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| A good man but a bad idea - Clive Stafford-Smith |
A little test for those who advocate getting rid of prisons; do you lock the front door of your house when you leave it empty? If so, then you are effectively voting in favour of a criminal justice system. You are saying, ‘This is the space I hold for myself. It is my property and it provides shelter and safety for the people I hold dear.’ The vast majority of the human race have such a space, usually one they share with fellow members of their family. In fact, one of the worst aspects of locking people into prisons is that we are depriving them of a home of their own.
If you leave the front door of your house open when you go out, you are saying to the world, ‘Help yourself: I do not care for property or possessions and you can take what you want.’ Only then you can argue that it is wrong to imprison people for their misdeeds. You might also be putting your loved ones in danger because, as well as protecting your possessions, you are creating a safe spacer for the people you love and
The death row advocate Clive Stafford Smith – a man I have a lot of admiration for – argues that, if you compare the worst thing you have done in your life with what we lock most people up for you will almost certainly find that your misdeed was worse than his. This, however, is to confuse the concepts of sin and crime. Prisons are there to protect us from the latter not the former. I am sure Clive is very caring towards his family and that he takes good care of them. That is why he almost certainly locks his front door when he goes out.
One of the main reasons that people want to abolish prisons is that they do not do what they are meant to, which is to turn criminals into citizens. The recidivism rate in our prisons in frankly terrible: around forty per cent. People (men usually) come out of prison with few skills, often no home to go to, a family they have lost and no chance of making a living except by turning back to crime. The rates of reoffending are, interestingly, lowest for murderers and rapists: once is enough for the great majority of violent offenders. It is highest for thieves who tend to return to their former way of making a living having learned new tricks while inside. Prisons are sometimes cynically described as ‘universities of crime’.
A film I once saw had a lawman say to some prisoners he was locking up that, if you divided the amount of time most prisoners spent in jail by the amount of money they stole, then you would find that they made less than minimum wage from their lives of crime. I have no idea if this is true but it had the ring of truth to it. Crime often does not pay, least of all for the criminal.
Why then do we lock them up? There are three reasons, what I call the three Rs:
Restriction: some people have to be kept away from society for our (and their) protection. A man like Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered thirteen women in Yorkshire, can never be let out onto the streets. Neither could moors murderer Ian Brady. Whatever the doctors say their state of mind, the risk that they will kill again is simply too great to contemplate their release. There are a small but significant number of people who are simply to dangerous to allow out.
Retribution: whatever we say about the evils of locking people up, for society to function properly, we need a criminal justice system. People tempted to commit crimes (virtually everybody) must know that, if they get caught, they face punishment if they are to resist this temptation. The fear of the humiliation of being punished is often worse than the punishment itself. This is why we lock our doors when we leave the house. If someone breaks in, we dial 999 and hope that the perpetrator is caught. However down on their luck we think the criminal is, our need to protect our home is paramount.
Reform (or rehabilitation): virtually everyone who is locked up will eventually be released and we want them to not go back inside again. For this to happen they need help. Most criminals suffer from low self-esteem and a lot of good work can be done by people dedicated to restoring this. Unfortunately, this last R is the one which is both the least popular and the most necessary.
A lot of people think that those in prison have to suffer, so that they can learn the error of their ways. In their eyes money spent on reforming prisoners is immoral because it might make their lives better. People become irrationally furious at attempts to turn criminals into good citizens and tend to be dismissive and cynical about the effectiveness of expenditure on it.
To them I would say look on prisons as you would look on a washing machine. We put our dirty washing into one and take it out an hour or two later expecting it to be clean. If the machine only worked half the time they were used, we would soon want our money back. In the same way, we put people into prisons with the expectation that they will turn out better. We will even use the same language, hoping they will ‘clean up their act’ or ‘go clean’.
Yet all too often, prisons are treated like dustbins, where we throw the rubbish of society sending it off and then forgetting about it. But you cannot forget about people – unless you give every one of them a whole life sentence, a solution both heartless and impractical. Stalin tried it with the gulags while Hitler used the death sentence more liberally simply eliminating those he regarded as a burden on society. Look where that got them – and the perfect societies they tried to create. So let us keep the necessary evils of prison but work on them so that they do their job more effectively.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
