SOCIETY'S WASHING MACHINES

Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt - victims of Usman Khan

When David Cameron was asked what would be his priority when he was re-elected as Prime Minister in 2015, he replied simply ‘prison reform’.  Well, that all went south because of Brexit and little more than a year later he was replaced by Theresa May and later by Boris Johnson.  Prison reform was forgotten after Brexit and the anti-reform attitude which went with it.

Another nail in its coffin was the recent inquest into those who were killed on London Bridge in 2019.  Briefly, what happened was that two young idealistic people (photos above) were killed by the supposedly reformed terrorist Usman Khan after attending a rehabilitation meeting at nearby Fishmonger’s Hall.  Khan had been given a clean bill of health and promoted as the ‘poster boy’ for prison reform and the deradicalization of extremists. 

The key word here is ‘extremists’.  There is a world of difference between making criminals feel worthwhile members of society who can make a contribution by giving up crime and persuading those who want to destroy western style democracy and replace it with a version of Islamic fundamentalism to see the error of their ways.  Persuading a crook to go straight is one thing, deradicalizing an extremist is another.

Despite the terrible failure of the idea of reforming a radical like Khan after he has been locked up, it is still worth making the effort.  But it is a tough sell.  There are very few votes in prison reform and nominally radical politicians tend to run scared from issues which they feel will lose them votes and make them look weak.

As is often the case, it is the conservative who effects change because he is mindful of his legacy, as Nixon did when he went to China.  Wouldn’t be cool to go down in history as the man who opened up the communist east to the capitalist west, thought Nixon?  Likewise Cameron may well have thought his administration would look good to posterity if prisons were genuinely reformed during his watch.

I have written before about the need for us to have prisons to make society work, my argument being basically that, once you lock the door of your house you are effectively voting for a criminal justice system.  (Go here for that post.)  However, they should not be, as they so often are, universities of crime, rather the washing machines of our society.

When I buy and use a washing machine I expect it to work.  I put in dirty clothes and take them out clean.  If it does not work, I want my money back or at least the machine repaired.  Similarly, if I support sending people to prison, I expect those convicted and sentenced to come out better citizens than when they went in. 

Some hope.  According to the Howard League for Penal Reform there are nearly 80,000 people in prison in Britain at present and there is little sign of that number going down, especially as the government thinks it can win votes by promising longer sentences - such as ten years for defacing a statue.  The League compares the prison system to a river which sweeps away people stuck in the middle of the flow.

In a sensible system, locking up people convicted of a crime and then working hard to help them turn their lives around would be a cause for celebration.  Look, John or Jane has been inside for five years and came out determined to go straight, find a job, reconnect with their families and leave their criminality behind them. They would become contributors to society rather than a drain on resources.

Prisons can be quite a drain.  We spend about £4.4 billion pounds a year in Britain on prisons (not on the justice system) and each prisoner we lock up costs nearly £45,000 annually.  (You could send them to a decent hotel for that.)  Yet the reoffending rates are shockingly high. Nearly 50% of prisoners who have been released are reconvicted within a year and these rates are higher for young and petty offenders.  The washing machine is not working.

Success stories like the (entirely imaginary) ones of John and Jane are not only rare but are widely mistrusted by those who never go to prison.  Talking to prisoners, as I do occasionally when working as a Samaritan, makes you realise what hopeless places they are, yet the appetite for punishment is increasing all the time and our prison population has almost doubled in thirty years from 45,000 to 83,000.

Many ordinary people are sceptical of concepts like prison reform and rehabilitation.  It is widely assumed that all prisoners have fancy flat screen televisions in their cells and can watch anything they want.  In fact, flat screen tvs are the only kind that are made now and access to a limited number of channels depends on good behaviour.  Yet just say ‘flat screen televisions in prison cells’ and people immediately assume that going to prison is like staying in a holiday camp.

In reality, it is often very difficult to get a job if you have time in prison on your cv.  Timpsons, ironically a company that specialises in locks for people's houses, has instituted a successful programme of employing former prisoners and says on its website that:

'The vast majority of ex-offenders we recruit are extremely loyal, productive, hardworking and make excellent colleagues. Many have been promoted and fully grasped the second chance they have been given. To put it simply, recruiting ex-offenders has been great for our business.'

Rather than regarding them as society’s washing machines in which those who have gone wrong can be cleaned up, we are all too happy to see prisons as the rubbish dumps of society, where people are tossed and left to rot.  Yet, as the Timpson story shows, this not need be the case.  Washing machines or rubbish dumps?  We have a long way to go to convince people that prisons can be the former rather than the latter but it is a step well worth taking. 

Edwin Lerner

Go to: https://www.timpson-group.co.uk/timpson-foundation/ex-offenders/ for more on Timpsons.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com.

     

THE THREE RS

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