For instance, even after watching and listening to such routine nightly horrors as the general panic over AIDS, the 17 per cent of American high school pupils who have tried cocaine, America's new status as a debtor nation, I was brought up short by the sight and sound of a judge in Tennessee, leaning over the bench and saying, 'Our judicial system is rooted in the notion of crime and punishment, but we have no place to put them'. At which point, he banged his gavel and set loose a whole bunch of criminals – well, minor criminals, but men who, in any other state, would certainly have gone to jail for a month or two.

Now this judge is not, he's not a kook or an innovator or a man with his own peculiar ideas of prison reform. He's at the end of his tether. He has issued an order and, as the senior federal judge in the state – he's a federal district judge – he will be a hard man to override. A few months ago, he ordered the state of Tennessee to reduce its adult prison population to just over 7,000 by the end of the year and, if that's not done, Judge Higgins has the power to start releasing prisoners on New Year's Day.

At present he refuses to sentence anyone to jail until all the present inmates have a bed. As it is, the cells are crowded, the prison gymnasiums are used as makeshift dormitories, the homicide rate inside the prisons is the highest in the nation.

Last summer there were violent riots at four of the state institutions. The cost of the damage ran to several millions of dollars and Judge Higgins is putting it up to the governor to use that money not in repairing damage, but in building new prisons or else, returning, for instance, drug traffickers to the streets.

Tennessee may have more murders committed behind the prison walls than anywhere but its troubles can be approximated not only in practically every state of the union, but also, I suspect, in most countries of the Western world. American convicts expect more than most by way of comfort, reading matter, television, recreation, sanitation. When they find themselves bundled together, two or three to a cell, they grumble, they heckle and then they riot. So, scarcely a month goes by without some state airing the grievances of its prison population and, in the past few years, making an almost monotonous din about the actual shortage of prisons. This is very tough on the governors who are automatically accused by their political opponents of cruelty, indifference and do-nothingism.

This week, the governor of Tennessee offered his second prison reform plan in three years. He took the blame for the riots and other troubles, but said, 'I tried to spend every available penny we had for classrooms, for healthcare and jobs for the millions of Tennesseans who obey the law, instead of using it for the handful who break them.'

Since the state has no funds left in its budget for the care and feeding of that belligerent handful, the governor proposes calling on a private company to finance, to build and to run two new maximum-security prisons. Twenty years ago, this would have been a revolutionary move, but it's happening in many states with the financing of other necessities that have always been thought of as the duty and/or prerogative of government, either federal, state or local.

Transportation, for instance. The streets of New York are more choked than usual by the buses of private companies that supplement the city-owned buses. The main railroad system along the eastern seaboard is run by a corporation. The post office was separated from the government some years ago to be run as a private corporation, nothing like the free market. It is, by the way, losing millions a year, so sooner or later, such brave enterprises come to the government for a subsidy.

If I were taping this letter in, say, San Francisco where I expect to be next week, I would not trust the mailing of it to the San Francisco post office. It would be no sooner taped and packaged than a smart white van, run by a private express mail company that exists in every state of the union, the van comes hurtling up to the studio, takes the package, gives you a form on which you sign your name and record the BBC's contract number and the package is whisked off to the airport and put on a plane, picked up in New York by another white van and delivered to the BBC office in New York before 10am the next morning. If it gets there at 10:30, you can get your money back.

Well, all this arose from imagining that we live in Tennessee. Suppose, however, you lived in Virginia or its neighbouring state of West Virginia. What sort of balance would you strike in reporting the news of America? The idea of balance would never cross your mind. You'd have been knocked off balance this week and overwhelmed by devastating floods – a story that you have to search for in the papers of the rest of the country.

Well, after all, the end of the fall and the approach of the first storm wave from the west or south is normal, isn't it? It is. There are always floods at this time of the year. However, on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, these two states and the fringes of North Carolina to the south and Pennsylvania to the north, a region larger than England, were subjected to seven, eight, ten, twelve inches of continuous rain – a legacy from the expiring hurricane Juan in the south.

Thirty people are dead. Another thirty or so missing and hundreds of thousands of people have seen their homes go under and float down the boiling rivers. America, as the French were the first to notice and exploit, is a continent of rivers and in those three or four states the Ohio, the Monongahela, the James, the Appomattox, the Roanoke poured over the nearby towns across 300 miles in one direction and 400 from north to south. The governors were begging their neighbours for millions of gallons of drinking water. The James River alone was 20 feet above flood stage.

So, we don't live in Virginia, West Virginia, Northern North Carolina or Southern Pennsylvania. Lucky for us.

About the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales this weekend, I will simply express, or imply, one puzzled question. I've always assumed that Buckingham Palace is thoroughly well informed about the life, the social conditions, the climate of the nations the Royals choose to visit. In California, southern and central, the only month you can be sure of rain is February. So, Queen Elizabeth went there two years ago in February and had a week's drenching from arrival to departure.

In the east here, the magical, warm, trumpeting season of brilliant light and beautiful skies is October, the fall. It's now over, so the Prince and Princess will be lucky if they don't find themselves in Washington during the only month it is much like London, Paris or Moscow.

No sun, no warmth, no fun, November.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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