October 3rd – What is the point of prison? By that
I mean what is the object behind incarcerating a felon; is it punishment,
retribution, rehabilitation…a mixture of all three? What?
I can remember being invited onto a Channel 5 programme, back
in…oh, er… 2005 possibly…a live broadcast where members of the public got to
question a selected politician about their policies, doctrines…those sorts of
things; think it was broadcast from London…not sure. Anyway, whatever, it was a
one-hour gig and the selected participant was Michael Howard. I think there
were about eight questioners and each was given a pre-selected topic on which
to ask Mr. Howard various questions. I got justice ‘cos, as we all know, he was
Home Secretary under John Major in the 1990’s and his record was, to say the
least, patchy and misguided. I think I got ten minutes with him but that’s
beside the point, what is the point was/is his blinkered take on that opening
question;
What is the point of
prison?
Like most (vast majority in fact) Tory politicians it would
seem from past utterances and voting choices, Mr. Howard sees prison as
primarily a form of punishment stoked by the fires of public indignation as
seen through the eyes of the Red Tops and so quickly sliding into retribution,
with the former Master of the Rolls, Lord Donaldson putting it much better that
I. When Mr. Howard intervened in and lengthened the sentence given to the
child-murderers of Jamie Bulger, Ld. Donaldson described his interference as;
Institutionalised
vengeance by a politician playing to the gallery.
Nicely put, M’Lord. (Not that this is in any way a personal
vendetta against Mr. Howard, it’s also probably worth noting that he voted for
the return of capital punishment for all murderers then changed his mind at the
last count and voted against it; his see-saw voting practise seems to suggest
he is a pragmatic politician of the highest order, happy to play with people’s
lives and we should be thankful he never did become Prime Minister let alone
the leader of the Conservative Party).
Michael Howard’s prison view is not uncommon, particularly
amongst the upper echelons of society. One only has to review the diatribes by
newspapers (I use that term advisedly here) such as the Daily Mail and The Daily Express
to realise that vengeance-masquerading-as-punishment is high on the list of
reasons why people are sent to prison. Should it be? I mean, I understand that
knee-jerk reactions to heinous acts are a natural process and if it was mine
who were the victims...? But should the vengeance/punishment reasoning always
be involved in the mix, even years after the event? OK, OK, I know, there are
and always will be exceptions to the rule where contrition or reasoned
understanding on the part of the criminal is totally lacking but, in those
cases it then follows that the perpetrator is in some way mentally challenged
and so a whole new process of treatment that’s really outside of the normal
prison rules is kick-started…should be kick-started. Keeping people in prison
costs money so it’s in our interest to work out ways of cutting that prison
population to a minimum, and you can only do that by using the time prisoners
spend paying their debt to society by cutting reoffending through education and
support…isn’t it?
I think we can all be fairly sure (well I am at least) that,
in the vast majority of cases and in direct opposition to Michael Howard’s
catch-phrase of prison works that, in
fact, it doesn’t. The UK has the
highest per capita levels of imprisonment in Western Europe – 87,000 so around
150 in every 100,000 and recidivism rates in the UK are running at around 26%
so 1 in 4 which, when laid against the year-on-year increase in the prison
population doesn’t need much by way of explanation as to why even static-moored
cruise liners were and are being considered as places suitable for
incarceration…there’s a sign right there (as if one was needed, given the
banking debacles and the expenses fiddles) that successive governments of this
country have lost the fuckin’ plot. With that as backdrop, the question has to
be asked;
If what we’ve got isn’t
working then what will?
In an ideal world, the sort of world the US right refers to
as lefty-commie-pinko liberalism and
the UK refers to as a nation peopled by
free-for-all-free-loading leftys, a well-funded, well run prison service
that focused on the rehabilitation of offenders with equal measures of
education and support, tempered with the gradual integration of offenders back
into society, would be the ideal. But we all know that’s not gonna happen, not
with the vested interest in newspaper sales that we have at present.
What sells newspapers is murder and mayhem; cuddly-bunny
stories are printed but only from page five onwards. Like the opening ten
minutes of a movie, the headline has to capture the potential reader’s
imagination and as with the ever expanding use of sexual connotation and
cover/ad photos in the form of provocatively dressed females draped alongside
key words such as sex and betrayal, the level aimed at is the
puerile that taps into our basic animal core.
So it is with crime. The more salacious and brutal the crime,
the more innocent the victim, the more deranged the criminal the greater will
be not only the original reporting possibilities but also the ability to get
the story to run-and-run…and it has to be said, no matter how much we, you and
me, look for the wriggle room of qualification and public interest, we read it
because we find in fascinating. You don’t think? OK. How many Ian’s are there
in the UK
Ian Brady. News, Views,
Gossip, Pictures, Video.
Gossip. Right.
Get time, go back into the archives of the Red Tops and look
at how much in the way of column inches they have put out about Ian Brady and
Myra Hindley from the time they were accused through to today. It’ll horrify
you, particularly when you consider the victims were someone’s son or daughter.
And every time the papers used the murder as a springboard for sales via
self-righteous comment, which they justified by claiming they were seeking
justice for the families they purported to be on the side of, that every time
they printed such support the family members were faced with a reminder as to
the events and their outcome. Surely, when the perpetrators of those terrible
crimes and all others like them were handed their life sentence that was
justice done wasn’t it; or, at least, that’s what we said it was, what our
society has come up with after all this time of gradual civilisation, that this
was justice. How much more justice can you give someone than…well, justice?
But once that justice has been given then isn’t it up to
society not to allow newsprint forums, whose only interest is in shifting
units, to polarise opinion and bring about the misuse of the system into some
form of extended vengeance? Surely we should be concentrating on the
rehabilitation or treatment of said criminals.
On this day in 2000, Mark Chapman was denied parole after
serving 20 years of his sentence for murder. The parole board, in justifying
their decision said that allowing Mr. Chapman his freedom would, in their
words;
Deprecate the seriousness
of the crime.
The seriousness of the crime was that Mr. Chapman shot an
unarmed John Lennon five times in, as the papers dutifully tell us at every
opportunity in order to vilify the perpetrator, in shot an unarmed John Lennon
five times in the back.
Do you think the fame of the victim made that crime of murder
any more serious than, say, the killing of an unarmed man by police who was
walking home after work in the case of Ian Tomlinson, or the killing of an
unarmed man by the police on the tube in a case of mistaken identity in the
case of Jean Charles de Menezes? And if we consider those crimes to be equal in
magnitude then how do we treat the perpetrators; with rehabilitation based on
education and support leading on to integration back into the community or by
increasing their sentence because we feel that life in prison isn’t really long
enough, particularly if we can get extra print miles out of the story…
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