Saturday, September 10, 2011

The Embarrassing Comparison

Prisoners in Germany strike, prisoners across the State of Georgia strike.  Canadian prisoners unionise.  Prisoners in California hunger-strike.

All those sacrifices are made in the name of change and reform.  And what are British prisoners doing?  It's embarrassing, sometimes.

8 comments:

  1. Maybe British prisons are too cushy, or the prisoners are too stoned to care?

    ReplyDelete
  2. But what do British prisoners want. A MAC donalds on site, play stations for all and a trip down the local on a Friday night. I think compared to these countries you mention British prisoners get an all right deal. After all it is a place of punishment.

    ReplyDelete
  3. supersaint:

    You are sent to prison as a punishment, not to be punished. There is a subtle difference in language, but they mean very different things.

    ReplyDelete
  4. 'I think compared to these countries you mention British prisoners get an all right deal.'

    Actually I believe prison conditions in both Canada and Germany are better than the UK.

    ReplyDelete
  5. How are they better......

    ReplyDelete
  6. Don't know about Germany but if it is anything like its neighbour Austria, its prisons make the UK's old Victorian jails look like dungeons. This is one of Austria's prisons (which houses plenty of 'baddies' - including murderers and rapists:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_Center_Leoben

    And Canada is well known for its progressive attitude towards incarceration (for one, their imprisonment rate is far lower than the UKs). In fact a quarter of inmates in their open/minimum security prisons are serving life sentences.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yes, Canada uses restorative justice: http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/pi/pcvi-cpcv/res-rep.html and their re-offending rate is comparatively low.

    ReplyDelete
  8. FYI: Just as the Tories over here are using data from the Canadian prison system to justify cutting the prison population over here, the new Canadian Conservative government have decided to introduce exactly the sort of policies that the discredited penal policies of the last neo-conservative/Labour government alongside a massive prison expansion programme including plans for US-style super max/Titan-style prisons. Unfortunately the global financial crisis has led to the building programme being put on the back burner in favour of double-bunking and piecemeal extensions to current federal and local (provincial) prisons.

    As for Germany, like most countries its prisons range from the fairly ancient to the modern, and are run by individual states rather than the federal authorities. All prisoners are expected to work to pay for their upkeep. JVA Stadelheim is fairly typical of the long-term/maximum security prisons there: http://www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t62052.html

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.