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The future of prisons |
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Monday, 28 January 2008 |
With the Government’s independent Prisons Commission taking its first evidence last week, Rory Cahill looks at the challenges facing our prison system, and what we can learn from others
Shug is a 19-year-old man from one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow and he’s standing before the judge awaiting sentencing. The offence he’s been found guilty of isn’t in the desperately serious league of murder, rape or armed robbery, but it still involved a clear and premeditated breach of the law. And he’s done it before. he’s got form.
The judge looks over the various reports compiled by social workers and health visitors and sees a depressing series of ticks against all the wrong boxes: the offender spent a period in care when a child, regular contact with the Children’s Reporter and hearings system, left school at 15, no record of employment, regular drink and drug use.
What are the options? give the young man the 12-month custodial sentence his offence warrants? But what will six months in Barlinnie really achieve apart from starting the young man on a cycle of imprisonment that could remain unbroken for the rest of his life? The Scottish Prison Service itself has said sentences of fewer than 12 months are useless in providing opportunities for meaningful rehabilitation
The Scottish Prison Service itself has said sentences of fewer than 12 months are useless in providing opportunities for meaningful rehabilitation 
. But the judge is not confident that a community sentence, as it stands, sends the right message, or will deter the young man sufficiently. So what should the judge do?
Debate on the way we run our prisons and the punitive elements of our criminal justice system is nothing new. It was happening 200 years ago when philosopher Jeremy Bentham unsuccessfully lobbied for his notion of a privately-run ‘panopticon’
– a prison designed to allow one warder to observe hundreds of inmates – to replace the transportation of convicts to New South Wales as the primary method of imprisonment and punishment that Britain favoured.
But with the Scottish government’s independent Prisons Commission – chaired by former First Minister and Justice Minister Henry McLeish taking its first evidence this month - the debate is again live in Scotland, and the outcomes of the discussion, if implemented by the government, could have far-reaching implications for not just the Scottish criminal justice system, but for Scottish society as a whole.
The starting point for the commission’s work is the government’s recognition that things simply cannot continue as they are. Scotland’s prison population hovers around the 7,600 mark, spiking higher at various times due to seasonal factors. Paradoxically, the prison population has been rising at a time when crime overall is falling.
The majority of those prisoners are serving short sentences of 12 months or less despite the SPS warning about the ineffectiveness of such tariffs for rehabilitation. Once released from jail, 64 per cent of offenders are re-convicted within two years.
How has this situation arisen? In 1950, there were only 2,000 people in Scotland’s jails on any given night. Why are 133 of every 100,000 of us locked up, compared to 76 in Ireland, 70 in Denmark and 66 in Norway? And what is the way forward? Do we accept that our jails should operate as de facto mental institutions and drug rehabilitation centres, as the women’s prison at Cornton Vale effectively does? Is making a fine defaulter spend a few days in prison really the best way to deter people from defying the order of a court?
These are difficult questions, with no definitive answer, but it is clear that the Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill wants the commission to investigate and identify new approaches to these problems.
Launching the commission in September last year he said:
“I refuse to believe that Scottish people are inherently bad, so why are we locking up twice as many offenders as Ireland or Norway? however, this government does not claim to have some kind of monopoly on good ideas and the commission will provide some welcome expertise. I am setting the commission a challenging task but the wealth of experience and expertise of the members can help provide some useful answers to one of Scotland’s most pressing challenges. Overcrowding in our prisons has reached record levels - up 15 per cent in a decade - so I firmly believe the time is right for a serious change of direction in our prisons’ policy.”
So if we do want to reduce our prison population, as MacAskill suggests, and find a way of dealing with less serious crimes that does not involve prison while maintaining the integrity – and the deterrence – of the justice system, where should we look?
Keith Simpson, head of restorative justice at SACRO, says that Finland, with its similar population, and previous history of high imprisonment rates, subsequently drastically reduced, provides a good comparator for Scotland.
“Finland certainly has lessons to teach us. In Finland, the presumption is that sentences will be served in the community. They make very strong use of deferred sentences. The majority of sentences are deferred and are only enacted if the conditions and reporting of the community element are broken
Finland certainly has lessons to teach us. In Finland, the presumption is that sentences will be served in the community. They make very strong use of deferred sentences. The majority of sentences are deferred and are only enacted if the conditions and reporting of the community element are broken
” he says.
Simpson says that while retaining tough jail sentences for serious offences, the Finnish approach has reduced their imprisonment rate from a figure comparable to Scotland’s to just 68 per 100,000. Simpson also advocates another Finnish policy that could prove controversial if introduced in Scotland – day fines. Instead of both Offender A and Offender B being fined £1,000 for the same offence, a punishment that may seem trivial to Offender A, a wealthy professional, but almost insurmountable to Offender B, who is on a low wage, and finds him or herself jailed for failing to pay the fine, the Finnish system sees both offenders fined a certain number of days’ wages, ensuring a parity of effect in the sentence.
But would the Scottish public – and importantly, the press – accept a change in our system that presumes a community sentence will be imposed in the first instance and hands out different fines to different people for the same offence?
Commission chair henry McLeish says that informing, and hopefully, changing, the existing perception of community sentences as ‘soft’ is a pre-requisite before any such radical shift can be considered.
“We are looking at community options. We have developed them fairly radically in Scotland and there is an issue with the public and the press that these are viewed as often ‘weak’ and not being about punishment and often being seen as soft.
“In reality, they are not. This is a very powerful public perception that the commission has to respect, but then go in for and see if we can get the mindset to change. But if the mindset is to change, we have to ensure that community sentences are tough, and in fact, tougher than a prison sentence. We have to make sure they are effective and work, we have to make sure the breaching of various orders we have is kept to a minimum,” he says.
Such tougher community sentences could incorporate MacAskill’s suggestion that retired or serving prison officers take
their accumulated knowledge and skills outside of the walls of the prison and out into the community as a means of interdicting people at risk of imprisonment, or re-offending, before they commit an offence that warrants a jail sentence.
John Mathieson, a prison officer with over 25 years’ experience and head of the LINK centre at HMP Edinburgh – which helps prisoners in preparing for release by assisting with finding accommodation, work and other necessities - supports MacAskill’s suggestion.
“What we have here is the knowledge of the prisoners themselves. You have to remember that some of these chaps are with us for many months and in some cases, years. We can amass a tremendous amount of information about these prisoners in terms of risk assessments. We have psychologists who do risk assessments, we have social workers who do risk assessments, we do quite intensive programmes and after those programme evaluations are carried out, there’s an awful wealth of experience and knowledge here,” he says.
Mathieson says that officers are attuned to the moods, behaviours, language and attitudes and expectations of prisoners, and better equipped than most – certainly better equipped than social workers straight out of college as MacAskill has suggested – to anticipate and deal with angry men who have poor decision-making and communication skills.
“Prison staff have a great awareness of the indicators that someone’s about to kick off or become violent and I think most prison staff have almost a sixth sense, if you like, for talking people down and calming situations and not allowing situations to get out of hand,” he says.
But Mathieson says too many prison officers who retire do not put their years of experience and the skills they have developed to good use. “There’s surprisingly few who continue with the criminal justice side of things, which is a wee bit disappointing and I think they undersell themselves, to be honest, in the criminal justice system because while police often go on to careers in security and elsewhere in the criminal justice line, prison officers don’t.”
MacAskill’s and Mathieson’s notion of retired prison officers – or other older men who can win and hold the respect of ex-prisoners or troubled youngsters – acting as mentors and guides, has a precedent in other justice systems around the world.
Both Canada and Australia, along with New Zealand, spurred by devastating rates of imprisonment, and particularly suicides in prison, among their Aboriginal and Maori populations, have embraced ways of dealing with young men trapped in the cycle of jail and release and re-imprisonment. Key to these innovations is the recognition that prison is a very Western response to crime, and one that springs from a very particular set of social and economic circumstances. While prison is seen as the natural response to crime in the West, for many other societies, it is seen as useless, unjust on both offender and victim, and even unnaturally cruel.
When the first Australian Aborigines saw the convicts who had avoided Bentham’s panopticon by being sentenced to transportation to the other side of the world, they could not believe that human beings would keep other human beings captive as punishment for a crime that had been committed against another person altogether. In Aboriginal society, as in many tribal societies, crime was dealt with by a mixture of immediate corporal punishment – non-fatal spearing or beating – or more often, a community punishment such as temporary banishment, or the assumption of particularly onerous duties within the society for a period.
Now in Australia, young Aboriginal men at risk of jail are regularly ‘sentenced’ to spend the equivalent time they would have faced in jail with the older men of their community, but in isolation from society as a whole. While they are punished by having their liberty effectively denied, studies into the process show the young men learn from their elders not only useful skills, but more importantly, how to reintegrate and make a contribution to their community.
While such innovative disposals – an ‘Outback Airborne’ of sorts – cannot be seen as a panacea, it has been credited with seeing a drop in the number of Aboriginal Australians coming into contact with the justice system, with 16 per cent reporting having been arrested in 2004, compared with 20 per cent a decade earlier.
Experts also suggest that in addition to pursuing and emulating positive examples of prison and offending policy, we also need to look to places where prison populations and re-offending rates are rising, and ensure we do not make similar policy errors. The key example used in this context is England and Wales. Such is the opposition to current English prison policy – the planned construction of three new ‘titan’ prisons holding 2500 inmates each, the reliance on an ‘order’ culture – that one suspects many in the Scottish criminal justice community would be quite content for the Scottish government to simply announce it would do the exact opposite of any policy pursued by Gordon Brown and Justice Minister Jack Straw.
Simpson says the culture of ‘orders’ unnecessarily pushes people into the cycle of prison:
“Anti-social behaviour orders in particular have contributed to the number of young people being imprisoned, and imprisoning young people is quite dangerous because they get into that cycle of prison and it can be very difficult to get them out.”
More dangerously, Professor Andrew Coyle, director of the International Centre for Prison Studies, sees England and Wales falling into the American trap of having to build more and more prisons to house an ever-increasing prison population.
“England and Wales is somewhere Scotland would do well to learn from in a negative way. In 2003-04, Lord Carter was asked by the then Home Office to prepare a report into the prison population, which at the time when the report came out in January 2004, was 75,000, and Carter said it would go up to 80,000 the next year but there was no reason why it should go any higher. But after John Reid became home Secretary, and added provision for another 8,000, then Carter was asked to report again to what had become the Ministry for Justice and when he did in December 2007, he said there needed to be provision for 96,000, and that recommendation was accepted by government. But in his 2007 report, Carter made no mention of the 80,000 figure.
“On December 5, Jack Straw stood up in the Commons and said he had agreed with the Chancellor for £1.2bn to be used to build three mega prisons, known as titans, holding around 2500 prisoners each. Now that took us out into a quantum we’ve never been on before. But then shortly after, Straw appeared before the Commons Select Justice Committee and changed his story, saying the prisons would actually cost £2.3bn. And I’ve heard from people who know about these things, who know the systems and so on, that the real cost will probably be much higher than even that. That’s not a model we want to follow.”
While the Prisons Commission is not due to report until the second half of the year, the early signs of McLeish’s thinking will encourage those hoping for a radical overhaul in the way we view prisons.
“Prison works for some, but it doesn’t work for others. When you look at the prison population, we’ve got to ask ourselves,
who’s in prison, why, how long are they in, what’s the outcome,” he says. We will always have prisons, and as the horrific case of Robert Foye, the prisoner who absconded while on day release and raped a teenager shows, prisons will never keep us completely safe from the violent and damaged people among us.
But as MacAskill and McLeish recognise, the range of options we have now is simply not good enough and a different type of prisons policy is required. Whether that change is enough to keep the Shugs of the world out of a bleak life of imprisonment at the taxpayers’ expense is yet to be seen. But it’s a start.
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