Prisoner Power

I have been sharing my views on prison across every forum for decades. From printing samizdat magazines in prison to Newsnight, I have foisted my views on others by whatever means the circumstances allowed. It can be fun, it can be entertaining and it can be informative.

Which is why I don't do it as much as I used to… For the most part, it is preaching to the choir. Having spoken everywhere from church halls to universities, I can’t recall once having a hostile audience. Questioning, certainly, and challenging but never outright hostile. My audiences were either already in broad sympathy with my views, or were very willing to be persuaded. They had, after all, paid my costs to be there and rarely are people prepared to pay to listen to someone they disagree with. If they were, I’d be the King of Twitter.

Which is all very interesting. But if the purpose is to try to provoke people to think about prison, and to prompt change, then preaching to the converted is very frustrating. There are many good reasons other than that to give talks, but when there are no minds to change then it is a different experience. And above all, provoking change is my ideal outcome. Otherwise I’m just an entertainment act.

Added to being dulled by talking to those who agree with me, is the sheer frustration of prison reform. Having began my sentence in a compulsory striped shirt with an AM radio being the height of convenience, I was in my later years confronted by endless stream of cons insisting that protesting for change was pointless - while wearing their own clothes and watching a TV in their cell.

Granted, change in prison can be glacial on a large scale, even if the details are endlessly messed about with. Week in and out I see reports from the Prison Inspectorate putting the boot into some prison, in a headline that's been perennial for most of my adult life. It's so frustrating to see the same crap, endlessly repeating. That applies to everything related to prison. The issues prisoners complain about, what staff complain about, never seem to change. For many prisoners, it probably is often true that nothing much changes. Because most prisoners comprise waves of short termers, whose sentence may not straddle some fiddling around the edges. Those of us with a longer perspective do get to experience changes, slow as they may be.

I long ago decided that genuine prison reform - achieving a justice system that actually cuts crime and social harm - is never going to be delivered by either politicians or the technocrats running HMP. Which seriously reduces my interest in trying to persuade people to support such change. Rather, I argue that reform lays in the hands of prisoners.

A conversation for another day…

Hard v Soft

One of the pleasures of General Elections is that they clarify the minds of politicians. All of a sudden, blather has to be turned into policy that they can actually sell. One of the disappointments of Elections is that Labour and Conservative will retreat into an arms race on criminal justice. Any idea that Labour are reformists was shattered by New Labour and Jack Straw, who helped lever themselves into power by being tougher than the Tories on crime. Straw led up to the election trying to out-Howard Michael Howard. Once in office, Labour created ultra harsh “two strikes” laws that the years have shown to be so disastrous that even their creators have renounced them. Labour isn't instinctively harsh on criminals, but it will never forget the electoral lessons of new Labour. The myth that Labour is soft on crime should be long dead.

The Conservatives need no electoral nudge to be bilious against criminals. It is their natural home and one they invariably retreat to in the face of elections. This rests on a view of human beings and their decision making that criminology dropped about five minutes after criminology became a field. The Tories hold to the view that people are rational actors, and as such a calculus of benefits versus punishments can influence crime rates. Harsher punishments should invariably mean criminals rationally deciding it's not worth the candle. That over a century of knowledge shows us that this isn't true is not a detail that hinders Tory splenics.

And so we return to the perennial issue of being “hard” or “soft” on crime. The Overton Window doesn't seem to allow us to see outside of this criminological dimorphism that we are sold by our leaders. And it is deeply depressing. Everyone is pretending that the rise in sentencing that has been constant for decades has seen a concomitant fall in crime. This hard v soft discourse is deeply dishonest, partly because we insist it is. Its nice and simple. And we seem to be insisting that our politicians lie to us and feed us simplistic pseudo solutions rather than tell us “this is complicated, we can't guarantee we will get this right but we will do our best”.

And so the escalation continues, the waste of lives and billions of pounds, with no reduction in crime or social harm. The question of whether a measure is hard or soft is meant to relate to crime, but in reality applies only to criminals. Being hard on crime itself would mean measures that reduced it. Being hard on criminals means inflicting harsher punishments. The two are not connected, leaving us in a spiral of increasing sentences without any effect on crime rates. An absurdity. One we seem content to support.

Abandon hard v soft. Walk away from this dead end. The only question should be - Is this policy EFFECTIVE? Does it cut crime? Most current policy does not, it is expensive and stupid. And we will continue to vote for it.