Prisons Without Walls
7p00 little attention has so far been paid to the report -I- of the Departmental Committee on Persistent Offen- ders issued a week ago, for what is recommended in it is
the beginning of a mild revolution in our treatment of crime. We have no reason for any complacency about our prison system as it exists to-day. Whether it compares favourably with the systems of other countries, as in many respects it does, is beside the point. What matters is whether it compares favourably with the system as it might be, and on that the Departmental Committee's report is uncompromising. In language of studied restraint it describes the present method of dealing with persistent offenders simply as "unsatisfactory," but the whole trend of the report goes to confirm what was generally known already, that the effect of prison life in most cases is not merely not remedial and reformative but actually bad, in that it dulls a prisoner's faculties, and so far from preparing him for r.ormal employment on discharge definitely disables him for it. Hence the altogether sound and constructive demand for treatment that shall be primarily remedial rather than primarily punitive and based on a considera- tion of the offender more than of the offence. As a practical measure the Committee proposes a system of detention of from two to four years for offenders who are not confirmed criminals, and prolonged detention of anything from five to ten years (subject to an earlier release on licence) for habitual offenders who have already served three or more terms of imprisonment. The short-term detention, which is much the more important of the two, would mean the extension to persons over twenty-one of the Borstal treatment available at present only for prisoners under that age.
The purpose of the prison system of this country is two-fold, to punish the wrongdoer and to protect the public, both by deterring the wrongdoer from repeating his offence and by robbing him, for a period at any rate, of the means of repeating it if he has the inclination. What it does not, in most cases, eliminate is the inclination. That is its real condemnation. The system is in most respects humane, and many wise ameliorations have been introduced in recent years. But by the nature of things prison life must be demoralising. Idleness for active men is demoralising always, and though prisoners are not idle they are employed almost wholly on unsuitable and unsatisfying work, calculated to diminish in the individual both the capacity and the desire to do better work when he returns to ordinary life. Normal prison employment, apart from the maintenance and repair of the prison buildings themselves, rarely ranges beyond the making and repair of mail-bags, the making of brushes and mats for Government offices or the weaving of cloth on obsolete handlooms, all calculated to deaden a compet- ent man's faculties rather than develop them.
Criminals, of course, cannot be reduced to a single type, and scientists may argue indefinitely about the parts that heredity and environment respectively play in their evolution. Some quite obviously have become criminals in defiance of heredity and environment alike, and to exculpate the criminal by declaring that he is simply what society has made him is to subordinate plain facts to a dogma. Society has much to answer for, and many prisoners have been more sinned against than sinning, but there is a substantial residue of whom nothing can be said but that a life of crime has appealed to them for one reason or another, and they have fallen into it. As their histories and their motives differ so the treatment accorded them must differ. A small minority
ought to be kept under prolonged custody as a protection to society. That is clearly true of men convicted re- peatedly for sexual offences, where the presumption is that they will commit them again unless deprived of the opportunity. Other apparently incorrigible offenders, (a man of eighty-three was given six months last Tuesday after a life of crime) may fitly be subjected for a pro- longed period to a form of detention which while it is less distasteful than prison is certainly not liberty.
The reforms proposed will need legislation, and the legislation ought to be forthcoming, in spite of the pressure on the time of Parliament. No great financial outlay is required, though it, no doubt, costs more to train a man for an ordinary trade for which there is reason to believe him fitted than simply to set him sewing mail-bags for eight or ten hours a day. Prison, already, for youths under twenty-one is something very different from the gaol life of literature, or even of the popular conception. In Nottinghamshire to-day, for example, convicted prisoners are, under the Borstal system, living in huts, lightly guarded, while they are building the prison that is subsequently to house them and their successors. The proposal is that this principle be extended to prisoners of over twenty-one, particularly to those between that age and thirty. Experienced officials in the Departmental Committee do not shrink at all from the idea of prisons without walls, whether in the form of camps under canvas, or of movable huts, which might be transported from place to place, where some appropriate piece of work offered itself. Agricul• tural work is contemplated for men with any experience of, or aptitude for, it. The knowledge that attempts to escape would mean transfer to the old-type prison, with its locked doors and barred windows, would sufficiently discourage such attempts.
A good deal of this, of course, is of the nature of the experimental, and it is an experiment that should be made gradually, but with the fixed intention of carrying it further if the results justify such extension. The prison accommodation of the country is in excess of the need, and it would be easy in the first instance to set aside one or two suitable establishments for detention prisoners. In those centres, in addition to the definite training by which the State would add to a convicted man's potential value instead of diminishing it, there would be a communal life unknown to the ordinary penal establishment, including meals in common, organized recreation, and an extensive application of the system of lectures and visits which is beginning to be introduced into ordinary prisons to-day. Certain objections no doubt present themselves. Prison life might be made too easy, but deprivation of liberty is a pretty severe punishment in itself. And the difficulty of the com- petition of prison labour (very small in volume relatively) could easily be got over in consultation with the trade unions.
Altogether, the new proposals are a hopeful sign. Even when legislation to give effect to them has been passed, as it should be, there is likely to be no very rapid move- ment in the new direction. Only limited detention accommodation will be available, for some time at any rate, and in any case the Courts concerned (of Assize and Quarter Sessions) are likely to take up the new idea slowly. The old system and the new will therefore be in operation side by side and their respective merits can be adequately studied. Ultimately a detention-sentence may be made mandatory on the Court instead Of optional, but as yet that is far ahead.
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