A plea for humane treatment of prisoners

It is a natural, but often not very helpful, tendency to divide people into those who are unambiguously good or bad. (During the pandemic, this tendency has become very pronounced. In particular, I think that the word 'heroes' should have a well earned sleep for a while). However, it takes only a moment's reflection to reveal that humanity is much too complicated to be like that.

Prisoners fall into the category of people who need our support, but who, as human beings, are often extremely 'difficult', so difficult that many people would be unafraid of asserting that they are entirely undeserving. However, I hope that most people would assent to the proposition that the mere fact of being human entitles a person to a basic level of dignity. I have to say that, for many prisoners, that basic level is not attained. They share cells, with inadequate sanitation ; live in fear of violence or extortion from other prisoners ; and their access to education, or to training to acquire skills. has been squeezed by the impact of austerity, as has so much else in the wider criminal justice system. When they leave prison, they are given a pittance, which is an invitation to recidivism. During the pandemic, even basic entitlements, such as the right to exercise in the open air , have been curtailed. A society that has any pretensions to be civilised should not tolerate this ; and yet we do. It is a rebuke to the notion that our society has progressed a great deal since the Victorian era. (I'll qualify that: we no longer imprison people for debt, and I suppose that this is an advance).

Even before the advent of austerity, mental health services were underfunded. Those with serious psychiatric conditions, compounded by neglect, poverty, disrupted education and abusive families, were and are extremely ill-served. They often found themselves in prison, which exacerbated their situation. It is no accident that those countries with a more realistic and humane attitude to mental health, such as the Netherlands and Norway, have lower prison populations.

I would regard the following as the minimum preconditions for a dignified existence for prisoners, which would also offer them a meaningful life after release:

1.) no sharing of cells.

2.) adequate sanitation.

3.) nourishing food.

4.) entitlement to adequate open air exercise.

5.) enough wardens to ensure adequate supervision.

6.) a broad education which will serve them throughout life.

7.) training to acquire work-related skills (emphatically not using prisoners as cheap labour).

8.) adequate mental health support.

9.) one-to-one intensive mentoring to enable prisoners to acknowledge the consequences of their criminality, and to forge a new path in life.

10.) adequate financial support after leaving prison, with tailored support for housing and employment needs, with continued mentoring, to prevent recidivism. Central to this would be an adequately funded probation service.

11.) Most controversially, I would propose that prisoners should be given the right to vote, on the principle that they have been deprived of their liberty, not their citizenship, and that they need to practise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in prison as preparation for life outside. This right would come together with education in citizenship and also supervised community service for those prisoners for whom it is appropriate. I am assuming that most reasonable people would regard deprivation of liberty as sufficient punishment, but I may be wrong in that assumption.

There are three possible objections.

One is cost. To that I say, these are intended to be crime prevention measures. Look at the costs of crime to individuals and to society. I think that these facts speak for themselves.

Second, many will complain that these proposals are 'soft' on criminals. On the contary, I would counter that they entail a fundamental commitment by prisoners to change the whole direction of their life. As many people will testify, this is one of the most difficult things that can be asked of a human being. If we are serious in asking prisoners to do this, they need a great deal of support. Punishment has always sat uneasily alongside rehabilitation as objectives of imprisonment, and this contradiction has never been resolved.

Third, it may be objected that this ignores the interests of victims of crime. Victims are often extremely ill supported by the criminal justice system (the treatment by the police and the courts of victims of rape and sexual assault is often particularly terrible, and compounds the original crime). A start would be to restore the austerity cuts made to the justice system, and to start to clear the backlog of cases. However, my proposals would serve victims by making crime less likely, and by increasing the possibility that criminals could become useful members of society. It is wrong to assume that there is necessarily a dichotomy between the long term interests of victims and those of prisoners.

It is usually the case that I confine myself to subjects in which I have some expertise when writing these blogposts. I have no specialist knowledge, from any part of view, of any part of the criminal justice system, and those who do possess such knowledge will undoubtedly find flaws in my argument. However, I hope that this piece contains more sense than the stupid and cheap rhetoric of politicians and newspaper editors, whose very last thought is to do anything constructive to reduce crime.