About this blog
Justin Atkinson’s blog dedicated to finding better solutions for society than prison.
Justin is an investment professional who has been interested in the impact of prisons on society ever since reading Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit
Justin Atkinson’s blog dedicated to finding better solutions for society than prison.
Justin is an investment professional who has been interested in the impact of prisons on society ever since reading Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit
Hi Justin
interesting blog and good on you for standing up and making a noise about something you care about. We need more people like you!
I have quite a strong view on this subject, too, and I agree that building more and more prisons is not the answer.
My view is that prison – especially for younger offenders – achieves very little. I strongly believe that we need to get to the root cause of the reasons why people offend in the first place. I think a lot of it stems from a poor/non-existent upbringing with little or no direction or discipline. Largely it is the PARENTS to blame (not teachers, or the police, or government). My logic would suggest we should therefore go after the parents as well, however I suspect they might be a lost cause or absent anyway.
So how do we sort out problems with poorly brought up adolescents? My view is that these people, absent of any decent upbringing or understanding of basic values, are essentially feral. And to sort these people out they need to be ‘broken down’ and rebuilt as decent human beings, with an education and a sense of morals and value. Then we might be getting to the heart of the matter.
How do we do this? First we get out of Afghanistan and all other ill-thought out military campaigns. We then use the money saved and the subsequently idle troops to set up and run remote ‘training camps’ where the young offenders are sent to be broken down by harsh military discipline and rebuilt as decent human beings with a sense of discipline. Once the feral tendencies have been knocked out of them they then could be reintroduced to society and go back to school/college and learn how to do something useful/productive with their time.
To my mind that gets to the heart of the issue.
I would expand the scheme such that policemen are allowed to randomly search youths and anyone found with a knife, for instance, would immediately be deported to a ‘training camp’.
Harsh methods it might seem to us but we are decent people. Feral creatures do not understand the ‘nicey nicey’ approach.
That’s my rant off the chest for the evening!
RRG, thanks very much for being the first person to post a comment on this blog – and a very thought provoking comment it was too!
In case you missed it in the Sunday Times on 27 June 2010, you might enjoy fellow car enthusiast Jeremy Clarkson’s thoughts on our prison system:
“No prison for you – just lick my cesspit clean
Rather than spending lots of money sending criminals to prison, why not get them to do a few nasty odd jobs around the house instead?
For reasons that are not entirely clear, the question of prison reform seems to have cropped up again. Good. It’s very important we reform the system so that prisons become disgusting and unhinged. No electricity. No light. No heat.
And full to overflowing with inmates who are allowed to eat only what they can catch, or grow in window boxes. Window boxes that they must make from their own fingernail clippings. Unfortunately, other people think that prisons should be about rehabilitation rather than punishment.
That they should be places for quiet reflection, whale song and afternoon poetry by interesting lesbians. Dostoevsky thought this. And so, to a certain extent, did Winston Churchill.
There is even a charity that exists to campaign for the rights of inmates and their families. And I’m sorry, but isn’t that a bit weird? Because when you decide to help those less fortunate than yourself, there are so many worthy candidates. People with no homes, no arms and no chance. People with hideous diseases. People with their heads on back to front. And that’s before we get to the heart-melting question of children and animals. So why, I wonder, did someone wake up one day and think, “I know who I’ll help. The man who stole my bicycle”?
It actually happened, though, and as a result we now have the Prison Reform Trust, which apparently believes that a prison sentence should be used only for the likes of Peter Sutcliffe. And even then, that he should be treated with tenderness and a lot of crisp Egyptian cotton.
Well, let me make something quite plain to the lily-livered eco-hippie vicars who think this way. If you come round to my house this evening, asking if I’d like to buy the man who stole my television a gift, I shall say, “Yes. But only if I can shove it up his bottom.”
It gets worse. Only last week one of the peace’n’love brigade tried to claim that Britain’s judiciary was in love with custodial sentences. Really? Because recently a furore erupted over a case in which Cherie Booth QC told a man found guilty of breaking another man’s jaw that he would not go to prison because he was a religious person.
On that basis, the devout Osama Bin Laden can hand himself in, knowing Cherie will simply fine him 50 quid. And the Archbishop of Canterbury now has carte blanche to kill as many badgers, and children, as he likes.
Strangely, however, the Haight-Ashbury views of the trust are shared by the outgoing head of the prison service. Yup. Mr Mackay wants fewer people sent to jail as well. And so, too, do the Prison Governors Association and Napo, the probation officers’ union.
Such is the weight of opinion behind the call for more community-based punishments, I decided to do a spot of research. And I uncovered some interesting statistics. Last year 55,333 people were jailed for six months or less, at a cost of £350m. And apparently, as much as £300m could be saved if they were given community jobs to do instead. That’s a powerful argument, now that an ice cream costs £700.
And consider this. It seems that only 34% of criminals given community punishments reoffend, compared with 74% of those sent to a nice warm prison.
It’s easy to see why this might be so. At present, criminals tend to mix with other criminals. I, for instance, do not know any smugglers or murderers, and in all probability you don’t either. That’s because these people live in a society where their crimes are considered the norm. At my old school, the worse the misdemeanour, the greater the so-called “lad values” that encouraged us all to be more and more badly behaved. And I dare say it’s much the same story in Wandsworth nick.
Before you think I’ve gone all soft, consider this. If we take them out of their cells, dress them in orange jump suits, shackle their legs together and get them to hoe the municipal roundabouts in our local towns and villages, then they will no longer be among their own. They will be among us.
As a result, we will be able to tell them things. And after they’ve spent six months on a roundabout, being told things, quite loudly, they may start to understand that their life is not normal and there is nothing particularly brilliant about shoving a pint pot into another man’s face.
How brilliant is that? The hippie vicars are happy because the crims are out in the open air, getting fit and doing something useful. And we’re happy, too — especially if we are allowed to throw things at them as we drive by. Tomatoes. Eggs. Bricks. And so on.
I’m starting to like this community punishment idea very much. And already I’m thinking of jobs around my house that need doing. Painting. Decorating. Licking the cesspit clean. Think. The offender would be able to see how a normal family lives and I would be allowed to call him names and hit him over the head with a stick.
Criminals could be made to retrieve shopping trolleys from Britain’s most disgusting canals. They could be made to perform dangerous stunts at theme parks with killer whales and lions. And put the cones out on motorways. Imagine Boy George being made to put his head up a cow’s bottom to see if its calf is the right way round while you call him names and pelt his backside with veg.
It gets better. Because if lags are made to pick up litter and weed central reservations, we’ll need fewer expensive prisons, it will save local authorities a fortune and, what’s more, the decent people currently employed by councils to do menial jobs would become free to earn a proper living in the private sector — inventing wireless routers that work, for example.
I can see now that my views on prison have always been naive. And I can see why prison officers are so in favour of community punishment instead. Because, to put it simply, everyone wins.”
Thankfully it seems that another car enthusiast, Justice Minister Ken Clarke, also shares broadly similar views with Jeremy Clarkson on the need for a rehabilitation revolution.
I think your rehabilitation/boot camp idea ought to be a part of this revolution (particularly for more intransigent offenders) so we should spread the word.