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The limitations of imprisonment

 

Sir Godfrey Lushington was Permanent Secretary at the Home Office in England for the decade 1885 to 1895. Giving evidence to a government committee on the penal system he said:

"I regard as unfavourable to reformation the status of a prisoner throughout his whole career; the crushing of self-respect, the starving of all moral instinct he may possess, the absence of all opportunity to do or receive a kindness, the continual association with none but criminal...I believe the true mode of reforming a man or restoring him to society is exactly in the opposite direction of all these; but, of course, this is a mere idea. It is quite impracticable in a prison. In fact the unfavourable features I have mentioned are inseparable from prison life."
(quoted in Rutherford 1986) [24]

Prison has retained all the features attributed to it a century ago by Sir Godfrey Lushington. It is still plagued by contradictions. It is intended to improve people but it generally makes them worse. It breaks the bonds which bind people to society and its norms. Those who had a home and family before they were sent to prison may lose both. Those who had a job may find their employer will not have them back. Everyone leaves with the stigma of a prison record. It is a concentration of people many of whom are committed to living outside the law and a recruiting agency for criminal organisations.

So it is not surprising that the best predictor of whether people will end up in prison is whether they have been there already. Prison does not stop people continuing to commit the acts that caused them to go there in the first place. In England and Wales, more than half of the men who are sent to prison have been caught and found guilty of another offence within two years. (Home Office 1995) [17]

It might be said that the justification for sending people to prison is its deterrent effect, not on those who have experienced it but on the rest of the population. It should instil fear and prevent people from committing acts that could lead to them ending up in prison. Actually, there is no evidence at all that can lead to this conclusion. Research suggests that tough penalties can deter but only at the bottom of the scale of the sentences. So, the fear of penalties may deter drivers from speeding or parking in a forbidden place. But the idea of deterrence assumes people are committing crime out of rational calculation. Many crimes are committed in circumstances where the strength of emotions, or the influence of drugs or alcohol, has overcome any rational approach. In fact, what stops most people committing crime is not the fear of prison but internal controls, conscience, the "policeman within".

Prison is also very ineffective when used as a major plank in a policy to reduce crime. The argument about the relationship between crime rates and imprisonment has been well-covered. Roger Tarling shows that in England and Wales it would be necessary to increase the prison population by 25 per cent to achieve a crime rate reduction of one per cent (Tarling 1993) [26]. Certainly all the evidence suggests that mass incarceration is the least effective available method of responding to crime. Crime prevention programmes, employment possibilities for young men, support for families, measures to combat social exclusion are all likely to be better investments (NACRO 1995). [22]

Prison is also a place with great potential for human rights abuses. Article 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says:

"all persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person".

Yet in the prisons of the world humanity and respect in the treatment of prisoners are the exception rather than the rule. When the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture visited Russia in July 1994 to establish whether the conditions in the pre-trial prisons could be regarded as torture he said after a visit to two such prisons in Moscow:

"The Special Rapporteur would need the poetic skills of a Dante or the artistic skills of a Bosch adequately to describe the infernal conditions he found in these cells" (United Nations 1994). [25]

Speaking to a committee of the Russian Parliament, the Duma, in 1994 General Yuri I Kalinin, head of the Penitentiary Department of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, said:

"I have to confess that sometimes official reports on prisoners' deaths do not convey the real facts. In reality, prisoners die from overcrowding, lack of oxygen and poor prison conditions...Cases of death from lack of oxygen took place in almost all large pre-trial detention centers in Russia. The critical situation in SIZOs (pre-trial prisons) is deteriorating day by day: the prison population grows on average by 3,500-4,000 inmates a month..." (quoted in Moscow Centre 1996). [20]

In January 1995 San Francisco judge Thelton Henderson ruled that Pelican Bay prison in California was in breach of the law and had 120 days to reform itself. The judge, in his ruling, described eleven violent assaults on prisoners.

"One had four teeth knocked out, another's scalp was partly torn back and he received no medical treatment until the flesh started falling off. Another's jaw was fractured, and one guard bent back a man's arm, thrust through the slot where they deliver meals, until the bone broke. They heard the crack throughout the building.

"Visitors have been startled to see naked men confined outside in tiny metal cages for hours during bitter weather. Inmates were handcuffed in the 'hog-tied' position, ankles and wrists almost meeting, and left for up to 10 hours. (Observer 1995) [23]

Europe too has its cases of ill-treatment of prisoners. Much takes place that has prompted the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, which inspects places of detention in those European countries which have ratified the European Convention on the Prevention of Torture, to reach the conclusion that prisoners are enduring inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

 

For example, the Committee visited the UK in August 1990 and found such bad physical conditions and lack of activities for prisoners in Brixton, Wandsworth and Leeds prisons that they held the UK to be guilty of submitting prisoners to inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment. (Council of Europe 1991) [5] The Committee found another case of inhuman and degrading treatment in Luxembourg in 1993 where a prisoner had given birth to a baby in hospital and a few minutes after the birth the baby had been taken from the mother by prison staff and given to foster parents. (Council of Europe 1993) [6] In France, visited in 1991, the Committee described as " a flagrant example of inhuman and degrading treatment" the practice of chaining women prisoners on civilian hospitals to their beds during labour and after giving birth" (Council of Europe 1993a) [7]. The Netherlands was severely criticised by the Committee for the conditions it found during its visit in 1992 to the special detention units. In the unit 4A in Demersluis prison in particular the attitude of staff towards the prisoners was antagonistic, unco-operative and sometimes openly contemptuous. They ignored the prisoners' requests for access to doctors, lawyers or social workers (Council of Europe 1993b) [8]. Overcrowding in Italy in 1992 was so bad that the Committee described it as inhuman and degrading treatment, with San Vittore prison in Milan built for 800 prisoners yet holding 2,000 (Council of Europe 1995) [10].

So prison is a penalty with many disadvantages. In developing countries these disadvantages are compounded. Prisons are for them an expensive colonial legacy. There are many places in the world where one can take a sight-seeing tour through a city and know as one approaches a distinctive sort of wall that it is the wall of the city prison. Round the corner will be one of those entrance portals, rather like the entrance to Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London or La Sante in Paris. This is the prison that the colonisers built. But, the Western notion of imprisonment, so unsuccessful in Western European countries and in North America, is actively disastrous in developing countries where to take a large group of people, render them totally unproductive and then have to feed, clothe and care for them is a huge burden on scarce resources. Prisoners are unable to produce food for their families. There is no money to pay to feed them all. There is no money to pay for the damage-reduction programmes like resettlement and after-care that are a necessary part of Western prison systems. For many in prisons with bad sewerage problems, infestation, no doctors, no medicines, little water and acute overcrowding a prison sentence can be a death sentence. Corruption amongst poorly paid prison staff is widespread.

But, it could be argued, these disadvantages are a price worth paying if the public is protected from serious violent crimes, murder, rape and robbery. Imprisonment surely protects the public from such depredations. Certainly it is reasonable to assume that a small minority of the people in prison have committed serious and violent crimes and if they were not incarcerated they would continue to pose a threat. But most of those imprisoned throughout the world constitute no such threat. Most of them are petty offenders. A large proportion, over 50 per cent in many countries, are pre-trial prisoners, as yet not convicted of a crime. Most come from the urban poor. Prisons are places where the discrimination of the outside society shows itself starkly. All around the world prisons are full of the poor, the unemployed, the disadvantaged and the mentally ill. In many countries ethnic minorities are grossly overrepresented in prison. In the United States African Americans are overrepresented. In Australia it is Aborigines. For many poor and minority men being sent to prison is just one of the social and economic injustices they can expect to face in their lives. The few women in prison are often there because they have finally returned the violence that is imposed on them by their husbands or partners or have become involved in drug smuggling in order to alleviate the extreme poverty they and their families face.

 


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