Peter Hitchens on UK prisons

From Prisons, what are they for?:

Several things believed by liberals are simply untrue. We don't have a large prison population because we lock people up more readily than Continental countries. We have a large prison population because we have much more crime than our neighbours across the Channel. If we jailed criminals as rigorously as they do, our prisons would be much fuller.

Given the current state of affairs in the U.K., as reported by Theodore Dalrymple, who would want to be a cop there? The UK refuses to face the root of its social problems and address them properly.

Prison does not make people better and never has. All attempts at rehabilitation have so far failed. There is no evidence of any criminal ever having been rehabilitated. And prison, by the way, is a liberal idea introduced and refined by enlightened reformers wanting to do away with harsh punishments and the diseased, squalid, promiscuous neglect, which existed before. It also does not make people worse. They are already pretty bad when they arrive, since it is now very difficult indeed to get sent there. If young people on a first or second offence were given short prison sentences, instead of being given ASBOs, cautions, probation and various other soft options, they might well be scared into giving up crime. But by the time they eventually arrive at reception, they are so hardened that they don't care.

And since authority inside prisons is weak and in retreat, these hardened types can cope with it very well. A gentle, humane person would hate prison. A savage, selfish and violent one would find it little different from the outside world. You might also wonder how it is that drugs are so easily available inside jails. As it happens, like TVs in cells, they help to keep the prisoners passive (when was there last a prison riot?). But that couldn't possibly be the intended result, since drugs are illegal and we all know how much the law disapproves of them, don't we?

So what are prisons for? Frankly, I despise the 'Prison works' mantra, which says that prison is useful because those locked up aren't free to commit more crimes. It's technically true, but it' s also an argument for locking up thieves and violent people for the rest of their lives, in preventive custody. No free society could do that, and long-term imprisonment undoubtedly makes people go mad. I'm always amazed when liberals claim that long prison sentences are more 'humane' than the death penalty. Long incarceration is horribly cruel. I've been into quite a lot of prisons round the world, and seen two executions, and I would much rather be executed than serve a lifelong (or even ten-years-plus) prison sentence.

Prison should have a long-term effect, if not on those who experience it, then on those who are considering crime, but are not sure if they need fear the consequences.

That is why prison ought to be for punishment, what the old Prison Commissioners called "the due punishment of responsible persons". They didn't think this would have all that much effect on many of the people who actually went to prison, though it might occasionally do so. Usually they just got too old for crime and gave up. . They were more concerned about its effect on those people who were thinking of committing crimes. They wanted it to be known that the result would be unpleasant, a deterrent.

To achieve this they made sure they, not the convicts, ran the prisons. They wanted an element of shame, of loss of self-regard, and of penitence. The prison buildings, deliberately solemn and grim, were placed in highly-visible city centre sites as a frowning warning of what awaited the wrongdoer.

They devised a regime of bare, basic living conditions, adequate but austere food, hard work and the possibility of earning comforts and remission by sustained good behaviour. Few wanted to undergo this, though by the standards of the USA or the continent it was not especially cruel. Despite its surprisingly short sentences it was highly effective in deterring crime, backed up as it was a by an alert and ever-present police force patrolling the streets on foot with a fraction of current manpower.

The current official view is that deprivation of liberty is punishment itself. The punitive elements of prison life have been discarded - largely due to a historical accident. Foolish Liberal and Tory governments imprisoned two groups of middle class people in the first 20 years of the century. First came the Suffragettes. then came the conscientious objectors to the Great War.

Why should prisoners be able to live off of the society that they have offended? Why should we provide them with food and clothing? Should they not be forced to grow their own and produce what they need, and thus engage in useful manual labor?

I think there is plenty of evidence to show that capital punishment is more humane than imprisonment, pace Pope John Paul II and the extreme defenders of Evangelium Vitae. Being forced to live in an overcrowded prison where gangs ruler and not the temporal authorities is degrading, and the inability of the state to protect prisoners from one another is an offense to their dignity. Contrary to what some might think, someone who is being punished does not surrender all of his "rights"--punishment is restricted to what fits the crime, and does not go beyond that; otherwise it is an unjust punishment. One could make the argument that conditions in prisons are so bad that putting someone in there (and not protecting him from what happens inside those walls) is an unjust punishment.

So once again, we have to look at the purposes of punishment--is it primarily retribution? Or rehabilitation? (While deterrance may be a purpose of punishment, it is definitely secondary; with respect to the one being punished, punishment has as much of an effect of deterrance as it has one of rehabilitation. If one is rehabilitated, one is deterred from committing further crimes, and vice versa. I consider rehabilitation the implanting of an aversion to sin/committing crime--I don't expect punishment to directly produce virtue, just as I don't expect law to do it. With respect to deterring people in general from committing crimes, that is just part of the coercive aspect of law.)