Guardian UK: Prisons are the scandal

[marmar]

Prisons are the scandal
The route to a lower crime rate and safer communities is not via mass incarceration


David Wilson
The Guardian, Wednesday July 23, 2008


Why do our prisons remain immune from scandal? I don't mean that scandals don't happen, but that they don't seem to attract attention - and through that public shame and political action. This includes everything from prisoners at Doncaster prison discovered sleeping in toilets, to self-harm and suicide and the fact that the murder rate inside can be double the rate outside.

One of these killings was that of Wayne Reid, who was stabbed to death in 2005 at Rye Hill, a prison run by the private company Global Solutions Ltd. At the recent inquest it was revealed that, under the prison contract, discoveries of "serious items" - such as knives and other weapons - carried stiffer penalties (50 penalty points) than a serious assault on a staff member (10 points), or indeed the suicide of an inmate (one penalty point).

Is it any wonder that prison officers regularly returned "nil" finds in their weapons searches, or that there were no random cell-search procedures in place at Rye Hill? In any event Reid was murdered just five days before he was due to be released.

As a penal reformer I have thought over the years about how to create a scandal over what happens in our jails. The title of today's conference on penal abolition - Creating a Scandal: Prison Abolition and the Policy Agenda - comes from one of my books about deaths in prison custody, and my attempts to muckrake about what goes on inside.

Some readers may be enraged by the idea that we could do without prisons for all but the most dangerous offenders. Indeed, one of my favourite ways of trying to create a debate is to argue that instead of planning to build three new Titan jails to house an extra 10,000 prisoners by 2012, we should be planning on closing prisons and investing more heavily in community-based punishments. While that gets some media attention, it does not worry politicians because penal reformers need to take the public with them - and all too often the public are led to believe that it is impossible to have safer communities, a lower crime rate and fewer people locked up. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/23/prisonsandprobation.communities

[PDJane]

1. Prisons remain a scandal

because the general public doesn't see criminals as worth getting upset over; they're not our class, y'see.

Punishment is supposed to cure what ails them........it doesn't, and it can't, and it won't. It just makes the cycle more vicious. Wasted time for the watcher and the watched.