Prison Morality

The murder of an utterly degenerate sex criminal evokes a visceral atavistic reaction. Good job. Reinforcing the universal belief that sex cases are invariably harshly dealt with by other prisoners, that criminals are somehow best placed to judge the crimes of others, the conscience of society.

And so we can find ourselves tipping our hats to the two murderers who did for sex criminal Ian Watkins at Wakefield nick the other day. Murderers being elevated as moral arbiters isn’t a common event, but due to the mythos of prison, we find ourselves in this embarrassing position of having sent two men to prison for murder, now wanting to buy them a pint for, er, killing again.

It is true that, as in all cultures, prisoners have a hierarchy. Or rather, hierarchies. As it is impossible for a single source of complete power to ever reside amongst prisoners, there are many hierarchies. There are those at the top of the wealth pile, others top of the physically tough pyramid, and so on. One's position across these hierarchies doesn't rest on one factor, your crime. Rather it rests on several features, some fixed, some fluid, your peccadillos being only one.

Pop culture has you believing that sex cases are invariably rock bottom of every possible hierarchy, including cockroaches. There is a visceral reaction against sex crimes that simply doesn't exist for any other breach of normality, even amongst those who themselves committed the most serious of crimes, murder. Murder doesn't repel us in the same way, which its why murder is a staple of popular entertainment. Sex crimes against children, not so much.

The measure of which crimes are worse than others is an exercise in painful mental contortions and staggering hypocrisy. How can you possibly calculate, even define, what is “worse”? Worse for who? Society, or the individual? It would take me little effort to argue that reckless bankers cause far more harm than paedophiles. But no one duffs up shady bankers.

The measure is, in reality, centred on that visceral reaction to certain crimes, that truly brainless reaction. And so we find murderers at the top of prison society, as a class, with sex cases firmly held to be at the bottom. Murder as the most SERIOUS crime, but not the WORST crime.

However, prison myths are just that. The black and white judgement on the crimes of others is regularly tempered by self interest. If a sex case is a 7 foot black belt, he’s often good to go. If he has a good supply of drugs, his crimes are obfuscated by addiction. If he is surrounded by friends who defend him, again , he walks with impunity.

Prison morality is a figment of the imagination, a projection by a society who actually wants us to commit violence on other criminals, a society that exercises its loathing through prison justice. It's a morality that absolves the cannibal while condemning the rapist. It's a morality built on narcissism and hypocrisy. Because if you suggest to the killers of Watkins that the families of THEIR victims would like to be allowed to kill them, I'm guessing they’ll unwaveringly cling to the rule of law…

Wanting to hurt those who have hurt us is all very human. But controlling our base urges is what separates us from animals. To this extent, the role of the criminal justice system is to protect us from ourselves, from our worst urges. It should not exist as a channel through which we call upon bogeymen to do our bidding.

A Question

Does anybody know of any research that focuses on the functioning and culture of  Segregation Units in the UK?

Or does my present job as an orderly give me a chance to add something new to the literature?

The Grand Plan

At the same time that Michael Howard was proclaiming that “prison works” and that our lives should be “decent but austere”, his minions were busy putting together a huge plan to reduce the rate of reoffending. This reveals the schizophrenia that comes from prisons being expected to do both punishment and rehabilitation, but there you go.

This Grand Plan was to reach back nearly a century and dust off the idea that criminals are somehow inherently different. This comes within a whisker of the old concept that criminality is a mental disease but with a modern spin.

The broad idea is that we suffer from 'cognitive deficits'. We think differently from free people. On the back of this dodgy reasoning, a range of psychological treatments were imported from North America. Collectively they are known as Offending Behaviour Programmes (OBPs) and their purpose is to help us to think in a different way.

Thus we are afflicted with courses entitled Enhanced Thinking Skills; Sex Offender Treatment Programme - Core, Extended, Modified, and Booster versions; Controlling Anger and Learning to Manage It (CALM); Cognitive Self Change Programme...and so it goes on. Each one has a future refresher or booster version and it is common for one to lead to the other.

There are several problems with this Grand Plan. The most obvious being that, after being in operation for over a decade, the research evidence that any of this stuff actually does work is extremely thin. None is peer reviewed. The level of desperation on the part of prison HQ to squeeze some hint of hope out of this was revealed by the latest research on the Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) course. Rather than follow the standard criminological research format - follow up cohorts of those who have, and haven't, done the course and compare the reoffending rates - the latest research confines itself to asking whether those who have done ETS feel that they may reoffend less in future. With one eye on their parole reports, to a man the prisoners swore blind they were cured of their criminal afflictions. Doh! Even if the course did work, the elephant in the room would be this - would reoffending rates be lower because the course altered criminals’ behaviour? Or could it be that the course trained us to think so much better that we plan our crimes more efficiently and just don't get caught? Just a thought...

If these courses worked, I might possibly stomach them. As they don't, they lead to wicked injustices. Lifers can't get released without addressing their 'cognitive deficits'. This leads to us spending many, many years undertaking course after course, a psychological conveyor belt of gibberish. The course are, of course!, voluntary. We just won't be released if we don't do them. So we sign up under massive pressure and go through the motions. Even if the courses could work, they would be ineffective as nobody changes on demand and under threat.

So, lifers are kept in for ever-longer periods, to complete an ever lengthening list of courses, none of which can be shown to work. After 15 years and 200 million quid, the reoffending rate is unchanged. We feel screwed over and hard done by, put upon by psychologists who know nothing and don't care to learn. To say we despise them is to be polite. They are a plague.

But it is when this Grand Plan is coupled with a kneejerk change in sentencing that the real wickedness becomes evident. The introduction of Indefinite sentences for Public Protection (IPP) has seen the lifer population approach 10,000. The average tariff (punishment period) for these IPPs is 18 months. At the end of that time, they can be released if they can show they pose little risk of future offending. This is done by completing the psychology courses. But as the number of places on courses is limited, you may have to wait years to complete them.

Policy makers failed to join the dots here, committing one of the cardinal sins that psychology claims for prisoners; a lack of consequential thinking. Thousands of men are kept in prison on open ended sentences solely because the Ministry failed to lay on sufficient courses for them to complete in a timely manner. It is deeply unjust to sentence a man with a 2 year tariff, knowing damn well it could be 6 years before he can do the necessary courses. It is inept and dishonest, at best, and downright wicked at worst. I predict that during the next wave of riots, alongside the word 'food^’ on the banners of complaint will be the words 'courses' and 'psychology'.

That is the Grand Plan. It continues on, with all concerned pretending that it does work. That the people in charge of our lives can be so self deluding is frightening. And me? I was assessed years ago and whatever my faults may be, it is accepted that 'cognitive deficits' are not included. As more than one governor has pointed out, there is no course to address being awkward.