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.
