Prison versus technology

Anastasia De Waal, 13 February 2010

As the well-documented phenomenon of cyber-bullying gathers pace in society at large, even the concrete walls of prison are apparently not providing barriers to its advancement. 

Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s intervention this week to stop prison inmates taunting their victims’ families via their Facebook pages only came after substantial distress had already been caused in thirty different instances. Murder victim Jimmy Mizen’s father said:

‘After people have been found guilty and put in prison you don’t want them to be able to bully or intimidate you from in prison.’

The fact that social networking can be used to taunt victims’ families, in spite of theoretically being strictly prohibited from within prisons, raises serious policy questions. On the most basic level, both in terms of legislation and policy, prisons are per se intended to deliver a level of incapacitation which acts as a deterrent. In line with this, inmates have many of their personal liberties removed for the duration of their sentence: a constraint which affects their interactions both within prison and, much more crucially, in relation to the outside world.

The assumed connection between Facebook and mobile phone technology has led to a crackdown on inmates smuggling of mobile phones. “Body orifice” scanners will now be
introduced in prisons to detect such gadgets. But the latest scenario begs the question of whether a long-term solution be found? Will new technological advances lead to new problems? The biggest loophole in any criminal justice system is that offenders are more than capable of outsmarting it.  The key aim must remain protecting the community from offences both before and after a crime has taken place. Hence, keeping one step ahead of the game is crucial in maintaining public trust in criminal justice.  The government should acknowledge the race against technology is ongoing, work with technological providers and invest more in pre-emptive strategy if prison is to be seen to ‘work’.

Lara Natale