Prisoners of a lack of conscience

Gaol, Jail, prison, nick, chokey, the stripey hole...call it what it you want but its over-use in Britain detracts hugely from the nation's traditional self-image as a land of tolerance and forebearance.

It's one of those hot-button issues which seems to unite the foaming-at-the-mouth, hang'em and flog'em types with apparently liberal minded folk who feel they've got something (usually property) to protect. It would appear – at least if the established media is to be believed – that British people seem to lose all rationale when it comes to to the sentencing and re-offending debate.

As of last Friday, the UK prison population stood at 86,407, of which 4,091 were women according to figures from the Ministry of Justice. This is one of the highest per capita prison populations in the western world.

Furthermore, this number continues to rise year-on-year despite re-offending rates remaining high and consistently so. That being the case, it's clear that prison doesn't work and probably does more to create a criminal underclass than centuries of poverty.

So if we are not incarcerating people with a view to their being rehabilitated, we are doing so to 'keep them off the streets' or in more liberal parlance, to prevent them being a danger or a nuisance to the rest of us. There is of course the sour motive of vindictiveness to consider but let's for a moment just focus on the greater good argument.

The need to lock up violent sociopaths is wholly understandable but the majority of the prison population just doesn't fall into that extreme category. In fact, as has been posited time and again in surveys, one is more likely to find a higher proportion of psychopaths working in the City of London than one might find in any prison in this green and pleasant land.

But when it comes to prisoners' rights, even the most seemingly liberal Guardian reading types seem to get all Old Testament when the subject is broached. Prisoners having the vote? You must be joking! Prison, it's like a holiday camp these days! And so on...

As a former prison visitor who has seen conditions in jails all over England, I can state with some authority that while prison in the early 21^st century is nowhere near as degrading an experience as it was even twenty years ago, the experience of incarceration is still among the most dehumanising that can be visited on the citizens of a supposedly evolved democracy.

Today, the papers reported on the findings of a suprise inspection of HMP Lincoln in August of this year. The Guardian reported that conditions at the grossly overcrowded Victorian city centre prison were so unsafe that prisoners are too frightened to leave their wings to go to work according to the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick.

The report found that "the prison was not safe … A third of prisoners told us they had been victimised by other prisoners. The number of reported fights and assaults was high and there were evident opportunities for bullying". 

"There was little attempt to investigate either individual incidents or patterns of violence. Prisoners who were too frightened to leave their wings to go to work but who refused to name the perpetrator were punished by being sent to the segregation unit," added the report.

“Half of prisoners at Lincoln are unemployed and will spend no more than three hours a day outside of their cell, while, despite new facilities, education and training is minimal. Inspectors even found a foreign national prisoner, who had been held nine years beyond the end of his sentence.” according to the Howard League for Penal Reform’s Director of Campaigns, Andrew Neilson,

Neilson tells us: “If you want an example of the terrible consequences of overcrowding in our prison system, you need look no further than Lincoln. The damning inspectorate report is among the worst we have seen.”

Well, the truth is that Lincoln is not Angola or Alcatraz, Lincoln is not exceptional; speaking from personal experience, I would say it is typical and representative of the prison estate.

Take Britain's largest prison, HMP Wandsworth in South London with 1,100 inmates; without doubt one of the filthiest and most hopeless places I have ever visited. Hardwick singled the prison out for its failures in terms of prisoner education, drug abuse and long periods of bang-up (being locked in one's cell).

Within the prison population's demographic breakdown we can see an ugly mirror held up to the inequity of mainstream non-carceral society. There are more young black men in prison than in university and despite making up only a tiny fraction of the greater population, almost one in ten serving convicts is from a traveller background.

But if punishment is to be the order of the day rather than rational debate on its social effects, are we really comfortable with the high levels of self-harming and suicide that take place within the prison estate?

National offender management service figures show the number of self-inflicted deaths in prison have risen from 54 in 2010-11 to 66 in 2011-12. They also show that incidents of self-harm also rose in men's prisons from 14,768 in 2010-11 to 16,146 this year, and the number of recorded assaults rose from 13,804 to 14,858 over the same period.