Let’s hear it for a good dose of imprisonment!
norman dennis, 8 December 2004
No one seems to have a good word to say for prison at the moment. The Prison Reform Trust has published a report today criticising the criminal justice system for sending so many parents to prison, which causes problems for their children. In her foreword to the report Cherie Blair says that ‘we should examine closely whether there is a better alternative, for the individuals concerned and their families, to imprisonment which too often worsens rather than tackles the problem’.
Of course, you would expect this sort of thing from the Prison Reform Trust, in the same way that you would always expect a barber to recommend a haircut. What is more surprising in that the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales will be publishing tomorrow a document on prison which is so larded with the language of the anti-prison intelligentsia (many of whom actually work in the criminal justice system) that I can’t help wondering if any of their lordships actually read the document, or if they just left it to their ever-growing bureaucracy to handle the matter on their behalf.
Here are some of the key phrases, which will be familiar to anyone who has the misfortune to have to read the sort of drivel that passes for criminological research in some fashionable quarters:
‘The new Sentencing Guidelines Council should be given the brief … of gearing the system so that fewer people are sent to prison. It might start by recommending that large numbers of very low risk offenders might be diverted from prosecution by conditional cautions, warnings and reprimands. It might consider how to reduce the needless use of custodial remand… Sentences should not automatically reflect … the gravity of an offence. Rather they should sometimes be a response to how probable it is that any punishment other than prison is likely to fail… Building more prisons is not the answer to overcrowding. We need to send fewer people to prison.’
This disedifying farrago of clerical clichés is rounded off with a most unusual threat:
‘Politicians, newspaper editors and TV drama executives who promulgate punitive views, in wilful disregard of the evidence, to gain political or commercial advantage – or who seek to reinforce prejudices rather than convey the overall truth – do a great disservice to the cause of justice. They should be held accountable for their actions.’
If only the bishops would use this uncompromising language in matters of faith and morals, on which they are competent to pronounce!
But what is this ‘disregard of evidence’ of which they speak? The evidence actually shows that prison is more effective at preventing re-offending than all of the alternative measures proposed. First of all, prisoners can’t commit more crimes while they are locked up, which is good news for the rest of us. Second, when they are released they are less likely to re-offend than those criminals who were given the softer options. However much money the government spends on these options, and however much our increasingly politicised civil servants spin the results, it is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal the fact that prison is very good value for money, in terms of protecting the law abiding citizens. Which, in case the bishops have forgotten, is the role of the criminal justice system.
The fact is, we live in one of the most crime-ridden countries in the developed world. Our prison population is far too low, in relation to the volume of crime. It is strikingly below the European average, and would need to increase by three of four times to bring us up to the level of other countries at similar levels of economic development. It is not the case that we are sending lots of low-level, petty criminals to prison for their first offence. To go to prison now, you have to have a list of offences as long as your arm, and to have run through the whole gamut of cautions, community sentences, tagging, fines, intensive surveillance etc etc. Do the bishops ever think, as they sit in their palaces, of the misery these hardened, repeat offenders inflict on their terrified local communities before the criminal justice system eventually, after criminal careers that may have lasted for years, sends them to prison for some very short sentence, only a fraction of which will be served?
Of course, it is regrettable that we should have to deprive large numbers of men and women of their liberty. It would be better if they hadn’t offended in the first place. It would be better if more people held the sort of moral convictions that prevent most of us from ever committing a crime, whether we think we would get caught or not. People need to be guided by an internal moral compass. The churches used to be good at helping with that; now they seem to regard it as too much hard work. Much easier just to attack the government, or ‘society’, or newspaper editors, or TV producers, for‘promulgating punitive views’. Hell and damnation should never, as the Catholic poet Alexander Pope said, be mentioned to ears polite.