The Nation stands at a crossroad in prison policy because of renewed awareness of prison overcrowding, active judicial intervention in correctional administration, and a new and searching debate over the purposes of incarceration. Arguments reviewed for and against prison construction cover a wide range, but the questions crucial to construction decisions are actually who should be locked up, for how long, and under what conditions. While quantitative measures cannot be the basis for prison policy, they confirm critics' fears that the system is imposing additional punishments ranging from inhumane to illegally cruel, that imprisonment is more expensive than the public can bear, and that alternative solutions such as probation may not even reduce imprisonment rates. Comparisons of British and American correctional practices show that the British have experienced sharp shifts in their prison construction rates and incarceration policies while Americans have steadily built and filled prisons over a 200-year period. Americans appear to have chosen imprisonment over other punishments because it meshes with other values, not simply because there were no convenient alternatives. The fundamental aims traditionally defined for the American criminal justice system are reduction of the number of offenses committed, reinforcement of the legal norms of the society, and provision of services to people whose criminal behavior stems from unmet personal needs. As a historical overview shows, each of these goals has guided American criminal justice at some period in history. At present, crime control is a central focus of the criminal justice system and of imprisonment in particular. To overcome the prison policy dilemma, the authors propose that (1) linkage of sentencing, prison construction, and prison programs should be undertaken; (2) imprisonment should be the punishment of choice to meet the threat of physical violence; (3) new prison space should be built primarily to replace or to upgrade existing facilities; and (4) administrators should retain existing services while beginning new ones that can be truly voluntary and facilitative. The authors emphasize that this system would incapacitate the most dangerous offenders without requiring abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal. A bibliography and index are supplied.