Lock them up and throw away the key

Prisons are shit. They don't work, because we don't use them as we should; places for rehabilitation.




So then, all appeals for clemency were rejected. Despite the opposition of a large minority of people, yesterday the inevitable happened and the end came for Timothy McVeigh. In the poetic and moving words of the 16th century poet John Donne, "Farewell to thee, thou blinkered and idiotic murdering fuckhead; didst thou really think that the slaughter of innocents would further thy cause? Or has thy mind simply snapped like a rotted tree in a storm? Either way, good bloody riddance to you!" Or something like that anyway...

As I've already gone into my feelings concerning the death penalty, there is no need to belabour the point. Suffice to say that he got what he deserved, unfortunately the event was a media frenzy and so it somewhat detracted from what should have been a solemn occasion. However, there were numerous calls for mercy from the many opponents of the death penalty. By mercy, they were presumably talking about life imprisonment which doesn't seem particularly merciful to me, but that is by the by. Having addressed capital punishment previously, I think perhaps a glance at the alternatives is warranted. I can't claim to be an expert on the American prison system, but I do have a certain level of knowledge of our own and so I shall limit myself to that.

I suppose the first question should be "Why do we have prisons in the first place?” which is not as straightforward as it seems. Are they for punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, or containment? But more than that, why are they actually needed? Large-scale prisons are a comparatively recent innovation. Before that, the main alternative to being condemned to death was banishment. This took many forms as society progressed; in prehistoric until the dark ages this generally took the form of banishment from a tribal territory. A man alone in the land of a hostile tribe could look forward to a fairly short life packed with interesting times. As we moved into the medieval and beyond, banishment (or at least the incidences that made it into the history books) became the province of the rich and powerful. It was rare that a king could feel so secure in his position that he could afford to have an influential rival executed, so banishment to the continent became the alternative. When one bears in mind that this occasionally resulted in said rival coming back at the head of an army of continental mercenaries, this could be said to have been a bit of a rubbish method of disposing of undesirable elements.

In the time of the Empire banishment became the exile of thieves and murderers (amongst others) to penal colonies, America until they kicked us out, and Australia after that. Not for nothing are Aussie soap opera's referred to as criminal...
And so we get to today, where banishment is a thing of the past. And why? Well, if one looks at the whistle stop history of it, one can see that the objective behind it is the same in each case; send the offender far away where they can't bother us any more. No thought was given to what happens to them once they were banished, because it ceased to be our problem. Someone else had to deal with them in whatever way they saw fit; we simply stopped worrying about them. This is perfectly fair and reasonable when you have somewhere to send them.

However, I would say that our attitude towards prisons isn't a million miles away from our ancestors’ attitudes toward banishment. As the prison population are for the most part put back into society after having served their time, our complete indifference as to what happens to them whilst they are in there is perhaps not the best way of dealing with things. At present, our prisons are little more than warehouses for criminals. So in that respect, the main purpose of our prisons is containment. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a bad thing at all. Certainly, no one in their right mind would want criminals freed and at large after they'd done something deserving of punishment. So prisons fulfill the roll that banishment once did; removing an undesirable from society.

They do this by confining criminals together in enforced cohabitation. Being human beings like the rest of us they intermingle, befriend some and antagonise others. Social hierarchies are formed (e.g. Sex offenders at the bottom, gang bosses at the top) and rules are created and observed. If broken, then the prisoners deal punishment themselves. In other words, a sub-culture forms. The longer one is exposed to this sub-culture, the more ingrained it becomes and the less likely one becomes to be able to live by the rules of normal society. In other words, they become institutionalised.

It seems to me that we are storing up trouble for ourselves when we store people in prison. They rarely learn the error of their ways or get the opportunity to improve themselves via increasing their qualifications (either practical or academic) so there is little or no rehabilitation on offer. As to punishment and deterrence, they fulfill that function the first time someone is sent there. But I would say that it is because a first time prisoner suffers fear of the unknown. Sometimes that first prison experience is enough to deter someone from serious crime (I'm tempted to make a crude pun about them never forgetting their first time, especially when one considers the part that fear of being raped in the showers has in the deterrence value of prisons). All too often though, new tricks are learned and the criminal becomes more alienated from society.

There are two schools of thought about this. To the right, the approach is to build more prisons so that we can contain more people for longer periods of time. To the left we have the desire for rehabilitation and understanding of the offender. Somewhere in the middle (although admittedly glancing off to the left) is me. Crime does need to be punished. It's just that I tend to believe that people are inclined to make mistakes in their lives, and blanket condemnation followed by a process that will incline them more toward criminal activity does not seem to me to be the wisest idea. Certainly they should be imprisoned (if only because we have no realistic alternative; I mentioned banishment earlier, perhaps once we have the technology for establishing permanent dwellings on the Moon and Mars we will see the re-appearance of penal colonies...). It's what we do with them once they're there that I take issue with.

And yet again, I'm going to cop out. Having stated that I think our current system doesn't work, I can't offer a functional alternative. I can offer idea's of course, and I've already hinted at them. Improving the educational facilities within prisons so that an unskilled and uneducated prisoner can finish his sentence and have either a trade to go into or qualifications to help him get work would be a good start. At the same time, one must remember that a crime was committed and this should be punished, so more Spartan surroundings and a strictly regimented lifestyle for all prisoners could be imposed(does anyone really imagine that if that odious little turd Jeffrey Archer does get imprisoned that he will be at anything other than a luxurious and comfortable prison? The bastard will probably get Jonathan Aitken's old suite...).

The flip side of this view is "Why should criminals have the opportunity to better themselves when citizens don't have access to the level of education that they would like?" Well, here's fun; why not try improving access to education for everyone? I don't mean for the prison issue to be looked at in isolation. I keep harping on about society, and our prison population is just one of society's problems. If, when one goes through school, one has access to a good education (by which I mean both academic and practical; I find it disgusting that someone who could be a top class electrician or builder gets a hard time through school because of our emphasis on academia. As always though, that is a rant for another day...) then it is less likely that one will commit a crime. I say that because one of the main background factors to crime is poverty and social deprivation. If we think of prison as a second chance to get this education, but also incorporate the element of punishment, then we deter people from crime by using both carrot and stick. At least that way, when society does encounter repeat offenders and pathological criminals, we will have clean hands and a clean conscience when dealing with them.