26 MARCH 1965, Page 10

Prison Without Pains?

By GILES

PLAYFAIR

(-NUR prisons may or may not have become too kf'soft,' but there still isn't one—closed, semi- closed or open—which is the equal of its most advanced equivalent abroad. Nor is there a prison in Britain which isn't less 'soft than it needs to be for the purpose of keeping its inmates safely confined. As a result of continuing com- missions and omissions in penal practice, every prisoner in the country, however great or small an 'escape risk' he may be, is subjected to physical hardships and mental suffering that are irrelevant to training and cannot be justified on security grounds alone.

Arguably, this might not matter—it might even be a cause for national self-satisfaction—if the basic reason for sending people to prison were invariably to punish them, and if the length of sentences were fixed strictly according to deserts and limited to what a human being can reason- ably be expected to stand without serious deterioration in body and mind.

But, other factors apart, the partial abolition of the death penalty under the Homicide Act, and now its likely total abolition, have led to an awareness that imprisonment may be an essen- tially preventive measure, hardly distinguishable in purpose from the confinement of dangerous lunatics in mental hospitals. The Government is persuaded that there are legally responsible but perennially violent offenders who may have to be locked up, if not for the rest of their natural lives, at any rate for much longer periods than have hitherto been thought morally permissible. One proposal at present under consideration for dealing with these people is to build a sort of prison within a prison at Albany, IOW. Ac- cording to a Home Office announcement, this special institution would be securer than the securest of regular penal establishments. On the other hand, conditions inside it would be 'mo're tolerable.'

But how tolerable? An excessively long term

of imprisonment, vital though it may be in society's interests. is none the less inhuman, if the individual undergoing it would. 'rum his own point of view, be better off dead. rhe aim mast be to provide him with a life worth having 41 captivity. And whether or not that is possible, experience in foreign countries shows that a great deal more could be done to achieve it then appears to be contemplated in Britain at present.

To begin with, there is the matter of earn- ings. In Sweden, for example. it is becoming common practice for a prisoner to be paid a fair market wage for his labour, which means that he can afford not only to keep himself plentifully supplied with cigarettes. periodicals, luxury foodstuffs and so on, but, more impor- tantly, to contribute substantially to the male' tenance of his family, if he has one. But the miserly few shillings a week, which a prisoner in Britain receives as an ex grotto hand-out, in some ways makes his lot harder than easier to bear. Thus, while he is allowed to smoke, the amount of tobacco he can afford to buy, even if he uses up his entire resources, is usually far too little to satisfy his yearning. This leads to a special form of prison starvation and, worse still, makes room for the 'tobacco baron' who preys on the smoke-hungry state of his felloW inmates. Again, one of the declared objectives of British penal policy is to 'encourage' prisoners 'to keep in touch with their families and remeor ber their responsibilities to them, and that to itself is no doubt highly desirable. But to en* courage prisoners to remember responsibilities which they are at the same time denied the means of discharging is manifestly torturesoire' It may be unreasonable to suggest that wage sufficient to transform prisoners into bread' winners are economically feasible short of prison industry entering the open market, and that de- pends in turn on winning trade union agree-

mont. Nevertheless, parsimony explains why a number of other progressive measures introduced abroad have not been adopted here.

Adequate plumbing—a feature of most foreign Penal institutions built during the present cen- tury—is one of these measures. At the peniten- tiary in Goias (Brazil)—to mention an outstand- ing case—every cell is provided with a lavatory, wash-basin and shower behind a partition. But in Britain, despite the massive building pro- gramme which is now in progress and involves the expenditure of millions of pounds, the idea of equipping cells with any plumbing at all has been rejected. Penal practice in our changing society is evidently set on retaining the repulsive business of 'slopping out' indefinitely.

Blundeston is the most recently completed prison under the present building programme, and absence of plumbing is not all that seems retrograde about the cells there. They are, ad- mittedly, better designed and more cheerful to look at than those at Pentonville, say. But they are also smaller; ,and this economy is excused on the grounds that, with the abandonment of solitary confinement and increased opportunities for 'association,' cells are now only required as sleeping quarters.

But even assuming that to be strictly true, it implies that a prisoner must spend all his leisure time 'associating,' whether he likes it or not, and is denied any right to privacy. In various con- tinental detention centres, where dangerously ab- normal offenders, murderers included, may be incarcerated for an indefinite period, 'association' is certainly as well provided for as it is at Blundeston. But it is also recognised that an inmate's cell is the only place he can call his own—his symbol of a home to be proud of. For that reason, cells are left unlocked during the day, and inmates are free to return to them outside of working hours, if they prefer to do so. What is more, they are encouraged to furnish and decorate their cells to suit their own tastes. For instance, at the detention centre in Groningen (Holland), which I visited some Years ago, I met one man who had a small aquarium in his cell; another man, a ruurderer, was building himself a canoe; a third had erected a toy electric". railway that he enjoyed playing With by the hour. He was an aggressive pedophiliac.

If imprisonment is to be truly non-punitive, then everything possible must be done to preserve a captive's human dignity and gratify his lawful desires and aspirations. Paradoxically, what has been found to be possible aids rather than en- dangers security, because it lowers tensions; and this includes, notably, opportunity for hetero- sexual intercourse. The so-called conjugal visit is permitted in penal establishments throughout Latin America, and in several prisons elsewhere. At Ixtapalapa, for example, a modern peniten- tiary outside Mexico City, every inmate is• entitled to a conjugal visit once a week from either his wife or from another woman of his Choice, provided he registers her name and Photograph with the administration at the time of his admission. A suite of rooms is provided for these visits in a building accessible from both within and without the main prison, and each visit lasts for three hours.

One doubts if there could be any objection to granting a married prisoner in this country a similar degree of heterosexual freedom, except cri punitive grounds. To say this is not neces- sarily to argue that there should be an end to Punishment as a part of penal policy and prac- tice. But the point is that if we claiM the right to lock people up for exceptionally long periods simply because they are too dangerous to be at large, we have a corresponding obligation to create for them, regardless of the cost in money or of affront to conventional prejudices, a new kind of genuinely non-punitive imprisonment.

Shaw once said that in dealing with incurably dangerous criminals the choice lay between killing and 'caging' them, and he suggested that euthanasia might be the more civilised way. One of his less responsible suggestions, no doubt; but, just the same, one would like to feel certain that 'caging' was something radically different from what he understood it to be.