BRING BACK BOTANY BAY

Parliament should debate penal colonies not hanging as a solution to prison

overcrowding, writes Paul Barker

NOT much is amusing about this country's penal system. But the tale of Seamus O'Neill is. He was due to appear at Marlborough Street magistrates court on a charge of attempted theft. It was the third time in two months that he had been expected in the dock. He was in the prison system somewhere — probably in one of the police cells, up and down England, being used for overspill from the jails of London. But, in those two months, no one could find him. The stipendiary magistrate dismissed the case, unheard. I hope they have by now been able to find O'Neill to tell him the good news.

It was revealing of how inured we are to the hopelessness of the system that this incident caused no comment whatsoever. A novel about the prisons of England and Scotland would need to be called Los/ Souls, on the analogy of Gogol's master- piece.

Like serfdom then, our prisons are a disgrace to a civilised nation. Against this background, it is doubly depressing to contemplate the imminent prospect of the House of Commons voting yet again on whether to bring back capital punishment. The English today seem as obsessed by hanging as Thomas Hardy ever was. It is a grim form of escapism: nothing to do with the real problem of crime and punishment.

Murder, fortunately, remains rare in Britain, hanging or no hanging. Murder rates (as opposed to general crime rates) seem to tie in with a nation's culture, rather than with the existence of the death penalty. Certainly, its gruesome re- introduction in the United States has done nothing to diminish the fact that 'violence is as American as cherry pie', in the words of the Black Power activist, Rap Brown.

The British pattern of crime is itself gradually becoming more violent. The prison system helps this changeover. It is the biggest machine for producing and perpetuating crime ever seen in this coun- try. We have the highest prison population — both in absolute numbers, and relative to population — of any EEC country. We have broken the 50,000 barrier. In terms of numbers imprisoned per 100,000 popula- tion, no one in the EEC can touch us.

In recent political history we have never had a Home Secretary prepared to nail his reputation to the mast of prison reform. In the 19th century it was what social refor- mers took as one of their main touch- stones. Latterly it has been neglected — or worse. Roy Jenkins is usually cited as our most humane, most reformist Home Secretary since the second world war. But prison reform was not on even his agenda.

Today the imprisonment machine con- tinues to accelerate. More and more of the people in prison are awaiting trial (about one in five now). And sentences are lengthening. In 1986, according to the latest Criminal Statistics, a robber could expect to get a Crown Court sentence that was four months longer than in 1985. This drift upwards in sentencing helps tilt the whole system further towards chaos. On the Home Office's own projections the prison population will outrun the space available for years yet. And I suspect that these projections are too optimistic.

Meanwhile, supposedly temporary mea- sures like army camps or police cells cannot staunch the overcrowding. The Chief Inspector of Prisons spelled out, in one of his annual reports, what this means:

If any reader unfamiliar with the prison system finds it difficult to picture the squalor in which many inmates• of local prisons are expected to spend their sentence, let himself imagine finding himself obliged to stay in a hotel so overbooked that he has to share a room with two strangers. The room itself is so cramped that ... if he wants to walk up and down, the other occupants must first lie on their beds. . . . The hotel management insists that guests remain in their rooms for all but an hour or so a day, and must take their meals there.

Because there is no lavatory, only a bucket, prisoners wrap their shit in bits of paper, or in old socks, and throw it out of the window. The windows may then be covered with wire mesh. The stink in the cells then gets worse. The men so closely packed in have seldom had a recent bath. The Chief Inspector, in his latest report last month, said that things were still getting worse for prisoners. The Home Office's only answer is to build more jails. Prisons are the fastest- growing part of the law and order budget. It is a kind of madness. The turnkeys still rule in our prisons, despite Douglas Hurd's attempts to dislodge their grip. The squalor — both moral and physical — is such that John Gay would have seen it as perfect material for a new Beggar's Opera. But there is a new circle of hell that he didn't foresee. Prisons have become forcing houses for Aids. The Home Office now has to decide whether to issue free condoms and free syringes. Two thirds of the men and women in custody committed crimes that involved neither violence nor sex. Most are thieves or burglars. A quarter of the sentenced prisoners are under 21. Over a third are serving sentences of 18 months or less. But with the succession of warder troubles, any would-be rehabilitation has been scrapped. This may always have been a will o' the wisp. But with its disappearance has gone any serious stab at even being humane. We are letting men (and an increasing number of women) rot. On their release, Aids is not the only contagion they bring. We are making criminals harder, more deter- mined.

What is to be done? Mrs Thatcher has shown how she can conduct a blitz on whole areas of policy: industry, unions, education. So far, prisons have been left to the incremental, bureaucratic approach. We need more prisons (the theory is): perhaps better designed; perhaps built faster. But here, more means worse.

The blitz we need is a mass closure of prisons. Some men, of course, are highly dangerous: the paranoid murderers and rapists, the armed robbers, the banditti of organised crime. But such villains are only a tiny percentage of those in jail.

Spain helps keep its numbers down by amnesties. They have never caught on in this country. But there is one local penal tradition we ought now to exhume. The 200th anniversary of the landings at Botany Bay gives the right clue. New South Wales was — as even Robert Hughes acknow- ledges in The Fatal Shore — the most successful penal experiment in history. We must find a way to bring penal settlements back. The Victorian system of closed pris- ons — invented specifically to replace such settlements — has not only failed, it has reached its reductio ad absurdum. It is now as bad as any Dickensian set of hulks.

Even in the wastes of the Home Office, to be fair, the junior minister, John Patten, does at least argue in such historical terms about the end of the prison era.

Of course, there are open prisons. Some come quite close to the idea of a settle- ment. At Hollesley Bay Colony, for exam- ple, in East Anglia, Suffolk Punch horses are raised on a thousand acre farm. In the United States, some offenders are taken on pioneer-type treks through the Rockies. The Outward Bound schemes are a power- ful model everywhere. Such initiatives show that there is some acceptance of the notion that it can be a good thing to break the links between an offender and his normal background. But generally they do not last long enough.

We are not talking about the Gulag, where the intention was to work men to death in appalling conditions. The essence of the Australian experiment was that, at its best, men were given an approximation of freedom. They had a real hope of getting back on the right track. With its 'New Generation' prisons, the Home Office thinks it can create jails which are less jail-like; more like life on the outside. I approve any effort to be more humane. But I am pretty sure this is a misplaced hope.

The days of Empire and Botany Bay are over. So where could new settlements be? In fact, we have room for them here. Hundreds of acres of landscape are far emptier now than they were when that first landfall was made in Australia. I am thinking especially of the Scottish High- lands and islands.

It would be a far better use for barren land to let men try to make a living out ofit again than to plant grant-aided conifers on it. Read John Prebble's The Highland Clearances and you will be reminded that these semi-desert landscapes were home to men, before the Cheviot sheep replaced them.

Well, now, the people could come back. The islands and Highlands could be set- tled, as New South Wales was, by men (and women) found guilty of small crimes. They could be joined, if they wished, by their families. Settlements might break, as they did in Australia, the cycle of re- offending. They would be following the path which assorted hippies and back-to- the-landers have led in recent years in Wester Ross.

Simple housing could be built, partly with the men's own labour. Land should be bought compulsorily (at market price) if landlords would not part. Each settler would get a living wage. Any surplus, beyond that, which he made from trading or fishing or agriculture would come to him as a lump sum at the end of his sentence. There would be grants for equipment or animals or seed, and classes for training. No one would be sent who did not want to go. I don't think there would be any shortage of volunteers to leave prison. The worst old lags — namely, members of the Prison Officers' Association — might be the most reluctant. If so, a new kind of staff could be recruited. How to break the union grip of the POA on the way prisons are run is one of the main problems facing any reforming minister.

The history of open prisons shows that men are less inclined to 'run' than you might think. With women, this is even more true. But if anyone did, or was thought likely to, electronic tagging could make sure they didn't do it again till they got a formal exeat — when they could stay in the settlement, or leave, as they chose.

Unlike in prison, there would be no nagging uncertainty here about parole or remission. There wouldn't be any. This would be the trade-off for greater liberty. It would give the regime a greater chance to work.

In the mid 19th century, the Highland Emigration Society helped tenants escape the heartlessness of their landlords. Today we could start to reverse that example of the underside of Victorian values. Some of the landlords, of course, are still the same.

Better, surely, for convicted men to have a hard life with some hope, rather than the fetid swamp of our jails. Better for the rest of us, too. Instead of a social poison in our veins, we might get a draught of healthy Highlands initiative.

Paul Barker is Social Policy Editor of the Sunday Telegraph.