Warning from America: Reject the big idea in 2009

Warning from America: Reject the big idea in 2009



Building American-style Titan prisons to warehouse thousands of prisoners could seriously undermine the ability of the justice system to cut crime by reforming offenders and instead set England and Wales on the fast-track to copying the damaging and discredited US prison system, a leading US civil rights lawyer warned when he addressed the Prison Reform Trust 2008 Annual lecture.

By: Inside Time Report

Professor Bryan Stevenson’s lecture, Warning from America: the social and economic impact of overincarceration and how to avoid it, is a direct challenge to Justice Secretary Jack Straw who has in the past criticised overimprisonment in the US and vowed it would not be repeated here.

The Prison Reform Trust believes we have nothing to be complacent about and asks: ‘as the recession bites, can we afford to spend 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the criminal justice system - a higher per capita level than in any other EU country or the USA?’ As a proportion of our population, we already hold more people in privately run prisons than is the case in the United States. Black and minority ethnic groups are massively over-represented in prison here and in the USA.

Professor Stevenson (pictured) highlighted the unjustified and counter-productive use of prison for petty offenders, children, the mentally ill and addicts in need of treatment as the main cause of the US system’s current problems and the UK’s ever-Warning from America: reject the big idea in 2009 increasing prison population.

He argued that the UK must not repeat the American mistake of dealing with the symptoms rather than the causes of prison overcrowding; and added that if large, American-style prisons are built in England and Wales then that would, in effect, signal the end of the government’s desire for prisons to reform offenders. Instead these prisons would become giant warehouses from which large numbers of offenders are released ready to offend again.

In his lecture, Professor Stevenson also talked about his experiences representing young, poor and marginalised prisoners, some of whom are as young as 13 years-old and facing life sentences without hope of parole.

In April 2008, as reported in Inside Time, a US think-tank concluded that harsher sentencing and growing prison numbers were ‘saddling cash-strapped States with soaring costs they can ill afford, and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime’. Professor Stevenson argued that investing just a fraction of these resources in communities in order to treat the mentally ill and break drug and alcohol addictions would produce better outcomes in terms of preventing reoffending and cutting crime.

‘The US has made serious mistakes with its criminal justice policy over the last 35 years; the UK should learn from these mistakes, reject the idea of Titan prisons and pursue cost-effective, humane and responsible strategies that avoid mass incarceration and inspire hopefulness rather than the inevitability of imprisonment which has so devastated many American communities’, he said.