There is no proof anywhere in the world that making prison a terrible experience helps to reduce crime, the United Kingdom’s Commissioner for Correctional Services Martin Narey said on Tuesday.
”I don’t apologise for not treating prisoners badly. It’s not about being soft, it’s about protecting the public,” he said in Pretoria during a four-day visit to South Africa.
”There is no point in making prison unnecessary punitive… The deprivation of their liberty is their punishment.”
In prison a constructive effort must be made to prevent convicts from re-offending once they were released from prison, Narey said. Across the world prisons paid little attention to this, while only concentrating on containment.
Education, especially basic skills training, was the most important part of such an effort.
About two-thirds of the prison population in England and Wales had such low levels of literacy and numeracy that they were unemployable, he said.
”If you take someone into prison without the ability to read and write and you release him without that ability, what other choice does he have to return to crime?”
According to Narey, offenders who had a job and somewhere to live once they were released from prison were half as likely than others to commit crime again.
In over 20 years in the prison service he had met very few inmates who were not redeemable, the commissioner said.
”Many failed in life… many have been failed by society, by education or social services, and most of them by their parents.”
The overwhelming majority of the world’s prison population were deeply disadvantaged, he said.
Correctional service authorities had a moral obligation to try and reduce re-offending.
”We can’t let an accident of birth, or disadvantage condemn somebody for life to be socially excluded.”
Besides, this was to the benefit of the community. In the UK, the aim was to reduce re-offending by 10%. This would result in an estimated four percent reduction in crime. Overcrowding, which was a feature of prisons even in many developed countries, could not be used as an excuse.
”It gives us even more reason to try and do something positive.”
But Narey added that overcrowding was indecent.
”If you house prisoners in overcrowded conditions, how can you expect staff to treat them as individuals?”
It was crucial to treat inmates decently and with dignity, he said. To achieve that, a change in staff attitude was most important.
According to Narey, sentencing authorities had to be convinced to seriously consider community punishments. Such a sentence was much more likely to be efficient if one could not achieve anything with a prisoner while inside an overcrowded jail.
Narey was quite certain the death penalty had no deterrent effect. Two bordering states of the United States, one with the death penalty and one without, had similar murder rates. Nearly 10% of the population of Texas, another state with capital
punishment, were in jail, he said. – Sapa