Short, sharp shocks
Leo Abse
Crime belongs to the workers: the perpetrators are almost invariably members of the proletariat and so are the most outraged of victims. By preaching uncomPromising harshness to delinquents, votes Inay therefore be gained from every section of the community. The Tory representatives at Blackpool, genteel upholders of law and order, anxious to protect 'heir society of poverty, rights and Privilege from rough working-class delinquents, respond with enthusiasm to the 120tio11 of wars being waged against crime. But so do the respectable tenants on the teuuncil house estates; since the offences of heft, burglary and vandalism which make !IP the bulk of our crime figures hit working'elass people the hardest. They, like Pensioners and one-parent families, are "C least likely to have insurance policies e_ushioning them against theft; and It is ;urking-class estates which bear the brunt the vandalism of disaffected youth. h, The warriors against crime, therefore, „ctve the people with them: and since PvuPulism, Thatcher or Benn style, is the L?g.ue, the brave politicians respond. Lord allsham, the Lord Chancellor, may be :ssured that his incitement last week to gistrates to hit out against young thugs stIll be acted upon, and the harder sand ranger the proposed 'short sharp shocks !he greater will be the applause Whitelaw will gain. It Will of course do no good. The inci dence of theft by juveniles and young adults will not decline and those who graduate from Whitelaw's new glass-house will be no less likely to repeat their offences than those who pass through the regime governing our present detention centres. This uncomfortable fact cannot be blotted out. The case for tougher detention centres may be based upon the claim that it is the duty of politicians to provide a catharsis for those who cannot tolerate the frustration of jail: the actual facts, however, cannot rationally be challenged. The history of the detention centres since they were first established by a Labour government in the Criminal Justice Act of 1948 provides ample corroboration. The original intention of that Act, as now of our Home Secretary, was that the detention centres should be primarily punitive and deterrent; from the earliest discussions, they acquired the label of administering 'Short sharp shock' treatment. But the intention could not be sustained. Although to this day detention centres remain very strict, within a few years after the establishment of the first centre the Prison Commissioners' report revealed that the detention centre staff, to their credit, had found it impossible to sustain a purely negative approach to their young charges. Cleanliness, tidiness, physical exercise, tough routines were not enough: it was shyly acknowledged that elements had , been introduced into the regime which were intended to elevate punishment into positive intensive training.
By 1970 a subcommittee of the Home Secretary's Advisory Council on the Penal System, of which I was a member, impatient of the ambivalences within the regimes and aware of the views of the staff, provided a comprehensive report reviewing and reappraising the function of detention centre training. The report argued that the punitive function of detention in a detention centre should be regarded as fulfilled by the deprivation of an offender's liberty. From this premise the report went on to recommend that positive training, particularly of an educational nature, should be formally incorporated in the approach of detention centres. These recommendations were accepted in principle by the government and resources were made available to fulfil the educational recommendations. With the raising of school leaving age to 16, all junior detention centres now provide full time education for boys who were still at school when they were sentenced; and, throughout, there are 'personal officer' schemes operating, seeking to establish a stable relationship between staff officer and reluctant lads whose early lives have almost always been loveless shambles. The challenge, though often impossible to meet, gives the possibility to the staff of feeling they are doing a worthwhile job.
Now, however, the Home Secretary complains that the original concept of the detention centre has been diluted. We arc asked to diminish ourselves by replying to the brutalised in their own language. The purpose of the initial two experimental centres is to sustain an unremittingly tough approach. Experience has shown that, to obtain the relentless staff prepared to undertake this task, the Prison Department will have to make a special effort to recruit a collection of psychopaths and sadists: they will doubtless succeed in obtaining the staff but the ashamed Home Office officials well know the experiment is doomed to failure. Their own research workers. having recently studied differences between treatment oriented and authoritarian regimes, reported that there is no significant difference in their reconviction rates. The results of this study have been replicated throughout the prison and borstal system. The House of Commons Expenditure Committee, facing the facts and aware of the research, last September not surprisingly concluded: 'There is no evidence that it [a severe detention centre regime] would have any greater deterrent or reformative effect.'
Faced with the evidence upon which such a conclusion was reached, the Government now disavows the intention of applying short sharp shocks to young offenders across the board, arguing that they would be appropriate only for certain selected offenders. Yet tie history of detention centres demonstrates the difficulties involved in restricting the use of such sentences to those for whom they are intended. While detention centres were originally intended for a small minority of offenders, from their inception there was uncertainty about who this small minority should be; as a result their introduction was followed by considerable variations in sentencing. In consequence, even more young offenders began to find their way into detention centres and this trend was officially recognised in the 1961 Criminal Justice Act. By the time of the Advisory Council's report in 1970 this wide eligibility was seen as acceptable, and only the mentally and physically handicapped were considered ineligible. In the light of this history no-one with experience of the courts can believe the use of short sharp shocks will be restricted to a carefully selected minority: these tough detention centres will spawn and undermine the therapeutic philosophy now at least par tially pervading our custodial institutions for the young.
There is unhappily no easy answer to juvenile delinquency. Almost all those brought continuously before the courts are the children of parents who have failed them; their records monotonously record the appalling disarray of their upbringing. Divorced Uncaring parents, brutal stepfathers, illegitimacy, oscillation between a life in a problem family and a local authority instiiution, are all the customary curses that have fallen upon the refractory young. It may be the tangled skeins within which they have been ensnared can never be unravelled: but our anger at our own helplessness should not make us lash out at them. Their anti-social behaviour springs from the hostility they have endured in their young lives: if in these glasshouses we corroborate society's hostility towards them, they will certainly become the most embittered graduates of our penal system and, on release, act accordingly.
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