Prisons and prisons-of-the-mind – how the biggest barrier to prisons reform is public opinion

28th October 2024

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

– from London by William Blake

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Over at Prospect I have done an article on the recent announcement about a review into prison sentencing.

Please click and read it here.

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This post will develop the point which was implicit in the Prospect article: the role of public opinion and of public (lack of) thinking in prisons (lack of) policy.

There are, of course, mental prisons as well as physical prisons – the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ described by William Blake.

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These prisons-of-the-mind are at least as difficult to break out of than any high-security prison.

The mental prisons exist on a macro scale – in terms of political and media discourse – as well as in personal habits of thought.

And the one particular notion that has the most purchase in prisons (lack of) policy is that a prison sentence for a term of years is a starting point for a non-trivial offence, and that any deviation from this norm must be wrong.

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Stating this notion critically does not mean that the opposite is true: that imprisonment is inherently wrong.

Indeed, there are certain exceptional crimes for which long sentences – even life tariffs – are justifiable.

But in the main, it is difficult to see what good a long prison sentence does.

Even the standard justification that it takes a person off the streets is not convincing in the grand scheme, as of the 80,000 inmates currently in prison only about 80 have whole life tariffs. At some point – every day, every week – many are being released back on to the streets to replace the ones taken off.

As has often been said, prison is an expensive way of making people who do bad things more likely to do bad things.

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Here – if you can forgive me – I would like to quote an introduction I did for a post some time ago at the Financial Times:

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Here is a thought-experiment: imagine that you have asked some mischievous demon to conceive the most counter-productive way of dealing with crime. What fiendish scheme would this diabolic agent devise?

“The demon could suggest a system where offenders are kept together with more serious and experienced criminals for months or years, and so can learn from them; where the offender is taken away from any gainful employment and social support or family network; where the offender is put in places where drugs and brutality are rife; where the infliction of a penalty can make the offender more, and not less, likely to re-offend; and where all this is done at extraordinary expense for the taxpayer.

“A system, in other words, very much like the prison system we now have in England and Wales, as well as in many other jurisdictions.”

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In essence, if prisons did not exist as a form of punishment, few would invent it.

And in the past, prisons – or gaols – were places where people were kept pending some ultimate outcome, such as awaiting trial or sentence in a criminal matter or the discharge of a debt in a civil matter.

Prisons were usually not, in and of themselves, the punishment, but a means to an end.

Of course, in criminal matters, those ends were once rather violent, either in a corporal or a capital sense, or otherwise life-changing, such as transportation.

And imprisonment is certainly preferable to those sorts of barbarity or extreme sanctions.

But is it the best starting point now?

For many, the deterrence is detection and conviction, not imprisonment.

For others – up to about 80,000 – the sentence did not create a deterrent effect.

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One day perhaps – although such predictions can be quite wrong – people will consider routine lengthy imprisonment with the same bewilderment that we today treat chattel slavery or witch trials. As something which only makes (a kind of) sense in a different mental universe, a different mentalité.

One day perhaps people will also think the same about our current drugs policy – the failed ‘war on drugs’ – which is closely connected with many aspects of our criminal justice system.

Perhaps.

But in the meantime, the appointment of a well-regarded former justice secretary to this timely review into sentencing is a Good Thing.

It may even signal to a broader possible escape from this prison-of-the-mind.

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10 thoughts on “Prisons and prisons-of-the-mind – how the biggest barrier to prisons reform is public opinion”

  1. When Blake and his contemporaries, strikingly David Hume, raged against ‘mind forged manacles’ or similar ‘superstition’ often in Hume they were generally raging against aspects of organised religion.

    I’d never downplay the way traces of religious mindsets can persist long after religion has ceased to play any real role in people’s daily lives. In this case, retribution. So many elements of religious thought carried over into state formation; both institutions interested in enforcing rules that often they’re hiding in plain sight. I’m sure that’s why, for example, in the US, conservative religion is so closely linked to harsh sentencing.

    Which is not to disagree with you in the slightest, just to suggest the roots of the intransigence of public opinion when it comes to harsh sentencing (and those roots are many and tangled) may sometimes go into places where we wouldn’t necessarily expect. If we want to challenge public opinion on this, maybe Blake and co. have more to say than we realise.

    I write as a practising believer .. just one who doesn’t like much of the cultural baggage my religion carries, and who has a lot of time for Blake.

  2. The tabloid press bears a heavy responsibility for creating and amplifying the public demand for serious crime ever longer sentences.

    This is relatively recent. In the 60s there was no great public demand for increasingly long sentences. This accelerated during the Thatcher and Major governments with the mantra “prison works”.

    The recent adverse reaction to early prisoner releases shows how strong this opinion is. It was as if these prisoners were otherwise never going to be released, rather than being released, on licence, after 40% instead of 50% of their sentence. The level of public ignorance about sentencing policy is staggering, considering how concerned people are about it.

  3. In advance, if my thoughts are no more than an assembly of truisms – apologies. They seem pertinent to me.

    I have long thought there is a series of elements to Justice, that all require equal attention and resource, and all must be delivered swiftly:
    Detection – Conviction – Punishment – Rehabilitation

    Each element demands thought and wisdom, or time and money are wasted, and the process is broken.

    We are slowly struggling to a system of fiscal management where the Bank of England and OBR are properly de-politicising that sphere of government. The long outstanding equivalence in the legal/judicial world is for politicians to stop sticking in their noses where their ignorance leads. The role of politicians is oversight, measurement, calibration and recruitment of the professionals who deliver the process of detection, conviction, punishment and rehabilitation.

    It is also true that the stages in the process do not / need not sit in perfect linear sequence, and that many peripheral services should be involved in the process – not least of which are adult education and drug rehabilitation.

    When the process fails, and people re-offend, it is not necessarily the failure of the process.

    We have the worst of all worlds at present. A system overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. Detection is slow, ‘justice’ is even slower. The punishment is excessively long warehousing, and there is little if any rehabilitation.

  4. Nothing to disagree with there. Long prison sentences will only work if meaningful rehabilitation is offered and taken up by the offender. Until then we are only warehousing these people at very great expense.

  5. Hopefully, attitudes will change in the future.
    In Once and future sins (https://aeon.co/essays/what-will-our-descendants-judge-as-our-greatest-sin), Steven Cave and Stephan Klein pose the question: what is it that our great-grandchildren will condemn us for? Their suggestions include:

    4. Healing criminals. At the moment, we lock up extraordinarily large numbers of people. In the US alone, two million humans are in prison, ruining not only their lives, but also making their dependents and communities suffer too. But in 100 years, no one will believe we have an absolutely free will and therefore that anyone chooses to be a criminal. Indeed, there is evidence that we lock up those who are least responsible for their decisions – those with the least capacity for self-control, those who suffer from addictions, or who are mentally ill. In the UK, for example, more than 70 per cent of those in prison have two or more mental-health disorders; in the US, more than three times as many people with serious mental illnesses are in prisons than are in hospitals.

    We will not find it easy to decide whom to treat, how radically and when; nor to extend understanding and sympathy to those who have committed the worst of crimes. But our great-grandchildren will be appalled at how we locked up millions of people when we should instead have been helping them.

  6. Experiment shows that being detected and convicted is the main deterrent against criminal action. But that is surely because merely being detected and convicted includes a very costly sanction, a criminal record. Your possibilities in life are greatly reduced with a criminal record. Many people lose their jobs, their entire professions. Meanwhile, in the non-criminal area, we see that speeding tickets are considered my many the cost of living life as you wish to live it, or the cost of doing business. But you get to that point that the next one will see you disqualified, then you may become careful.

    This is not an argument for long sentences – I disagree with long sentences for all but the dangerous and the undeterrable. But it is an argument that a conviction needs to be accompanied by a sufficiently painful sanction, or people will no longer care about avoiding it.

  7. Politicians (and the media) seek advantage by appealing to people’s desires for revenge, for punishment, and to ‘other’ lawbreakers. Those are not people’s most kind desires.

    There is not a more sensible explanation of current attitudes toward sentencing. These sentences are not effective for those incarcerated, and are not cost effective for society.

    Will the involvement of David Gauke in a fresh review be sufficient defence against the right wing press and Tory Party? Only time will tell.

  8. I suspect it may be safe to sum up public attitude to “prison sentences” as ‘Out of sight. Out of mind’?

    And the longer out of sight, the further out of mind, with little thought to what happens in between ‘out of sight’ and ‘back in sight’?

  9. The mad, the sad, the bad and folk just like you and I.

    The more I thought about it the more difficult the problem seems.

    The system does seem a bit ‘one size fits all’.

    A psychiatrist friend feels a nice safe warm home with high walls, barred windows and a stout door would help many of the mad and sad.

    For the battered wife who killed her husband – let her walk free (and let husbands worry a bit). For the illiterate no hoper we locate the directors of education and of social services who let them down – and cancel their jobs.

    Young males seem a problem. We must prevent prison becoming their university. Offer something better with compulsory training.

    Plans of the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ kind don’t seem to work, so for ordinary crimes keep to shortish sentences. Seems like a cop-out but we have nothing better. Reserve long/infinite sentences for the really bad.

    1. Though his Toniness was “tough on crime and the causes of crime” he was always keen on the first anchor on the second. It seems to me that to concentrate on major drivers of crime such as drugs, mental health and destitution should be the first priority to stop entry into the system in the first place.

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