SOCIETY TODAY

Crime and consequences

Not a reform too soon

lain Scarlet

Forgive my mentioning it but the English are a puritanical and punitive people (as exemplified by the Haiisham posturings during the Profumo debacle and personified in Mr Justice Melford Stevenson who also knows a great deal about human artificial insemination — though God help future generations if he ever gets on to the selection committee for donors); we are not, however, a cruel people.

We are inclined to savour in anticipation that for which we have no stomach in actual practice. Thus the eternal crime-and-punishment debate is unfailingly conducted in a highly emotional atmosphere which is at one and the same time both unreal and rational. At any given moment, for instance, it's Probable that the great majority would vote for the reintroduction of capital and corporal punishments; but it's equally probable that an even greater majority, its self-righteous anger cooled by time, would find in each individual case some real objection to the sentence being carried out.

Hence, I suspect, our collective attachment to that good old compromise stand-by: imprisonment. It satisfies our need to punish while at the same time acting as a sort of long-stop for our doubts and consciences, In other words, it's not Irrevocable.

For this sop alone we are prepared to tolerate a system which is expensive (£8 per prisoner per day is the going rate), and inefficient to the point of acting as an encouragement rather than as a deterrent to crime: pro rata to our prison Population we have more recidivists than any other nation in the Western world.

Now none of this is to say that there isn't a valid role for prisons in our society. What it is to suggest, however, is that we have not yet managed to sort out what that role is in the present day and age. It was not always so. At the beginning of the last century when there were 200 capital offences on the statute book and transportation was in full swing, everybody knew that our prisons were "a sort of waiting room before transportation to the New World or the next." Over the next six or seven decades, however, things changed. Hard bed, hard labour and hard fare — not to mention solitary confinement and the rule of silence—had become the order of the day; but already a code of practice was being developed. Though the protection of society was the primary aim, 'moral regeneration' was running a close second; and it was recommended that "anything that inflicts unnecessary pain or humiliation should be abolished."

It was about this time that the divergence of views began to show.

The public held to the view that imprisonment was for punishment; the public servants in charge of the prisons wanted to believe in the philosophy that later became Rule One of the Prison Regulations, "that the purpose . . . shall be to establish in the convicted prisoner the will to lead a good and useful life. . . ."

This same dichotomy still exists. The public wants to punish pure and simple. The penal authorities, if for no other reason than to maintain their self-respect, want to try and fit prisoners to return to society, and to return as good citizens.

Both sides are batting on a sticky wicket. The merest hint of unsavoury conditions in our prisons (remember the 1968 scandal concerning the Borstal wing at Wormwood Scrubs?) and the public are up in arms. But let the authorities show a constructively humane attitude (remember when a prison official took Miss Myra Hindley for a short walk outside the confines of Holloway?) and the public wails about wanting to be 'protected'.

"The conflict can be summed up quite easily," a prison governor said recently. "The public doesn't believe people can be adequately punished while they're still at liberty. We in the service, on the other hand, know damn well that prisoners cannot be trained for freedom in conditions of captivity."

To which there appears to be no complete answer. Yet there are means by which the institutional penal system might be improved and its population considerably reduced without the public being put at any great risk; and indeed, without our even having to undertake the awesome task of retraining those niggers in the woodpile, the magistrates and judges.

The idea is quite simple and it has been tried out — with considerable success — in various American states.

First they established an integrated Correctional Board which was responsible for every aspect of dealing with convicted offenders from imprisonment to probation. Then, when they received a prisoner from the courts they put him through a process of proper .assessment which, while taking into account the gravity of his offence, made a second decision as to whether he really needed to be contained in an institution at all. In many cases of course the element of danger left them little choice but to carry out the court's orders; but in many others they found good reasons for granting early release on licence to a probation officer or other social worker.

And they encouraged the probation officers to accept the responsibility by making over to the probation service such sums of money as would be saved by the man's early release.

All the reports so far to hand suggest three welcome results. The pressure on prison space and staff was considerably reduced. The probation service was able to pay its officers far better and thus recruit better people. And the reconviction rate of offenders went down with a resounding thump.

Now God knows we could do with some results of a like kind over here. At the moment we're spending (or perhaps I should say throwing down the drain) rather more than E100 million a year on keeping people in prison, and as much— probably more, in fact — on keeping their dependants outside.

And all that on a system which, while it satisfies our puritanical tendencies and punitive fantasies, doesn't actually work.

lain Scarlet, a writer specialising in crime and delinquency, conducts a weekly programme on these topics for Radio London