John Hayward Posted: 30 June 2010
Keywords: Crime & Justice,
Justice Secretary Ken Clarke today acknowledges that prison has too often proved 'a costly and ineffectual approach that fails to turn criminals into law-abiding citizens' and is expected to announce that he is critical of short sentences being imposed for relatively trivial offences. He wants to adopt a system of 'intelligent sentencing':
'This means prisons that are places of punishment, but also of education, hard work and change. It means rigorously enforced community sentences that punish offenders, but also get them off drugs and alcohol and into employment.'
For years, the Jubilee Centre has argued for more relational justice: 'In many cases it is doubtful whether imprisonment is the most suitable punishment. The majority of prisoners have committed offences involving no violence and are not obviously a threat to public safety. ... Imprisonment can lead to unmerited hardship for dependants, place great stress on family relationships, result in permanent job loss, and multiply contacts in the criminal world. Moral and pragmatic arguments suggest we should use prisons less.' (An eye for an eye? The morality of punishment, 1997)
Earlier this year we learned that reoffending by thousands of criminals serving short prison terms in England and Wales costs the taxpayer up to £10bn a year. Around 60,000 prisoners are jailed for less than 12 months each year, most spending as few as 45 days inside at a cost greater than that of a highly intensive two-year community order involving unpaid work and rehabilitation schemes. Moreover, as we have noted on the blog previously:
'Many of those caught up in the system are people whom the criminal justice process is ill-equipped to deal with: for instance, it is estimated that 47 per cent of male sentenced prisoners ran away from home as a child; 49 per cent were excluded from school; 72 per cent suffer from two or more mental disorders; 66 per cent used drugs in the previous year; and 67 per cent were unemployed prior to their imprisonment. Biblically, these are people who deserve compassion not vengence; for them retribution brings not justice but further injustice.'
Given that the population in custody in England and Wales reached a record high at the end of May of 85,500 (at a cost of £45,000 each†), intelligent sentencing is long overdue.
Prison is simply a school for criminals. It does not reform them. And it costs the rest of us a lot to maintain them. I note that there was no prison in Mosaic Law, just corporal and, in serious enough cases (never for theft), capital punishment. And you had to work to pay back what you had stolen, with damages.
God wiser than man, as usual.
Anton Garret 30 June 2010