We lock people up with no thought and to little effect
Appetite for vengeance coupled with political expediency has led to an overcrowded prison system that doesn't work
Ian Loader
Friday November 23, 2007
The Guardian
On Wednesday Jack Straw delivered a speech on the future of penal policy to the Howard League for Penal Reform. It was widely expected that the secretary of state for justice would say something significant, partly in response to the lord chief justice's recent acknowledgement that sentencing policies are placing an intolerable strain on our prisons. In fact, Straw's speech was benignly neutral. In the midst of the Northern Rock crises and the Revenue & Customs discs scandal, the risk of being depicted as "soft on crime" was too great and had to be avoided. Word from the Ministry of Justice was that "the political landscape has hardened".
Once again, political expediency foreclosed much-needed public debate about penal policy. We live in a society that punishes a great deal but thinks rather less about why it does so. As a result our prisons are bursting with 81,547 inmates, an outcome that few in government planned and fewer have a tenable strategy for resolving. It is an issue the Commission on English Prisons Today, established by the Howard League, is determined to do something about.
The question of why we punish brings forth a standard menu of justifications. We do so in retribution for past wrongs, to deter future crimes, incapacitate the dangerous, rehabilitate offenders or repair broken bonds. Yet this age-old scrutiny is today disconnected from the decision-making that determines the size and operations of the penal system, and from public sensibilities towards punishment. The result is a high-minded debate about ideals that exercises little purchase over penal culture and practice, and justifications which decorate rather than guide the system.
It may be better, instead, to start with public philosophies of punishment, locating the debate in places where citizens, professionals and politicians are, rather than where one might wish them to be. The noisiest such philosophy wants a system that does harm, in response to the harm offenders have inflicted on victims, or to signal that the behaviour being punished is not to be tolerated. The overarching rationale here is public protection, the dominant emotions crime-related anger and fear, vengeance towards criminals and, lest we forget, audience pleasure at the punitive spectacle. Offenders are typified as dangerous, set in their ways, not "one of us"; their interests stand in a zero-sum relation to those of victims and wider society. This is the philosophy that has in recent years underpinned spiralling incarceration rates, the criminalisation of young people, indeterminate sentences and public distaste for parole - indeed, for any disposal deemed "soft". It may be no accident that this punishment-centred vision of a safe society captured the imagination of our rulers at precisely the moment when they lost faith in political utopias of a more socially inclusive and generous kind. Safety has become the ideology of the post-ideological age; prison its modal institution.
High among the costs of this penal utopianism is its cost. There are here no limits to the size and scope of the system, no resources to prevent 81,547 inmates becoming but a station on the track to US-style mass imprisonment. This is the jumping-off point for an alternative public philosophy - one that wants the penal system to make good.
This perspective pinpoints the fact that the population under penal supervision is disproportionately from poor family backgrounds, with little education, and typically with drug and mental health problems - in other words, "troubled" as well as "troubling". On this view, the penal system should be a site, not merely of punishment but for providing the educational, health and related services that improve the chances of an individual leading a "good and useful life" (to cite prison rule number one) on returning to society.
Sometimes this philosophy is premised on the idea that society bears some responsibility for the breakages that have resulted in offending and has an obligation to repair the damage. In today's climate, it more often claims the mantle of public protection, contending that without remedial intervention the prison doors will keep revolving. The relationship between offenders, victims and wider society can, after all, be positive sum. The former may lack the material and psychological ingredients of a law-abiding existence, but they remain amenable to programmes that can enhance their life chances or change their behaviour. There is, in short, hope.
This has a powerful appeal. Yet it is not without pathologies. It can license interventions into the lives of offenders that are intrusive and disproportionate and deny rights. A benign system can also, paradoxically, encourage greater resort to penal measures, inflating expectations and leading it to deliver services that are better provided elsewhere.
Here the way is open for a third public philosophy. This rests on the observation that the penal system in general is a perennially failing institution. The watchword here is parsimony. We are wise to treat the penal system as a control agency of last resort. Better also to limit its necessarily damaging effects by creating institutions that treat inmates with dignity and respect. Offenders are, after all, citizens, and should have their human rights protected.
One variant of this position comes with a Treasury mindset: we should spend no more of the public purse than strictly necessary on a system that routinely fails to meet its crime reduction goals. Another highlights the truism that penal institutions play an important but ultimately peripheral role in the maintenance of social order, and that secure societies are sustained by wider processes of inclusion and regulation. In either case, the task has become one of talking people down from their attachment to a prison solution to crime. And in the current climate, it is a hard sell.
Yet this is the task that confronts us. We need to think much harder about the benefits of, and how to create the conditions for, a minimum necessary penal system. More than ever, we need to reflect on how - and how many and how much - to punish, so as to stimulate debate about the expansive penal system we have so carelessly created. For the way we treat offenders communicates a great deal about the kind of society that Britain is, or aspires to be.
· Ian Loader is professor of criminology at the University of Oxford and a member of the Commission on English Prisons Today
ian.loader@crim.ox.ac.uk
A mixture of law, politics, autobiography and humour. Once described as "The Devilish Advocate" (Guardian), I do have the ability to provoke a response. Sometimes it comes from someone who uses a thought process, and sometimes from jerks usually associated with the knee.
A reply to the discussion article "We lock people up with no thought and to little effect”
ReplyDeleteThe facts would seem not to support the assertion that people are locked up to little effect, though this belief has become widespread. Unfortunately amongst such circles there is a tendency to have the comfort of opinions and the warmth of self-righteousness without the discomfort of thinking or the inconvenience of evidence. They want to be “nice”, they want to be “enlightened”, even if it means disregarding obvious reality. The article is very heavy on emotion and self-righteousness, railing against “crime-related anger and fear”, “audience pleasure at the punitive spectacle” and even “the overarching rationale…[of] public protection” (an unworthy aim indeed!) but remarkably light on fact.
I shall use figures from the USA partly because they appear to be better available than from the UK, partly because there is a stronger debate in the USA on the issue and partly because the USA has a well known high rate of imprisonment and is often held up as a negative example by the opponents of imprisonment. For example Loader mentions the supposed “mass imprisonment” of the USA in a throwaway remark without the slightest examination of the actual American experience.
The USA is frequently portrayed as country that locks up large numbers of people out of unenlightened and vicious revenge and that this does nothing to reduce crime. I would argue that people believe this simply because it fits their view of the world and their opinion that punishment is inhumane. Evidence contradicts such a view; that the view that imprisonment is ineffective arises from a distaste for punishment and other preconceived ideas rather than any observation of reality.
Let’s look at the figures. Between 1980 and 2003 the US imprisonment rate increased from 139 to 482 per 100 000. One would think, given the widespread opinion that imprisonment is ineffective, that in the same time period the US crime rate had increased, remained the same or at least only declined slightly. That is not the case. Between 1980 and 2003 the rate of property crime decreased by around two thirds. The violent crime rate decreased by more than half. The murder rate decreased by 44%. Do these figures suggest that the USA is locking up people to little effect?
Now, we can argue about whether other factors are involved and to what extent – unfortunately we don’t have a control USA in which the rate of imprisonment stayed the same to compare it with. However the figures are devastating – a decline in violent crime by more than half and a 44% reduction in the murder rate is hardly insignificant. It blows the imprisonment is ineffective argument out of the water.
As with any credible theory, we must have evidence that supports it as well as a mechanism of operation. An American study found that criminals classified as “felons” (those who commit more serious crimes) committed on average between 12 and 15 crimes per year. Therefore for every “felon” imprisoned, one may expect 12 to 15 fewer crimes per year of imprisonment, which in my opinion represents a very obvious mechanism for the reduction in crime, even disregarding any deterrent or rehabilitative effects.
At this point those who object to imprisonment will no doubt say that something must be wrong with society for so many people to end up in prison and that it would be better to prevent crime in the first place. One can hardly disagree and I strongly believe that the roots of crime can and must be tackled (in this I do not believe the USA to be a model), but this is very different from saying that criminals are being locked up to little effect. The evidence would suggest they are being locked up to very great effect.