A Place of Redemption

 A Christian approach to Punishment and Prison

 written for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales

 

 

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons

Dostoevsky

Prison should not be a corrupting experience, a place of idleness and even vice, but instead a place of redemption    

 Pope John Paul II

 

Contents

 

Introductory Summary

Introduction

Part I:             Justice and Mercy

Part II:            The Individual and Society

Part III:          Hope and Redemption

Epilogue

Recommendations

Executive Summary

Appendix  Some voluntary organisations helping prisoners and their families

A hard copy of this text can be purchased here or downloaded in PDF here

 

 Introductory Summary

1. Shortly before Sir David Ramsbotham retired in July 2001 as Chief Inspector of Prisons, he sat down to write a farewell lecture at the invitation of the Prison Reform Trust. As he wrote, his wife, Sue, who had watched him tussle with the lamentable state of Britain’s prisons for six full years, slapped a piece of paper on his desk on which she had written these words:

 

• If prison worked, there would be work or education for every prisoner.

 

• If prison worked, we would be shutting prisons, not opening more.

 

• If prison worked, judges would not be seeing in the dock the same people over and over again.

 

• If prison worked, we would not be imprisoning more people than any other European country exceptTurkey.

 

• If prison worked, fewer mothers would be in prison and fewer children would be in care.

 

• If prison worked, we would be saving billions of pounds with fewer prisons, fewer care homes and fewer court cases[1]

 

2. True justice must produce a positive outcome for the victim, for society and for the offender. It must give every opportunity for criminals to come to terms with what they have done, to recognise their own guilt, and to acknowledge the need for remorse and penitence. In atoning for their past they recognise the human dignity of their victims and they also help to redeem themselves. It must be possible, within such a system, for an offender to make different choices from those that they have hitherto made. And the system must make it possible for that transformation to take place, and be assisted, at every point during the offender’s sentence and life thereafter.

 

3. Our existing penal system is a long way from meeting such a description. The prison system, which this year reached its highest ever recorded number of prisoners, is stretched to breaking point. The terrible overcrowding only underscores the extent to which our penal system – though it pays lip-service to the need for reform and rehabilitation – is, in practice, is essentially punitive. In this paper we have outlined several major concerns and made a number of specific suggestions to rectify this tendency.

 

4. We would like to see greater concern for the victims of crime and more emphasis on restorative justice which gives victims of crime the opportunity to participate in the administration of justice – and which oblige offenders to make amends to the victim and the community.

 

5. Many of those in our prisons have histories of significant vulnerability and disadvantage. Justice demands that society addresses the disadvantage of prisoners in education, moral training and lack of family support – assistance in all of which will reduce re-offending. We would like to see a prison system in which there is better education, more drug treatment, more behavioural programmes and better mental health care for the large percentage of prisoners suffering from mental health problems. The current record levels of suicides inside prison show the urgent need for this. Our prison system needs greater bias towards the needs of the vulnerable – women, ethnic minorities, the elderly, and the children of prisoners.

 

6. We would like to see a greater range of prison regimes for different prisoners.

 

7. We would like to see a more constructive attitude to work in prison, with the introduction of a normal working day for prisoners. The current definition of a full working day in a prison workshop is four hours – of mainly low-skilled menial tasks. This pays scant respect to the dignity of the prisoner and is ineffective in helping prisoners reform their attitude, acquire a work ethic or gain new skills. A full working day should be introduced to parallel that of the outside world, eight hours a day, five days a week. The quality of work too should relate to the outside world, with prisoners learning the disciplines and skills they will need when they are returned to society.

 

8. We would like to see a prison regime which treats prisoners less as objects, done to by others, and more as subjects who can become authors of their own reform and redemption. In that spirit we would like to see the right to vote restored to sentenced  prisoners.

 

9. Prisoners have the right to continue to protest their innocence in prison. The Government should re-examine the tendency of the parole system to deny early release to those who refuse to ‘show remorse’ for a crime which they maintain they did not commit.

.

10.  We would like to see smaller more human-scaled prisons with moves to implement the strategy of community prisons outlined by Lord Woolf so that prisoners serve their sentences in small institutions, integrated into their local community, as close to their homes as possible. This would be both more humane and would, all research shows, reduce re-offending. It would also alleviate pressure on overburdened staff.

 

11. In our prisons we detect a dispirited workforce – and statistics on stress, sickness and staff turnover reflect this. Undoubtedly some of the workforce in our prisons, including at leadership levels, needs renewal. It is important for the authorities to root out those elements within the prison staff whose vision has been corrupted or jaundiced to the extent that it constitutes an impediment to change. And yet at all levels the prison service has some remarkably dedicated staff for whom the term prison ‘service’ has real meaning. We call on the authorities to discern who are the exemplary public servants in this sector and then listen to them and indeed cherish them. Society must show a greater duty of care to those who work in our prisons.

 

12. But above all there need to be fewer people in prison. The Sentencing Guidelines Council needs to gear its work towards reducing sentence lengths, and reducing the number of short term prisoners. It needs to divert low-risk offenders from prosecution. It needs to reduce the number of prisoners remanded awaiting trial. It needs to seek alternatives to prison for the large numbers of people jailed for comparatively trivial offences like shoplifting. It needs to counter the inflationary pull which is inbuilt in the present system of sentencing.

 

13. We would like a re-examination of the automatic progression from fines to community sentences to imprisonment. We want a far wider range of community service and punishment orders, along with improved drugs treatment programmes. We would like to see the fines system bolstered and revised, with the introduction of Day Fines and an end to the fines as the first option for dealing with poor people.

 

14. We would like to see an extension of tagging and electronic surveillance. There needs to be a new flexibility in mixing prison and community punishment in a single sentence – with halfway houses, weekend prisons, individual curfews, exclusion orders and other innovations to assist in the balance between justice and mercy, human dignity and the common good requires. The Government has gone some way towards this but needs to guard against dangers in its new Custody Plus, Intermittent Custody and Custody Minus sentences which may increase, rather than decrease, the numbers is prison.

 

15. Above all we would like to see an end to the tendency to consider prison as the ultimate backstop for all society’s problems – the ultimate social service which must cope with the failures in the work of other departments of government, particularly with regard to mental health, drug and alcohol misuse, housing, employment and social welfare. Prison must not be a dustbin for the problems society fails elsewhere to address. The key to making significant reductions in the level and impact of crime lies as much in the development and implementation of wider social and economic policies as it does in reforming the prison system.

 

16. We want to promote a change in attitudes inside the Catholic Church to those in prison. We also want to see a similar change in our wider society. We want politicians and the media to treat issues of crime and punishment more responsibly. And we want to see those television entertainment executives, newspaper editors and politicians who seek to reinforce prejudices, rather than convey the overall truth held publicly accountable for their actions.

 

17. On the detail of all this we accept that others may disagree or see other possibilities. What our Christian anthropology insists is not negotiable flows from our vision of Christ and his Kingdom.  Jesus invites us to see himself in the marginalised, alienated and rejected. Thereby he calls us always to extend his Kingdom of mercy and compassion. That call requires us to commit ourselves to a pursuit of justice which is always within the horizon of grace.

 

18. The image of God comes to its glory in each one of us. Through justice and mercy, hope and forgiveness, no-one is beyond the reach of God’s purpose. The possibility of change is ever-present. Society should never give up on any individual. For every place is a place of redemption.

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

Modern man often anxiously wonders about the solution to the terrible tensions which have built up in the world and which entangle humanity. And if at times he lacks the courage to utter the word ‘mercy’, or if in his conscience empty of religious content he does not find the equivalent, so much greater is the need for the Church to utter this word, not only in her own name but also in the name of all the men and women of our time[2].

 

Pope John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia

 

 

25. Nobody wants to know about prison. It is the concern of those behind bars, those who detain them, the members of their families, and a handful of campaigners and professionals. But as a society the rest of us want, metaphorically, to throw away the key. Yet the issue is not without outside scrutiny. Every prison is visited by a Catholic chaplain, as well as other chaplains, at least once a week and many have a daily witness. The Church has an unbroken history, through the centuries and across the world, of visiting those in prison. InEnglandandWales,  the Catholic Church plays a leading role in Churches’ Criminal Justice Forum, through which Christians of all communities are encouraged to embrace criminal justice as a cause for  concern.  The Church’s locus here is not just that of its moral and social teaching but its experience: Catholic priests spend a considerable part of their ministry dealing with people who fall through the holes in our society.

 

26. All this is not normally an aspect of the Church’s social action to which we draw attention but we do so now because the overall state of the nation’s prisons is a scandal – and the situation has in recent years deteriorated rapidly and steadily. And this is a crisis to which we believe the Church has an important perspective to bring, not merely from the perspective of our social concern but because Christian theology has important insights to offer into questions of criminal justice, the rights and responsibilities of individuals, and the wider duty of our society to promote the flourishing of all its citizens.

 

27. In 2004 the prison population in Englandand Walesreached its highest ever recorded. In March 2004 it stood at 75,544 – an increase of 3,068 over the previous year. It has almost doubled from the figure of 42,000 it was in 1991. The number of women in prison has risen particularly dramatically; ten years ago the female prison population was 1,811; in March 2004 it was 4,549 – an increase of 151 per cent. The rate of imprisonment for black people is now seven times that of the white population. The number of juveniles has doubled over the last decade[3]. The number of elderly men (over the age of 60) has trebled since 1995[4]. On occasions prisons were so full that had 200 more offenders been jailed there would, literally, have been nowhere to put them[5].  The figure has fallen slightly since[6] but by the end of the decade Home Office projections predict a prison population of anything between 91,400 and 109,600 – though the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has hinted that he hopes the number will be capped at 80,000 by 2009[7], an aspiration which may well prove to be over-optimistic.

 

28. The result is terrible overcrowding. By the Government’s own admission 91 of the 139 prisons in Englandand Walesare officially designated as overcrowded – 13 of them at levels beyond what the Prison Service classifies as safe[8]. Some 17,000 prisoners – 23 per cent of the prison population – were recently revealed to be doubling up in cells designed for one[9]. Shrewsbury Preston Prison was recently holding 625 prisoners in cells designed to hold 324[10]. In the last ten years 12 new prisons have opened but nine of those are overcrowded already[11]. As a result record numbers of inmates are committing suicide, staff sickness is higher than ever[12], drug use is widespread[13] and purposeful activity such as education, employment or exercise for each prisoner is declining. Many prisoners are still locked up for the majority of every day.

 

29. Money is going into expanding rather than improving the prison system. Yet building new prisons has not been a solution: in the last 10 years, 12 new prisons have been opened. Of these, nine were already overcrowded by June 2004.  Overcrowding means individual prisoners are facing cuts in their access to prison education budgets and programmes to reduce re-offending. More prisoners are placed far from home, with a deleterious impact on family relationships. Some offenders no longer attend their own cases in the Court of Appeal because they fear that, by the time they return to prison, the cell which they have made their home will have been allocated to another inmate. Overcrowding is such that prisoners are forced to defecate in front of one another and on some prison wings slopping out has been brought back[14]. Our prisons are becoming a public disgrace.

 

30. The cause of all this is tougher sentencing by magistrates and judges in response to the Government’s more proscriptive sentencing guidelines, a climate of increased public intolerance, fed by harsher rhetoric from politicians and media reporting which is often far from responsible. The number of offenders arrested, cautioned and appearing before the courts has remained relatively constant – and there has not been any increase in the overall seriousness of offences brought to justice – yet more people are being sent to prison, and for longer. Ten years ago one defendant in 26 would have gone into custody – today the number is double that[15]. Those appearing in magistrates courts are three times more likely to go to prison than they would have ten years ago[16]. First time offenders are far more likely to go to prison. This year, for the first time, more than half of all sentenced men in prison are serving four years or more[17].

 

31. This increased severity is a peculiarly British phenomenon. Comparisons with our European neighbours are unedifying. This country has 141 prisoners for every 100,000 of our population – the highest proportion in Western Europe. Hollandhas 100, Germanyhas 98, Francehas 93 and Denmarkhas 64[18]. Of the major developed countries only the United States has proportionately more people in jail. There are more life-sentence prisoners in England and Wales today than the rest of the whole of western Europe added together[19] yet there is no evidence of any more crime in the UK than in other Western European countries[20].

 

32. We are alarmed at these developments for two reasons. The first is that there is no sign that this increased severity is making our society better or safer. Only five per cent of that 30 per cent fall in crime is attributed by the Government to the increase in the prison population[21]. Since some 58 per cent of all prisoners are reconvicted of a further offence within two years of leaving prison (and this figure is even higher for young prisoners, 72 per cent for 18 to 20 year olds, and 84 per cent among those under 18) the costs are rising rather than falling[22]. Released prisoners, it is estimated, commit at least a million offences a year. The cost to the nation is £11bn a year, according to the Government’s Social Exclusion Unit. And that is on top of the annual £3.2bn which the prison system costs our society – an increase of £900m in the past seven years[23]. We are forced to the conclusion that prison doesn’t work.

 

33. But secular campaigners and policy-makers have addressed these issues, and the need for society to achieve a just balance between the respective needs of victims of crime, offenders, offenders’ families, and the wider community. In addition to the Social Exclusion Unit report (Reducing re-offending by ex-prisoners, July 2002), there has been the Carter Report (Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime, December 2003) and a host of informed responses from bodies like Nacro, the Prison Reform Trust and the Howard League for Penal reformHoward League for Penal Reform. As bishops we have sought to contribute to public debate on specific issues through our reports Women in Prison (published in 1999) and People, Punishment and Prisons (2002) which looked at practical questions of policy.

 

1. So it is not our purpose here to rehearse these. Rather it is to concentrate on the second of our areas of concern regarding the present state of the nation’s prisons. It is to ask how these should be reformed, not in the light of utilitarian considerations, but in the context of a Christian anthropology which inquires by what right does our society deprive people of their liberty – and asks questions about what implications the values of the Gospel have in issues of punishment.

1. We want to deepen and ‘ground’ the discussion in the foundations of Catholic theology which we believe has something distinctive to offer to the debate on how our  prisons should be made better places. Care must be taken to avoid confusion in the application of theology to law, for not everything sinful is illegal in the judgement of the state (and nor, conversely is something necessarily immoral because it is against the law, especially where a law may be unjust). Nonetheless, it is not accidental that religious language is so often used in our discussions of crime and punishment because theology rightly underpins our approaches to these vital concerns. Yet how well-informed is the application of that theological vocabulary?

36. The scriptural basis for the Church’s approach to prisoners is well-known: “I was in prison and you visited me[24],” St Matthew tells us Jesus will say on the day of judgement. But the life of Christ itself offers its own commentary. In the paraphrase of one prison campaigner: Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night on the word of a paid informer, subjected to intimidating questioning, and remanded in custody, after which he was subjected to police brutality, given a bogus trial and then condemned to die – by a weak judge who was put under pressure by public opinion.

 

37. There is, of course, far more to it than that. The Gospels give to the Christian community a privileged insight into the constitution and destiny of humanity and God’s presence in the world. A central part of their revelation is that love of God and love of neighbour are not to be separated; indeed, Jesus treats them not as two discrete acts but as one act. The command to “love our neighbour as ourselves[25]” tells us that others cannot be treated as accidental to our self-understanding and realisation. There runs a communion of goodness through all created things. Men and women are not redeemed unless all of our relationships are also redeemed.

 

1. The reality and the logic of the Incarnation forbids an easy dualism between Christians and the world. Rather it calls Christians – individually and as a Church – to be constantly engaged in a creative interpretive witness to the values of the Kingdom which is to work for the common good of all. This is not a one-way process. The values of society will offer significant opportunities, insights and realise values that may be recognised and accepted by Christians as their own – for the Spirit works in all things and builds upon goodness, wherever it is to be found. To live the Christian life well is to mediate between a society whose ends are not governed by the Gospel and a vision which is shaped by Christ and God’s salvific purpose for all human beings. Only by doing that will society find new ways out of the disarray, failure and moral neglect which constitute the life of our nation’s prisons.

 

1. 39.  In 2001 we asked:

 

“With prison populations rising fast, and rates of re-offending on release very high, is there not an urgent need, without compromising public safety, to consider how best to educate and rehabilitate prisoners rather than just contain them? At present it is quite clear that many of them are not being treated with the dignity and respect which is theirs as human beings. The prison population is higher per head of population than in any other European country. Do they all need to be in prison? Should not other solutions be urgently and carefully explored?[26]”

 

In the interval things have only got worse, and the questions have remained unanswered.

I: Justice and Mercy

 

 

The story of Frank Cook

 

He was at one point Britain’s “most wanted man”. His name was Frank Cook, a former armed robber and gangland ‘enforcer’ in South Yorkshire. He was incarcerated for over half of his life, wreaking havoc in every prison in which he was locked up.

 

It had begun with a string of convictions starting in his childhood, resulting in lengthy spells in children’s homes, approved schools, detention centres and borstals. As a youth almost all his family and friends were thieves. The more he stole, the more he got patted on the shoulder by his peers. The only way that he had to be ‘normal’ was to drink, use drugs and commit crime. He was sent to a youth detention centre but it did little to alter his behaviour, instead it provided what he later called “the biggest launch” in his career as a criminal. All he learned there was “that I could take pain – I came out of there fit, thick, homeless and anti-social with no sense of direction.” The pull of belonging meant that he inevitably went back into crime.

 

He was not a man, perversely, without ambition. “I wanted to be the best gangster. I worked hard in the gym and I challenged people to fight,” he said. He progressed to more serious crimes involving guns, shooting at people and taking hostages. He served long periods in custody where, he said: “I mixed with the worst. Brutality was rife. I shaved my head, went to the gym and thought that people wouldn’t hurt me if I was nasty. And that’s what I was – nasty, nasty, nasty”. He was constantly disruptive, which resulted in him spending long periods in solitary confinement.

 

It was while in solitary that he was interviewed by Dr. Ray Gillett, the Medical Superintendent of Grendon Prison, which had developed radical ideas on the rehabilitation of prisoners through psychotherapeutic treatment. But when Cook was transferred there he continued to cause trouble. One day, after he assaulted some members of staff, he was summoned to see Dr Gillett. He assumed he would be told he would be sent back to the harsher regime of a conventional prison. Instead Dr Gillett put his arm around the recidivist’s shoulders. Frank Cook burst into tears . . .

 

 

 

A: JUSTICE

 

40.  Justice is both a personal and an institutional virtue. An awareness of the demands of justice is essential for individuals in their interactions with others. It is also vital at a social level, for without it our civic institutions would lack credibility and citizens would be reduced to instrumental relations of the state or the controlling individual power or group.

 

1. Philosophers point to two key dimensions to justice – distributive and corrective – but both are about fairness. By distributive they mean how society allocates the scarce resources for which individuals compete, and how it also distributes the duties and burdens which are also essential to our living well together. By corrective they mean how the law deals impartially in resolving conflict between individuals and the wrong-doing that can produce. When it comes to questions of punishment and prison the common assumption is that the issue is essentially one of corrective justice. To restrict our society’s thinking in this way would lead us into a blind alley.

 

42. In its most basic aspect justice is encapsulated in the principle of Roman law, suum cuique tribuere – to allocate to each his own. In this sense, it has always been closely connected to the ideas of desert and equality. Rewards and punishments are justly distributed if they go to those who deserve them; where there is no question of differing desert then justice demands equal treatment. We shall consider this further when we look at society’s various justifications for imprisonment.

 

1. The key point here, however, is that our present prison regime, geared as it pretty much is in practice to straightforward punishment, sends out almost two-third of prisoners to be convicted of a further offence within the following two years. There are a number of explanations for this. Prison is a place where offenders have deviant social values reinforced by their fellows and may learn new techniques of crime. They receive inadequate corrective psychological training and insufficient education to pick up the basic literacy and numeracy skills they need to go straight when they are discharged. Many leave with little money and no job or home to go to. After release some 60 per cent of ex-offenders find themselves rebuffed when they apply for work specifically because they have been in prison[27].

 

44. All of this gives us pointers to the nature of the problem. It is that justice demands not just certain behaviour from individuals, but that it also requires an appropriate response from the rest of society. Although there is particular need to pay attention to the impact that crime has upon those people who become its direct victims the central concern must be to the violence which crime does to the common good. But what society has to guard against is the risk that our attempts to repair any tear in the social fabric may create a fresh one. It is no coincidence that those measures which are known to reduce re-offending – reducing truancy and school exclusion, improving youth employment, tackling homelessness, promoting youth activity programmes, curbing drug and alcohol misuse and promoting measures to support families in distress – are all essentially social rather than directed at the individual. A dialectic between the rights of the individual and the rights of society which also seems to be central in any discussion of penal policy.

 

1. This takes us onto the question of distributive justice. When it comes to finding criteria for the just distribution of society’s benefits and burdens, Christian tradition is clear[28]. It leans away from the notion that what is due to each person is given by laws, customs and shared understandings of the community of which that person is a member. Instead the Catholic approach is rooted in an understanding of creation as being ordered in justice by the Creator. This is normally developed in terms of a concept of ‘natural law.’ As Kant saw, to act legally is not necessarily to act justly. Rather, it requires that society’s positive laws be in accordance with natural law which is known through reason.

 

46. The Bible has a particular insight to offer on the question of justice. The Old Testament picture of God is as just or righteous. Often the portrait is of God passing judgement on the unfaithfulness of his people. But God’s justice is not that of an impartial judge adjudicating between the claims of competing or conflicting peoples to achieve peace and harmony. It is manifest also in deeds that liberate the weak and vulnerable from bondage, and which require his people to act in ways conducive to human flourishing. As we noted in a previous document, The Common Good: “People who are poor and vulnerable have a special place in Catholic teaching: this is what the Church means by the ‘preferential option for the poor’ Scripture tells us we will be judged by our response to the ‘least of these’, in which we see the suffering face of Christ himself[29].”

 

47. The traditional symbol of justice – as a blindfolded woman with a pair of scales – is thus not adequate. Biblical justice and legal justice are not one and the same thing. True justice must have an inherent bias toward the marginalised, vulnerable or oppressed individuals in society.

 

 

 

Justice for the Victim

 

1. 48.  A cartoon in the New Yorker magazine once depicted two men walking past a man lying dazed and beaten in the gutter. One passer-by says to the other: “Whoever did that must be in need of a lot of help”. The sardonic drawing made several points. It reflected the widespread view that the victims of crime are neglected in modern society and that the treatment of criminals is too soft. These are real concerns and no account of crime and punishment can afford to ignore them. This is particularly true of a Christian account which must hold in mind Christ’s parable of The Good Samaritan[30], of which the cartoon was an ironic echo. The first imperative must always be to attend to the victim.

 

49. In a crime where there is a direct victim the victim stands within the dimensions of a theology which biases itself in favour of individuals who have been offended against. Support of victims in our society is by no means automatic, and many experience insensitive or inappropriate treatment at the hands of official bodies or others with whom they come into contact. The lack of transparency in sentencing – whereby an offender fairly automatically serves less time in prison than the sentence handed out by judges and magistrates in court – is a source of unnecessary exasperation for some. The Government needs to address this. Official forms of support or compensation are often not sufficient to attend to the needs of many victims. For some victimhood can become a permanent and debilitating state.

 

50. The charity Victim Support in 2003 offered assistance to 1.4m people who had been victims of crime, ranging from practical help with applying for compensation or getting a broken window repaired to emotional support [VS1] . It also gave advice on criminal justice processes, but since 97 per cent of crimes never reach court most work on supporting victims needs to be done in other spheres[31]. Greater awareness of the physical and psychological problems of victims is needed from all citizens, most particularly those who come into contact with victims of crime either through official agencies or as employers, landlords, neighbours and friends. What victims need, most say, is not more punitive sentences but that their needs are recognised and addressed and that they are treated with greater respect and kept better informed. Greater awareness of these issues should be encouraged among Christians at parish level.

 

51. One promising area, where new approaches are being tested, is in the notion of ‘restorative justice’. Crime damages relationships between people who live in community. Restorative justice therefore offers victims of crime an opportunity to participate in the administration of justice – and it obliges offenders to take responsibility, requiring them to acknowledge the harm they have caused and work to make amends to the victim and the community. Victims are offered the chance of a meeting with the offender. They can also be given the power to help define the obligations the offender takes on, which may include direct reparation to the person violated.

 

1. Such an approach has been pioneered by bodies like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africawhose work, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, saw offences primarily as acts perpetrated against individuals rather than society[32]. In more straightforward criminal contexts the principle of restorative justice is to see crime as a violation of human relationships and to emphasize the intrinsic value in all those involved – victims, perpetrators and criminal justice professionals. In countries like New Zealand, where some of the most long-standing experiments have taken place, a real reduction in re-offending rates has resulted. The British Government has now begun to explore this area, publishing a consultation document in 2003[33].

 

62. Such an approach embraces many principles of Christian teaching such as right behaviour[34], repentance[35], forgiveness[36], healing[37] and restoration[38]. Most of all, it recognises the value of each and every individual, be that person victim or offender. As Christians, we believe that we are all “offenders” before God, yet are still loved by him[39]. We share a belief that we are all capable of change.

 

63. The virtue of restorative justice is that it can produce a win-win situation. For the offender such an approach can provide the motivation to reform which the prison system so signally fails to do for many. Through restorative justice the criminal comes to realise that crime generates a history not only for the offender but for the person at the receiving end too. The process first of all can prompt within the offender a recognition of the wrong they have done, and of how this harms not just others but also themself. This is the first point in a crucial process; from it grows repentance, which couples the act of acknowledgment of wrongdoing with a turning to seek forgiveness. And from that flows the atonement which involves attempting to make reparation in some way.

 

64. For the victim it can bring closure on issues of fear, vulnerability, personal security and even self-blame: victims are often dogged by questions like: “Why me?” which can find resolution in meeting the offender or communicating with the offender indirectly through a mediator. Some victims value the opportunity to tell the offender how the crime affected them. Restorative justice is not merely about finding a way for victims and society to forgive an offender; it is about creating a system which recognises that the perpetrator and the victim are members of society who both need reintegrating into something like normality. We would like to see far greater use of restorative justice models within our nation’s penal system.

 

65. There are, however, caveats. One is that bringing the victim and the offender together must never become an added pressure or burden for the victim. To make a victim feel an obligation to participate could amount to a re-victimisation[40]. Another is that it requires careful moderation if the victim is not to have unrealistic and oppressive expectations of the offender’s obligations. Yet another is that we must be careful never to allow the understandable anger of an individual victim – much less the prejudice of public opinion – to determine decisions. Criminal justice must not be reduced to the whim of a public clamour which so often will be weighted against the marginalised. There is debate about whether restorative justice is best implemented within the state’s criminal justice system or as an alternative to it and there are worries in some quarters that restorative justice could become a mere management technique in the hands of an essentially punitive justice system[41].

 

66. The point of transforming the individual offender is not primarily to encourage the victim or family to forgive, again notwithstanding how edifying that would be. A distinction must be maintained between the moral duties owed to the victim of a crime by the perpetrator, on the one hand, and the debt incurred to society on the other by the criminal’s attempt to superimpose his or her will as against the common good. It is because society is punishing the transgression against the common good, not acting as a wronged individual that we can make some sense of the symbolic nature of punishment.

 

 

Justice for the Prisoner

 

67. In coming to live among us and in dying, without protest, on the Cross, God chose vulnerability. But for many in our society their vulnerability is enforced. Popular opinion would not include in that category the 74,700 men and women who are today[42] confined in our nation’s prisons. They are not seen as individuals in need of the love of God so much as people who have been hell bent on destroying that in the lives of other people. And yet when Jesus, from the Cross, spoke the words: “Today you will be with me in paradise[43]” he was speaking to a convicted thief.

 

68. All the research shows that the men and women in British prisons today are extraordinarily disadvantaged and vulnerable individuals. The Government’s Social Exclusion Unit has found that, compared with the general population, prisoners are thirteen times as likely to have been in care as a child, thirteen times as likely to have been unemployed, ten times as likely to have been a regular truant or excluded from school and five times more likely to have been in receipt of benefits. A survey by the Chief Inspector of Prisons showed that two thirds of young prisoners have no educational qualifications and that one in five had no idea where they would live when they left detention. A study by the crime reduction charity Nacro showed that 60 per cent of young prisoners came from unstable living conditions, 40 per cent had been neglected or abused as children, and that 72 per cent of prisoners had some kind of mental health problem[44]  –  14 times the level in the general population. Another showed that 25 per cent of remand prisoners – one in five of whom are subsequently acquitted – had attempted suicide before entering prison[45]. Suicides are a growing problem in our prisons.

 

69. What such statistics show is that it is dangerous to make assumptions which straightforwardly equate criminality with moral degeneracy – or limit the issue of justice to the determination of guilt or innocence on a particular offence. A full understanding of justice is inevitably more complicated. Where offenders come from broken and impoverished homes and have been reared in an atmosphere of contempt for the police and the law, and whose parents had made no serious attempt to keep them in school, the quality of the moral training they received must be seriously impaired. One of the roles which it is incumbent on a properly humane prison regime is to rectify this. Yet this in an area in which the present system is notably deficient:

 

 

Education

i. Half of all prisoners are at, or below, the level expected of an 11 year old in reading[46]. Two-thirds cannot compete with the average junior-school leaver in numeracy, and four-fifths in writing[47]. One recent inspection found 70 per cent of young offenders (aged 16 to 21) had reading ages of a seven-year-old[48]. Research highlighted by the Government’s Social Exclusion Unit has found that prisoners who do not take part in education or training are three times more likely to be re-convicted. By contrast basic skills learning in prison can contribute to a reduction in re-offending of around a third[49].

 

ii.Yet of the £38,000 a year it costs the state to keep an individual in prison – a figure which it has famously been said well exceeds the cost of sending a boy to Eton – an average of just £1,185 per prisoner was spent on education in prison in the year 2002-2003[50]. This is less than half the cost of the £2,590 spent annually on the average pupil in a normal secondary school for the basic education on which many prisoners have missed out. Overcrowding means individual prisoners are facing reductions in their access to prison education budgets and programmes to reduce re-offending. In a city centre prison like HMP Manchester the budget covers only 12 per cent of prisoners[51]. The average number of hours per week prisoners spend on formal education is just six hours[52].

 

 

Drugs

iii. The number of people in prison as a direct result of drugs is high and growing. Some 16 per cent of male sentenced prisoners were convicted of drug offences in 2002, compared with just 7 pc in 1993[53]. And there is a much wider group of prisoners whose offence is in some way drug related. Shoplifting, burglary, vehicle crime and theft can all be linked to drug misuse. According to the Government’s updated drug strategy, heroin, crack and cocaine users are responsible for 50 per cent of these crimes[54]. Even where there is no direct correlation there is an association: around two-thirds of prisoners use illegal drugs in the year before imprisonment – at least double the proportion of illegal drug users in the general 16-29 year old population[55]. Alcohol is a serious problem too. The Office for National Statistics says 63 per cent of sentenced male prisoners and 39 per cent of female sentenced prisoners admit to hazardous drinking at a level that carries the risk of physical or mental harm. Of these, nearly half have a severe alcohol dependency problem. These are more likely to be younger prisoners aged 16 to 24 who have committed violent offences[56]. Yet despite this one city centre prison visited had only one weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for more than 1,200 prisoners[57].

 

1.                                                            iv.      Yet many prisoners have never received help with their drug problems. The Social Exclusion Unit report estimated that in one prison 70 per cent of prisoners came into jail with a drugs misuse problem but that 80 per cent of these never had any contact with drug treatment services. There are drug treatment and rehabilitation programmes in 60 prisons aimed at prisoners with moderate to severe drug misuse problems but in 2002-2003 just 4,386 prisoners entered these programmes and the target for 2004 was a paltry 5,700 treatments per year[58]. And though nine out of ten young adult prisoners say they use drugs prior to imprisonment only one in three Young Offender Institutions provide drug treatment programmes. Rather many prisoners continue to get access to illicit drugs while they are inside prison: three-quarters of prisoners admit to taking drugs while behind bars, 53 per cent using heroin, and 55 per cent cannabis[59]. Likewise proper treatment and support services in the community for prisoners leaving custody are very limited; where such programmes do exist newly-released prisoners often find themselves often viewed as ‘new cases’ and have to join the back of the queue.

 

 

Families

1.                                                              v.      A stable supportive family throughout a prisoner’s sentence is a key factor in preventing re-offending, according to Martin Narey, the chief executive of the new National Offender Management Service. “I firmly believe that we should do as much as possible to sustain family relationships at what for many will be an especially traumatic time in their lives,” he has written[60]. The Home Office has also acknowledged that: research indicates that good family ties can reduce a prisoner’s risk of re-offending by as much as six times.

 

1. vi.    Yet many prisoners are still held a long way from their homes. At the end of September 2003, some 26,134 prisoners were held over 50 miles from their committal court town and 10,880 were held over 100 miles away[61]. On average prisoners are held 53 miles from home[62]. During their sentence 45 per cent of offenders lose contact with their families and many young offenders lose touch with their parents[63]. The number of prison visits has fallen by a third in the past five years despite a more than 20 per cent rise in the prison population[64]. The Prison Service should add to its Key Performance Indicators one reflecting closeness to home and facilities to arrange visits.

 

1. Meanwhile the recommendations for a new system of smaller community prisons seem no nearer realisation than when they were made by Lord Woolf in his magisterial report on prisons after the Strangeways Riot in 1991[65] – which in the words of the then Conservative Home Secretary Kenneth Baker set out ‘a blueprint for a humane and riot-free prison system’.

 

1.                                                         viii.      We are also concerned that insufficient consideration is given by the criminal justice system to the effect of prison upon the families of prisoners. There are a number of issues which need to be addressed, including: the social impact of guilt by association (the very term “prisoners’ families” reveals how the spouses and children of offenders are defined by the crime of their family member); the psychological influence on children of having the police arrive to arrest a parent, sometimes in the middle of the night; the cognitive dissonance produced when family members do not recognise the individual described in court as the person they know from home; the tendency of family members sometimes to blame themselves in some way for the offence; and the physical problems of families who find themselves forced to move homes or schools because of the stigma of the offence. We would like to see all of these factors given more weight by the authorities, and often by the congregations of local churches.

 

 

Mental health

1.                                                            ix.      Many prisoners have significant mental health problems. Some 72 per cent of male and 70 per cent of female sentenced prisoners suffer from two or more mental health disorders. These figures compare with just 5 per cent of men and 2 per cent of women in the general population[66]. Neurotic and personality disorders are particularly prevalent – 40 per cent of male and 63 per cent of female sentenced prisoners have a neurotic disorder, over three times the level in the general population. A significant number of prisoners suffer from a psychotic disorder (7 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women, which is, respectively, 14 and 23 times the level found in the general population). There has been a 77 per cent increase in reported incidents of self-harm amongst prisoners: 17,294 in 2003[67].

 

1.                                                              x.      Yet there is a shortage of mental health professionals working in prisons. Only 155 staff, working in 42 mental health in-reach teams, were working with prisoners as of March 2003 – which is the equivalent of one mental health professional for every 322 prisoners suffering from a mental health disorder. Prison regimes do little to address the mental health needs of prisoners; according to the Prison Reform Trust, 28 per cent of male sentenced prisoners with evidence of psychosis reported spending 23 or more hours a day in their cells – over twice the proportion of those without mental health problems[68]. Prisoners with severe mental health problems are often not diverted to more appropriate secure provision. Prison governors are concerned that prisons are being used as a backstop, or “a dustbin” in the graphic phrase of one governor[69], for individuals who should more properly be in secured mental hospitals. The Chief Inspector of Prisons has estimated, based on visits to local prisons, that 41 per cent of prisoners being held in health care centres should have been in secure NHS accommodation[70].

70.  The Church must always foster a special concern for the most marginalised. Within this country’s prisons two of the most additionally vulnerable and disadvantaged groups are women and individuals from ethnic minorities. Their situation deserves particular attention for it needs additional redress.

 

Women

 

1.                                                                i.          The number of women in prison has almost trebled over the past decade[71]. Crime by women has not increased, but the severity with which they are sentenced by the courts has – and even more sharply than the rise in harsher penalties for men. It is not clear why this should be. It may be because of society’s stereotype of the woman as carer and nurturer is the more violated by female transgression. It may be because our society does not sufficiently value the caring and parenting role. But the consequence is that women are now generally treated disproportionately harshly by courts. The criminal justice system has begun to discriminate against women.

 

1.                                                             ii.          The increased severity of sentences is significant. A women convicted of theft or handling at the Crown Court is now twice as likely to go to prison as in 1991[72]. At the magistrates’ courts the chances of a woman receiving a custodial sentence have risen seven-fold[73]. Even more alarming are the punishments being handed out for comparatively trivial offences. In 2003 more women were sent to prison for shoplifting than any other crime[74]. Often women are jailed for motoring offences: in 1991 only eight per cent of women convicted of motoring offences in the Crown Court went to prison; by 2001 that proportion had increased to 42 per cent[75]. And it is a matter of deep concern that so many female prisoners are in custody for their financial problems. We do not condone fiscal irresponsibility in individuals, but we do believe that there must be a better way of supporting and educating individuals and their families out of the downward spiral of debt. Prison is not the right response save in the most exceptional of cases.

 

1.                                                             iii.          The kind of women who end up in prison are significantly more vulnerable than their male counterparts. They are 35 times more likely than the general population to be suffering from mental disorders (male prisoners are 14 times more likely, which is bad enough). They are seven times more likely to be drug abusers (men are five times). Some 71 per cent of female prisoners have absolutely no educational qualifications. As many as half are estimated to have experienced physical abuse and one in three have undergone sexual abuse. In addition many women prisoners have very limited experience of stable employment; 46 per cent in one survey had not worked in the previous five years. Some 15 per cent of sentenced women prisoners had previously been admitted to a mental hospital and 37 per cent had previously attempted suicide[76].

 

 

The children of women in prison

 

1.                                                      iv.      Women prisoners are much less likely than the general population to be able to call on the support of a stable relationship, but more likely to have childcare responsibilities: 55 per cent of women prisoners have at least one child under age of 16. At least a 20 per cent were living as lone parents before imprisonment (compared to 9 per cent in the general population). It is estimated that 150,000 children have a parent in prison.[77] This is a cause for grave concern.

 

1.                                                        v.      As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

 

“The family is the original cell of social life. . . Authority, stability and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to honour God and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society.”[78]

 

vi. Depriving children of a family life by sending their only parent to prison is a step which should be avoided in all but the most serious and violent crimes. Imprisoning women has been shown to have little positive impact on overall crime levels, but it does have extremely negative consequences for families. The majority of women serve very short sentences. In 2002, 40 per cent served a sentence of three months or less, and nearly three-quarters were sentenced to 12 months or less[79]. Few would argue that such short sentences have much of a deterrent effect, nor are they long enough to institute a proper programme of reform. But they are long enough to ensure that around a third[80] of women prisoners lose their homes, and often their possessions, whilst in prison. And many of the children are taken into care[81].

 

                                                        vii. Research by the Home Office shows that 66 per cent of female prisoners are mothers. Each year it is estimated that more than 17,700 children are separated from their mother by imprisonment[82]. Just 5 per cent of women prisoners’ children remain in their own home once their mother has been sentenced[83]. As the Second Vatican Council stated: “The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute”[84]. We find it impossible to accept that all of these women need to be in prison and all these children deprived of a mother.

 

viii. Even where children are not taken into care, the system places additional obstacles to the maintenance of close family ties. At the end of 2003 half of all women in prison were held more than 50 miles from their home town. A quarter were held more than 100 miles away[85]. With so many being held a long way from their homes visits from families are more difficult. One Home Office study found that only half the women who had lived with their children – or been in contact prior to imprisonment – had received a visit since going to prison[86]. All this is in addition to the increased financial, housing, emotional and health problems which prisoners’ families and children often experience during a sentence.

 

                                                           ix. It is not even-handed for the courts and authorities to disregard the family dependants of prisoners. This is especially so when it is plain for all to see that it is the mother rather than the father who is the effective carer for children in most single parent families. To hide behind the protestation that ‘the law must treat offenders of both genders equally’ is disingenuous when this supposedly ‘even-handed’ treatment results in the punishment of children.

                                                             x. It is not right that the consequences of the crimes of the mothers should be visited on the children. The innocent children of women prisoners should not be especially disadvantaged by the criminal justice system which is carried out in our name. Immediate steps should be taken by the prison authorities to strengthen the possibility of maintaining ties between women in prison and their children. Judges, magistrates and legislators should be encouraged to find, as a matter of urgency, alternatives to prison for mothers. It is not acceptable for the authorities simply to ignore this challenge.

 

Ethnic minorities

 

1.                                                              xi.    The rising number of black, Asian and other ‘non-white’ prisoners is a cause for concern, especially since in some prisons there appears to have been a culture of racism over many years. What is particularly alarming is the disproportionate rise in the number of people from ethnic minorities being jailed; in 1999-2002 the general prison population rose by 12 per cent but the number of black prisoners went up by 51 per cent. Black people make up just 2 per cent of the general population but now constitute 12 per cent of prisoners. Some 24 per cent of male, and 31 per cent of female, prisoners are now from ethnic minorities where, if they went pro rata with their representation among the general population the figure would be just 9 per cent[87]. Overall there are 18,000 prisoners from a minority ethnic group and there are now three prisons where minority ethnic prisoners are in the majority, though there are few staff from ethnic minority communities. There are now twice as many black males in prison as at university. The Government needs to investigate whether members of ethnic communities are more susceptible to be sent to prison than their white counterparts. Government also needs new sensitivity to the feeling among many in the Islamic community that Muslim youths, many of them with previously impeccably good character and no police record, received disproportionately harsh sentences after the riots across northern towns in 2001.

 

71. To take note of the vulnerability of prisoners’ backgrounds is not to excuse moral failure. Sin, as Pope John Paul II says, “is always a personal act. . . The human person is free. This truth cannot be disregarded in order to place the blame for individuals’ sins on external factors such as structures, systems or other people”[88]. Criminals must be treated as responsible moral agents; not everyone in care, who truanted from school, or who takes drugs becomes a criminal. Biblical justice is as clear as legal justice that those who commit crimes cannot escape responsibility for their acts. Punishment is proper and the public as a whole must be protected from such further acts on the criminal’s part.

 

72. But it must also be stressed that a comprehensive sense of justice requires that the type of punishment should routinely assist all offenders to retake their place eventually in normal society. Where offenders come from backgrounds of vulnerability our society has a duty to help redress those shortcomings. Otherwise we are building what the Pope elsewhere calls “structures of sin” which “grow stronger, spread, and become the source of other sins, and so influence people’s behaviour”[89]. Those who cause or support evil, or who exploit it, are of course culpable of sin. But so too, he says, are “those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order.[90]”

 

73. A full sense of justice has to find a way to balance these personal and social aspects and, in doing so, balance the ethical seriousness of sin with the possibilities of mercy, compassion, forgiveness, hope and redemption.

 

 

 

B: MERCY

 

Mercy in the Old Testament

 

1. Two names for God stand out in the Old Testament. Jewish scholars long ago noted that the two traditions from which these are drawn perceive God to be acting in two distinct ways. The first name, Elohim, which we traditionally translate as God, frames the Divine in terms of justice and the right and faithful ordering of relationships. The second, the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), usually translated as Yahweh, Jehovah or Lord, is associated with a God imbued with mercy. In the stories of the Old Testament, beginning with the two different accounts of the Creations in Genesis, it is through both justice and mercy that God is revealed in relationship with the people of the world and with all creation. God discloses that justice alone is not sufficient, it remains incomplete without mercy. Both justice and mercy characteriseIsrael’s experience of God. This is a two-way process. It affects how the people ofIsraelare shaped by God’s actions in history. And it is on the basis of justice and mercy thatIsraelconstantly invokes God’s action.

1.  It is to God’s mercy that the people ofIsraelconstantly appeal whenever they become aware – often at the prompting of the prophets – of their infidelity in having broken, on many occasions, their covenant with God. It is there at the beginning of the history of the Judges,in the prayer of Solomon at the inauguration of theTemple,in the prophetic work of Micah,in the consoling assurances given by Isaiah,in the cry of the Jews in exile,and the renewal of the covenant after the return from exile. Mercy signifies a special power of love, which prevails over the sin and infidelity of the Chosen People. Without God’s mercy,Israelwould not exist.

76. In Jewish and Christian thinking there is thus a profound and continuous tradition which understands both justice and mercy as intimately related and together proceeding from the very nature of God. The calculus of justice can never exhaust all the circumstances and dimensions of human existence. Mercy is the creative response to the limitations of justice because it arises as genuine act of freedom for it can never be coerced or required. It is a sort of excess. True mercy, John Paul II says in the encyclical Dives in Misericordia – the Latin of which signifies that God is Rich in Mercy – is “the most profound source of justice[91]”. Some theologians affirm that mercy is the greatest of the attributes and perfections of God. It is the mystery of mercy which reveals to us that within history is a sacred history of salvation, a new possibility for being human.

 

 

 

Mercy in the New Testament

 

77. This experience and witness of Israelfinds its expression in the person of Christ. Jesus preached “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy[92]” – an axiom which the present Pope has said constitutes, in a certain sense, a synthesis of the whole of the Gospel[93]. He has also made mercy one of the principal themes of his preaching: mercy is at the heart of the parables of the prodigal son[94], the Good Samaritan[95], and the merciless servant [96]. But most of all Christ embodied the love of “the Father of mercies”[97] in his death on the Cross which is “the overwhelming encounter of divine transcendent justice with love: that ‘kiss’ given by mercy to justice[98]” .

 

78. One incident in the ministry of Jesus is particularly instructive. When Christ is confronted with a woman caught in the act of adultery[99] he does not condone or excuse her offence. But he manifests his trust in the redemptive power of mercy by forgiving the woman, saying to her: “Go and sin no more.” And as a prelude to that he focuses attention on the hypocrisy of her accusers, saying: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Jesus was here not operating within the formal framework of the law. This was not a court but there were statutory codes of jurisprudence which required a specific penalty: that the woman be stoned to death. Jesus sets these aside, again prompting questions about the difference between legal and divine justice and about when forgiveness and compassion are more important than retribution. In this Christ more fully reveals a God who is “rich in mercy”[100]. Mercy is contrasted with God’s justice, and shown to be “not only more powerful than that justice but also more profound[101]”. God’s total love is given not because we have earned it, but because we need it.

 

79. How are we to apply this to the criminal system in our own time? The question is problematic. Mercy, as Jesus showed, is necessary for justice to complete its personal and social end. It does not abolish the order of justice but is the freedom to transpose justice into redemption. It is what makes society humane. Yet because it is not bound by any law, it operates as a personal and intimate act of the moral imagination and it is difficult to see how this can ever be reduced to an abstract principle. How, then, do we institutionalise mercy within our criminal justice system?

 

80. It is important to say that mercy is not to be confused with weakness. As Pope John Paul II reiterates: “In no passage of the Gospel message does forgiveness, or mercy as its source, mean indulgence toward evil, toward scandals, toward injury or insult. In any case, reparation for evil and scandal, compensation for injury, and satisfaction for insult are conditions for forgiveness[102].” . The Christian option is not the soft option. We are instructed to love our enemies[103] and love, in the definition of Aquinas[104], means seeking the good of the other. Yet this, as every parent knows, is not the same as being lenient or permissive. We have, therefore, to consider what is the best way to show love to those convicted of a criminal offence

 

 

The philosophy of punishment

 

1. By what right does our society deprive people of their liberty? Criminologists generally offer four justifications for punishment. It is to exact retribution;  to remove criminals from society and restrain them committing further crime; to deter others from committing the same crime; and to reform offenders[105]. The general assumption is that these various intentions are to a considerable degree, simultaneously achievable in an attempt to balance an acknowledgement of the moral culpability of the criminal with the possibilities of reform and rehabilitation.  It is worth considering whether this is indeed possible.

 

Retribution

82. The word ‘retribution’ has picked up pejorative connotations in common usage. There is something about it that smacks of the vindictive and the primitive. It is important, therefore, to strip away this emotional undertone. Philosophically the rationale of retribution is the restoration of the social equilibrium which the offence disturbed. The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is as Pope John Paul II puts it “to redress the disorder caused by the offence”[106].

 

83. In this approach to punishment the concept of desert is central. Since individuals are free moral agents who must take responsibility for their actions, those who offend against what society deems to be acceptable deserve to be punished. (There can be, of course, as in the case of unjust laws, situations in which acts which are illegal are not wrong, and there is a significant tradition in Catholic thinking about justice and law and when it is appropriate to break the law in good conscience. But where morality and the law coincide the principle of desert on issues of crime and punishment is a central one). It is worth underlining that the principle of desert also insists that this retribution must, in the degree and character of the punishment, reflect the seriousness of the offence. Our criminal law is predicated on the assumption that society excludes and diminish offenders with similar force to the violence of the crime they have committed. Punishment is immoral if it is disproportionate or contains any element of vindictiveness.

 

84. The classic expression of this ethic of retribution is the Old Testament lex talonis: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But in addition to retribution this also embodies the principle of proportionality, that is to say only an eye for an eye, only a tooth for a tooth. Or, as Shakespeare put it, when justice demands a pound of flesh, it requires exactly a pound of flesh[107]. The prohibition on unlimited revenge is reflected in a long Judeo-Christian tradition of taming the instinct of vengeance. Punishment is legitimate, but as penal reformers like Jeremy Bentham argued, must be proportionate and unnecessary suffering minimised. Popular expressions which express the principle of retributivism, ‘the punishment must fit the crime’, ‘just deserts’ and the like, can all be regarded – contrary, often, to general usage – as demonstrating balance and proportionality, ruling out sentences which are too harsh as well as those which are too soft. In such an approach punishment is not meant to be reformatory.

 

85. Those who argue that retribution is the primary purpose of imprisonment could logically argue that the guilty should be punished even if this achieves no consequential good. Such an approach is generally rejected in favour of a more utilitarian outlook in which ‘what actually works?’ is seen to be the prime question to address. One of the reasons a retributive approach has fallen from favour is the perception that it does not work when it comes to making society safer. Being tough is not necessarily synonymous with being effective. Yet it is worth noting that such empiricism contains an ethical difficulty. A purely utilitarian outlook must reject notions of “just desert” and yet desert is central to society’s right to deprive a person of their liberty: offenders are punished because what they did is wrong, not simply because it is convenient for the rest of society. The punishment must also be seen to ‘fit the crime’ whereas, under a utilitarian approach it would be legitimate to argue for severe penalties for even small crimes to maximize their deterrent value. We shall return to this when we come to consider the balance between individual rights and the common good. Retributivism is now intellectually out of fashion, and yet its concept of desert emanating from the key notion that we are all responsible for our actions, is not one which our society can afford to discard.

 

Incapacitation

86. Another traditional justification for incarcerating criminals is that prisons eliminate the immediate threat to the rest of society simply by removing offenders from circulation and placing them where, while they are behind bars at any rate, they can do no further damage. There is a superficial attraction to that argument, when it work s in combination with the retributive principle of desert; without that it would justify locking up suspects without due process – which is one of the reasons why we have such grave reservations about the current British Government practice of using immigration regulations to detain, without trial, foreigners suspected of terrorism. (There are serious prima facie human rights violations involved in this.) The Government needs to reconsider its approach here. Indeed present penal practice relies on the justification of incapacitation when a prisoner is held for longer than the crime itself merits primarily for the safety of the public[108].

 

87. Where the principle of incapacitation becomes alarming is when  large portions of the prison population are merely “warehoused” as is inescapably the case at present. This is of particular concern when – despite all the rhetoric about reform and rehabilitation – what most prisoners actually experience amounts to little more than incapacitation through containment. Prisons without hope are mere storage pens, as the Catholic bishops of Ontariorecently put it. The purpose of sentencing ought to be to contribute positively to a well-functioning society, rather than just to achieve control and damage limitation. Our present penal policy is tantamount to a sentence of banishment and little more. And in many cases, as Pope John Paul II has noted “detention seems to create more problems than it solves[109]”. A philosophy of straightforward expulsion does little to help either the offender or the victim.

 

Deterrence

1. The idea that the prime justification for prison is that it deters potential criminals would always be dubious. If deterrence alone were a sufficient validation this would work even if those punished were not guilty: to say that may sound a philosophical quibble but it illustrates a key concern about the business of deterrence. “If there were a law prescribing a mandatory death sentence for any driver going through a red traffic light you can be sure that no-one, at least no-one sane or sober, would commit the offence,” as Lord Justice Laws has put it, pointing out that in practice deterrence is always constrained by the proportionality inherent in the principle of retribution[110].

 

1. There is also a powerful practical objection to relying on deterrence as a rationale for the present policy of harsher sentences. There is little research on the efficacy of deterrence, rather it proceeds from a common sense assumption which is hard to evaluate. It may well be that deterrence is more of a pious hope in the minds of those who live reasonably pleasant day-to-day lives than a practical reality. “Fear of imprisonment may deter those who have a job, a home and a family but not those who have no hope of achieving or retaining them,” as the last Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham wrote after five years in the job[111]. There are a significant number of criminals whose behaviour seems impervious to ‘deterrence’ or the boundaries of normal behaviour in a prison regime designed to punish and contain; rather they emerge from what have been called ‘universities of crime’ more criminally skilled, more resentful or angry and more psychologically disposed to offend. A far more effective deterrent than severe sentences, as the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, has pointed out, is increasing the chances of the criminal being caught. The Carter Report has stated that there is no evidence that a 15 month sentence is any less effective than an 18 month sentence in terms of reducing re-offending[112].

 

 

Reform and Reparation

88. Of all the justifications for punishment the one which insists it should be for reform and rehabilitation seems most obviously to coincide with a Christian anthropology. But it is worth noting that even where good and effective rehabilitative programmes are in place they do not constitute in themselves a sufficient justification for imprisonment. Were that the case such programmes could be infinitely extendable – which would offend against natural justice.

 

 

1. What all this points us to is that there are inadequacies in all of the theories on which society traditionally justifies the basis on which society determines punishment. None of the usual justifications is enough in itself. This is important because political discussions on penal policy often turn around considerations of which of these four criteria should be dominant. Yet this is a false question. It is like asking someone who is hungry, thirsty, cold and tired whether they most need food, water, warmth or rest. All of us hold ambivalent or even contradictory views on prison. We know that prison is destructive, and yet we want it to reflect our outrage at the seriousness of certain crimes. Society wants simultaneously to be both punitive and merciful but our over-riding impulse is what has been called “our addiction to vengeance[113]”.

 

90. Some sociologists suggest that the explanation for this lies in the different ways individuals conceptualise the issue at different times. Society’s attitudes to crime and punishment are kaleidoscopic and change according to how the question is framed. As bishops we disagree. The key question is whether the four standard aims of punishment are competitive or complementary and whether the inadequacies in one approach can be said to balance out those of the other three.

 

1. Specific circumstances suggest that this catch-all approach fails different groups in different ways. The needs of young offenders are very different from those of prisoners on remand. The responsibilities of women in prison can differ significantly from those of men. Short-term sentences have traditionally been supposed to have more deterrent value than reformative purpose – which is why short-term prisoners are moved from one prison to another so much and almost never given any reformative assistance. Moreover the deterrent effectiveness of short sentences is increasingly being challenged by criminologists. Long-term prisoners have very different needs, not just in terms of basic skills training and drug or behaviour therapy, but also in terms of the maintenance of hope and the creation of a sense of purpose. Which is why we would like to see a greater range of prison regimes for different prisoners. Nor does it seem safe to assume that what deters a prisoner from the prospect of re-offending automatically coincides with what deters potential criminals from offending in the first place. The gathering of empirical evidence clearly has something important to offer. But so does the perspective of Christianity.

 

 

Christian priorities on punishment

 

1. In John’s Gospel Jesus places the authority of Pilate to pass sentence on him under the authority of God[114]. But what does this mean in practice? When Jesus took up the scroll in the synagogue of his home town on the day that he inaugurated his public ministry the text from which he read was Isaiah:

 

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

for he has anointed me

bring the good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives,

sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim a year of favour to the Lord[115].

 

In this list, proclaiming liberty to captives is the instruction which falls most uncomfortably on modern ears.

 

93. In this passage Isaiah may have had in mind the Israelites being set free from slavery in Egypt. Or perhaps he was thinking of those returning to their homes from exile in Babylon. Or he may have been referring to those Jews who had sold themselves into service to their fellow Israelites in years of poor harvest and whom the Jewish scriptures decreed were to be liberated every seventh year, with the cancellation of all debts on the 49^th year, the Year of Jubilee.

 

94. But with Jesus that meaning was enriched. The biblical injunction to set the captives free became an instruction to liberate people from all that enslaves them – from their own sin as well as others’ oppression. In today’s penal system that imperative covers a wide range of imprisonment, in some cases literally to physically free individuals or categories of offender who would better be punished outside of prison, in other cases to help liberate those in prison from the social and psychological conditions which have nurtured their criminality. In each case the paramount criterion must be what leads the individual and society towards redemption.

 

95. That is not to say that certain individuals should not be in prison. The protection of the public requires that dangerous individuals should be physically constrained. The commandment to love our enemies does not necessarily involve us in doing what they want, but rather in making a judgement about what is best for them – ideally a judgement with which the prisoner will eventually come to agree. The business of liberating captives can be as much about how we treat those who are in prison as well as about considering whether certain offenders should be behind bars at all. The answer to the question “by what right does our society imprison people?” is a complex one. It is that society has a duty to the common good which involves public protection, a right to deter those who are tempted to rip further the social fabric, and a responsibility to reform and rehabilitate those who have offended.

 

96. The insight into the relationship of justice and mercy is what Christian reflection brings to society’s questioning about justice and punishment. The Christian understanding of the purpose of punishment cannot be one that is purely punitive nor deterrent. As we have seen, the thrust of the Judeo-Christian tradition, made most explicit in the ministry of Jesus, insists that the primary aim of any penal system must be to reform and restore. Punishment should contain retribution, in its best and most balanced sense, but more importantly it must be reformative and rehabilitative. Moreover justice should be restorative and involve reparation which addresses the condition of both victim and perpetrator, since both stand within the dynamics of justice and mercy, hope and forgiveness.

 

97. One of the most profound illustrations of the relationship between justice and mercy, Pope John Paul II tells us, lies in the parable of The Prodigal Son[116], despite neither the words justice or mercy appearing anywhere in the text. It shows, he says in Dives in Misericordia, that mercy springs from the sinner rediscovering his or her human dignity and beseeching forgiveness. Again mercy is not sought as of right but through an appreciation of rights having been forfeited. Mercy is not implored by third parties but is provoked by the repentance of the person who has erred. That mercy unites the beneficiary and the bestower. “It becomes more evident that love is transformed into mercy when it is necessary to go beyond the precise norm of justice[117]”. When this happens, the person who is the object of mercy does not feel humiliated, but rather found again and restored to value:

 

“Mercy becomes an indispensable element for shaping mutual relationships between people, in a spirit of deepest respect for what is human, and in a spirit of mutual brotherhood. It is impossible to establish this bond between people, if they wish to regulate their mutual relationships solely according to the measure of justice. In every sphere of interpersonal relationships justice must, so to speak, be ‘corrected’ to a considerable extent by that love which, as St. Paul proclaims, ‘is patient and kind’ or, in other words, possesses the characteristics of that merciful love which is so much of the essence of the Gospel and Christianity[118]”.

 

98. This contains an important insight for both victim and offender. For the precondition of mercy is that the offender does not deserve some advantage; he or she has nothing to demand as of right. Understood in this way, mercy might perhaps be less offensive to the family of a murdered child when that murderer is released. “Mercy is manifested in its true and proper aspect when it restores to value, promotes and draws good from all the forms of evil existing in the world and in man,[119]” the Pope says. It also offers an important insight for the rest of us. Responsible citizens, like the prodigal’s older brother who kept the faith, may baulk at a merciful reaction from authority, yet this should not be decisive.

 

99. In other words where claims of retribution and redemption conflict Christian mercy dictates that it must be the latter which takes priority. Some secularists will dispute this, saying that this order of priorities is by no means self-evident. Yet Christians know, as in the parable of the Good Shepherd[120] who abandons 99 sheep to go in search of a single lost animal the priorities of a self-giving God can seem strange to men and women. “Although justice is an authentic virtue in man, and in God signifies transcendent perfection,” says the Pope, “nevertheless love is ‘greater’ than justice: greater in the sense that it is primary and fundamental. Love, so to speak, conditions justice and, in the final analysis, justice serves love.[121]”

 

 

 

 

The story of Frank Cook

 

When Frank Cook burst into tears he crossed a threshold of understanding which marks the beginning of real therapeutic activity. Frank Cook believes that the corrupted values of his friends and family set him into a criminal career, and that this deviancy was confirmed by his experiences of penal institutions before he went to Grendon. But in his autobiography[122] he puts his finger on something much more than simple deviancy amplification. He describes something deeper and far more resonant. “You can’t love yourself and go around hurting people. It doesn’t work like that,” he writes. “You hate yourself and that’s why you hate everything else.”

 

Love had been missing all his life. “I can’t remember kissing my mum or cuddling her. My father was evil and wicked, but she should have got us away from there”. Elsewhere he says: “I can safely say that I have never been in love in my whole life. Mums and dads give love – mine didn’t”. Significantly he comments that “the first person that I felt love from was Dr Gillett”.

 

That was the beginning of a process which led him to the point where he says “the life of a gangster no longer held any appeal. I could make a difference and actually help people, which was a new and satisfying experience for me. Against all the odds I had become a role model and that brought with it responsibility.” It was not exactly love, but it was the closest Frank was at that point able to get. He was released from jail in 1996 at the age of 43 having spent all but 16 years of his life in some form of institution. The years since then have been far from easy, but thankfully he has been crime free. He was, he says, “filled with the determination to succeed”. So far, he has done precisely that.

 

 

II: The individual and society

 

 

 

The story of the man with the ironing board

 

One rainy morning a prison visitor was moving through Brixton prison. She was on C wing, a busy wing which the prisoners refer to as The Fours because it has four levels. She walked up the stairs, looking for a prisoner on the top level who had requested a visit. As she climbed the prisoners stepped aside saying “Good morning, Miss” or “How’s it going?” or just “Hi” but everyone she passes said something or nodded.

 

Everybody was out of their cells. She looked around. There were men in clusters and milling around, rolling up cigarettes, drinking tea from huge blue plastic mugs, shouting and talking. It was difficult to move around. Then she noticed a man ironing at the very end of the level. Without any conscious intent the visitor negotiated several groups of men hanging around cell doors and walked up to him.

“Good morning” she said

He looked startled.

“Good morning”

“I’m wondering if you can tell me where John Smith is?

“Yes. He’s over there.”

 

She turned and there, out of the sea of heads, was the man she had come to see. “Thanks,” she said.

“Who are you?” the ironing board man asked.

“I’m a counsellor. I come to Brixton to talk with people.”

“How do I get to see you?”

“Well, I can put your name down.”

“Yes. Put my name down please. I would like to see a counsellor. I’ve never heard of one before!”

She wrote down his name and then went over to see her client.

 

 

The rights of the individual

 

1. Human beings have a range of obligations and rights. Some of these are bestowed by the mutual agreement of society. But others are inherent to us as individuals. When considering questions of crime and punishment it is important to have a clear understanding of which rights and responsibilities are conferred by society and which are intrinsic to us.

 

1. 101.                      Conferred rights

As individuals we inhabit a variety of different spheres. Our identity or ‘status’ is defined by that sphere, and these definitions can vary from one sphere to another. What it is possible for us to do, and to claim, will vary from one area of social activity to another. For all the talk about ours being a ‘consumer society’ our obligations and rights will vary depending upon whether that sphere is education, health, immigration, shopping or the more general framework of the law. The state imposes different kinds of relationships between itself and citizens in different areas. These relationships, and the status they confer and regulate, may also be determined differently at different times and there will always be a measure of fluidity in their construction and application depending on the nature of the society and the various pressures on it or expectations it has. Asking ‘by what right’ and ‘who decides’ in different circumstances is part of the business of political debate.

 

102.                      Intrinsic rights

Yet a major strand of the Christian theological tradition attempts to ground the status of the individual in certain matters as an irreducible. Human dignity is non-contingent. This is summed up in the idea that every individual is created in the image of God (the imago Dei, as the Latin has it). This has given to Catholic social teaching a clear focal point: the human person is the clearest reflection of God that we have. And because God became flesh, and entered the human race in person in Jesus Christ, as true God and true man, Christ challenges us to see God’s presence in our neighbour, especially the neighbour who suffers or who lacks what is essential to human flourishing. In relieving our neighbour’s suffering and meeting our neighbour’s needs, we are also serving Christ. For the Christian, therefore, there can be no higher privilege and duty. As our 1996 document on The Common Good put it:

 

We believe each person possesses a basic dignity that comes from God, not from any human quality or accomplishment, not from race or gender, age or economic status. The test therefore of every institution or policy is whether it enhances or threatens human dignity and indeed human life itself. Policies which treat people as only economic units, or policies which reduce people to a passive state of dependency on welfare, do not do justice to the dignity of the human person[123].

 

1. Biblical justice contains a bias towards those who are poor, marginalised or vulnerable. Catholic social teaching therefore contains a “preferential option for the poor[124]”. Scripture tells us we will be judged by our response to the “least of these[125]”, in which we see the suffering face of Christ himself. Humanity is one family and the vulnerable are not a burden; they are our brothers and sisters. We must always keep in mind that, whatever their offence, every criminal is also a sister or brother for whom Christ died. This notion – that the human individual has an irreducible status which is not at the disposal of the State and in which all rights and obligations are ultimately grounded – is, of course, not particular to Christianity. It is a view of human dignity shared by Judaism and Islam and by many people of good will. Yet it draws unique sustenance from the doctrine of creation, further developed in Christian revelation about the person and work of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, it gives each person an integral status which is beyond that contingently conferred by the state.

 

104. This insight has a number of ramifications. It is important to remember that it applies as much to the victim as to the prisoner. It also bears upon our responsibilities as well as our rights: the imago Dei constitutes the basis of obligations to others – for we all carry the obligation to see God in all others, recognising and honouring them – irrespective of wealth, power, prestige, utility or behaviour. Just as justice will concern us with the fitting assignment of duties as well as rights and benefits, so mercy must reveal to us that a new possibility for being human resides in that imago Dei. In the arena of criminal justice this will self-evidently mean that certain types of behaviour by the state, torture for example, can never be countenanced. But it will also mean that a penal policy which is essentially or primarily punitive is also unacceptable – for it does not fully respect that the human person remains always open to the possibility of mercy as the necessary complement to justice and to the fulfilment of social relations.

 

 

The rights of society

 

105. The common good

Society has rights too. Catholic social teaching addresses this fact in its concept of the common good. By this is meant the whole network of social conditions which enable human individuals and groups to flourish and live a fully genuinely human life. As Pope John XXIII put it in his encyclical Mater et Magistra, it embraces “the sum total of those conditions of social living, whereby human beings are enabled more fully and more readily to achieve their own perfection[126]”. Or as the Catholic commentator Paul Vallely put it: “It does away with the old black and white distinction between selfish action and altruistic action. We each contribute to the common good because we want to live in a society which is fair and just. If it is fair and just to others it will be fair and just to us too. We do not have to agonise about our motives, nor bribe or excuse ourselves with concepts like enlightened self interest. The service of the common good is an end in itself.[127]” All are responsible for all – and not only as individuals but also collectively, at the level of society or nation.

 

1. The common good is the sum of all those social conditions which allow the human dignity of each individual to be respected, and their basic needs to be met, while at the same time giving each man and woman the freedom to assume responsibility for their own lives. The common good requires a stable secure environment within which each human being can develop their own life as autonomous individuals in a harmonious community.

 

1. 107.                      Governments therefore have a responsibility to ensure, at every level, local and central, that their policies serve the common good by protecting the weak and vulnerable, and by promoting the integral human development of everyone. The need for this is singularly urgent in a society where materialism is pervasive, where the bonds of mutual responsibility are being weakened, where moral norms are being eclipsed and where family life is fragmented. Electors have a responsibility to hold the Government to account on all this.

 

1. In The Common Good we said:

 

“The first duty of the citizen towards the common good is to ensure that nobody is marginalised in this way and to bring back into a place in the community those who have been marginalised in the past. The alternative is the creation of an alienated ‘underclass’ , bereft of any sense of participation in or belonging to the wider community. The existence of such an ‘underclass’ can never be regarded as a price worth paying in return for some other social advantages to be enjoyed by the majority.”

 

1. This has particular resonance when it comes to issues of crime and punishment. Here the demands of the common good require public authorities to do all they can to prevent crime and to safeguard people and property, and where offences are committed to hold those responsible to account and to care for the victims. Yet this cannot mean that the needs of the majority are allowed to overrule those of the minority. No advantage for any one group in a pluralistic and diverse society has the moral right to exist, as the philosopher of law John Rawls has reminded us[128], if that advantage does not in the long run benefit the most highly disadvantaged elements of that society. That includes anyone who is vulnerable, powerless and at a disadvantage – be they people on low incomes, disabled, ill or infirm, homeless or poorly housed refugees or those in prison.

 

110. In the spirit of good citizenship all members of the Catholic Church must accept their full share of responsibility for the welfare of society. And as we have said before[129] the discharge of those responsibilities is no less important than fulfilling our religious duties, indeed they are part of them. Consideration of the common good must require us to keep in mind all those who suffer: the victim and their family, the person punished and their family, and those involved in the administration of the justice and penal systems and our wider society.

 

111.                      False perceptions of the common good

The common good is not ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. At every point the rights of the offender must be protected if they are not to become the victim of the unrestricted claims of a community. What most people want on questions of criminal justice is not necessarily right, as is evidenced by opinion polls on capital punishment. What Pope John Paul II has said on this subject has a wider application here. The death penalty, he says in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, is justifiable only “in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society”[130]. He continues: “Today, however, as a result of steady improvement in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent[131].” In the same encyclical he elaborates: “Modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform[132]”.

 

112. The inference to be drawn is clear here: in a system of penal justice which is in line with human dignity – and thus, in the end, with God’s plan for man and society – the primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts must both defend public order and ensuring people’s safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behaviour and be rehabilitated. This does not mean punishment first and then rehabilitation if there are resources, time or the political will. It requires both, as an integrated purpose. Good penal practice must “correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person[133]”.

 

113. One danger must be guarded against here – both in terms of Government policy and, more generally, in how the rest of us regard those in prison. It is the risk of turning offenders into scapegoats. It is well to remember that this phenomenon has its roots in a religious practice. In Old Testament times the scapegoat was an animal which was symbolically laden with the sins of the community and then driven out into the wilderness. In our time it is not animals which are the subject of such symbolic demonisation but people. Our media-driven society has a proclivity to light upon certain individuals – notorious criminals figure prominently in this – and make them ‘the other’, offer them up and send them out into a social no-man’s-land. This process is about denying the full humanity of an individual and reducing them to their offence. Those who have offended most grievously must not be conceived as ‘other’ but rather as a living example of the potential evil which lies in every heart and against which every soul must be vigilant.

 

114. Christ insisted on the opposite of this scapegoating. In his parables and encounters he pointed to the danger of the tendency to create ‘us and them’ categories. By his death he demonstrated that even those on whom society inflicts its most loathed and despised punishment have value. He insisted that when individuals or groups embark on the diminution or oppression of anyone – setting ourselves up as judges, condemning, excluding and acting violently against them – we expose ourselves to judgement. All individuals contain within them the potential for good and evil; in all individuals both are manifest in some degree. We deny this when we brand others ‘evil’ in their person rather than in their offence. In doing so we flatter ourselves dangerously – for the corruption we condemn in others, we need to acknowledge, lurks within us too. We must remember this: in the only prayer which Jesus taught us, the Our Father, we are all enjoined to consider ourselves both as trespassers and trespassed against. We are all victims, but we are all offenders too. Indeed, as the Catholic theologian James Alison has pointed out[134], Christ revealed that one of the truest kinds of faith is that found by those who can undergo demonisation without resentment. In the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, “salvation does not bypass the history and memory of guilt but rather builds upon it[135]”. The transforming hope of redemption comes out of sin.

 

The fears of society

 

115. Much of our society’s response to crime and punishment issues is not based in the hope of redemption but in the experience of fear. Yet the evidence is that much of our fear is poorly founded. Many of the truths which the general public holds to be self-evident about crime turn out to be myths. Ask most ordinary voters and they will tell you that crime is rising, crime is violent and that everyone is now at risk of random attack in their home or on the street. Yet the facts are that crime is falling; it is down 30 per cent since 1997[136]. Most crime – 80 per cent of it – is not violent[137]. And the statistics for burglary show that those who are most vulnerable are single-parent households, the homes of the young, and those in poor inner city areas, while the figures for violence show that those most at risk are not the elderly or the middle-class but young men aged between 16-24, single parents, those in rented accommodation and the unemployed[138].

 

116. Yet perceptions of growing crime and insecurity are fostered by both politicians and the media. The recent increase in the severity of sentencing was blamed by the Carter Report specifically on the interaction between public perception, media, politicians and sentencers[139]. Successive governments have either cultivated or acquiesced in a simplistic equation between deterring crime and longer sentences when they know that the reality is far more complex. They know that measures to prevent crime, or to increase the rate of detection of those thought to have committed crimes, or to increase the proportion of those who can be justly prosecuted – would all do more to protect the public from the effects of crime than would longer sentences. In our society politicians who promise tough and decisive action on crime nowadays gain political advantage. As a result the main political parties increasingly attempt to “out-tough” one another on law and order. And because this “penal populism” thrives on misunderstanding, honest politicians are sometimes at a disadvantage. Two decades of an increasing party politicisation of the issue of law and order appear to have only made matters worse[140]. All our political parties have a responsibility to guard against irresponsible exploitation of fears over law and order to gain electoral advantage.

 

117. The role of the media must also be brought into question here. The power of the media to help the authorities in the identification of suspected criminals is welcome. This does not mean, however, that the rights of those accused of crime should be compromised in the interests of the media or the wider public. On a broader front the media play into, or even feed, public fear of crime at a time when crime is actually falling.

 

118. The problem is twofold. Some parts of the media, most particularly tabloid newspapers, offer a distorted version of the truth in their selective and sensational reporting of crime. The most dramatic examples of this are to be found in the reporting of murder cases, especially where the victims are children. As bishops we do not shirk from using the term ‘evil’ to describe some deeds and the force behind them. Yet we have grave misgivings about the readiness of some newspapers, and even some politicians, to invoke the term ‘evil’ too lightly to demonise individual human beings. Apart from being unjust to those concerned, the loose use of the term in inappropriate contexts undermines the seriousness with which evil needs to be countered. Human beings cannot facilely be separated into good and evil. Of course, it is in the disturbed nature of those responsible for the most demonic acts that they can deem themselves, even in the heinousness of their crimes, to be in the right. No individual is the sum total of the worst acts he or she has ever committed. Greater sensitivity is needed in the language society uses about crime and criminals; everyone should take care to brand the crime rather than the criminal – labelling an individual a murderer, a shoplifter or a paedophile confuses the two, and can lead us to blur the distinction between those who have committed a one-off offence and those who have a propensity to be offend again in this area. Greater clarity on such issues would be helpful.

 

119. The second problem is one of context. Focusing only on the most dramatic elements of criminal justice distorts the realities of a complex system. Indeed, the media focus on the most infamous crimes too often distracts us from attending to the mundane work of the criminal justice services with those involved in the whole gamut of crimes. Similarly, television in its drama and entertainment output, rarely depicts life behind bars in anything except the most brutal caricature of the daily reality which members of the Church encounter in our prisons.

 

120. The selectiveness of the media here has undoubtedly contributed to the unfortunate politicisation of criminal justice in recent years with the result that the public tend to over-estimate crime-rates, under-estimate the severity of actual sentences passed, and over-estimate the utility of punishment. Common public views that judges are too lenient (or at the other extreme sometimes too severe) are unrepresentative examples which are published because they are peculiarly horrifying, or at the other end of the scale, trivial. The distorting impact this has on public opinion becomes evident when members of the public are invited to take part in sentencing exercises; in these members of the public – when given sentencing guidelines and a series of different case scenarios – tend to make decisions remarkably similar to those actually imposed by the courts. Revealingly, the proportion of population who say sentences are ‘much too lenient’ has fallen recently from half to a third[141], indicating that less weight should in any case be given to the tabloid hue and cry on issues of crime and punishment.

 

121. Responsible broadcasters, journalists and politicians needs always to maintain a distinction between proper vigilance and scare-mongering. Politicians, newspaper editors and tv drama executives who promulgate punitive views, in wilful disregard of the evidence, to gain political or commercial advantage – or who seek to reinforce prejudices rather than convey the overall truth – do a great disservice to the cause of justice and should be held accountable for their actions. By contrast the Church should applaud those who demonstrate a continuing commitment to paint a more rounded picture of the scale of crime and the scope of punishment. So that when, for example, a penal institution (a prison, a place for young offenders, or for sex offenders) or beyond the prison or probation services (a mental health hospital or a reception centre for asylum-seekers) is planned for a locality the debate should not be conducted in terms of tabloid cliché responding to uninformed or ill-informed fears. Instead a debate should be fostered which eschews simplistic solutions in favour of those which acknowledge the complex interaction of issues of crime, order, justice and the common good – and which dismantle barriers to the development of non-custodial sentences or innovative programmes of support for offenders on and after their release.

 

122. There needs to be acknowledgement too of the fact that much of the debate on crime and punishment reflects what Rod Morgan, the Chief Inspector of the Probation Service for Englandand Wales, has called “the ontological uncertainties of the post-modern world” – that is to say “the criminal justice system probably acts as a lightning rod for more general anxieties”. Pope John Paul II articulated a similar insight in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, and indicated that the Church has a particular responsibility to speak out against such anxiety:

 

Modern man often anxiously wonders about the solution to the terrible tensions which have built up in the world and which entangle humanity. And if at times he lacks the courage to utter the word ‘mercy’, or if in his conscience empty of religious content he does not find the equivalent, so much greater is the need for the Church to utter this word, not only in her own name but also in the name of all the men and women of our time[142].

 

 

 

The treatment of individuals

 

123. There are three aspects of the theology of the imago Dei which are useful for our considerations. First it has a universality: it does not allow us to make detrimental distinctions on the basis of any social category – victim, criminal, elderly, racial type, educational attainment, etc. Second, as must by now be clear, the imago is not contingent upon a person’s behaviour, rather it is a status which they possess as a gift of being. And thirdly the imago is not static or inert: it is not just something that persons are but also something that they are called to become. This means that actions, intentions, and agency are intimately connected to the realisation of the imago Dei at both a personal and social level. In this sense, it carries with it a transformational possibility and dynamic. Practical evidence of this can be seen in the fact – which is all too rarely stated in discussions on penal policy – that whatever influences they are subjected to, many individuals with criminal tendencies, once they reach their mid to late twenties, thankfully, grow out of them. Society through its laws, institutions and practices must therefore seek ways to promote those things which assist individuals to realise themselves as the imago Dei. This will have consequences for the treatment of those whom the state categorises as both victims and criminals, as well as those professionals whose daily work is within the walls of our prisons.

 

124. Victims

We have spoken already in favour of the extension of the current schemes of restorative justice[143]. Victims, too, often have to undergo a transformative journey. Programmes which offer victims of crime the opportunity to participate in the administration of justice can play a vital part in promoting the realisation of the imago Dei in the victim. Programmes which require the offender to take responsibility for the harm they have done, and undertake activities to make amends to the victim and the community, can help bring closure to the victim and help resolve the issues of fear, vulnerability, personal security and self-blame which can be part of the aftermath of crime for the victim. Restorative justice draws bitterness and can take away the anger and resentment which lies behind the Chinese saying: He who seeks revenge should dig two graves.

 

129.                       Those working in prison

Reviews which ask how humane are British prisons often neglect to consider those who spend their working lives administering the system. Prison officers, prison doctors and prison chaplains take on a difficult task at society’s behest. For many of them the work is a vocation. At all levels, including leadership levels, we detect some remarkably dedicated staff for whom the term prison ‘service’ has real meaning. In most cases, however, those working in prisons are trying in extremely difficult circumstances to carry out an important vocation conscientiously.

 

1.  However the appalling conditions of many prisoners translate into appalling working conditions for these staff. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, recently described the overcrowding in our prisons as “a cancer of the system” which means that “resources that could and should be used so much more beneficially elsewhere are swallowed up in what is correctly described as warehousing of prisoners[144]”. The additional pressures that causes for prison staff are considerable. A few prison workers do not rise above these pressures, in which case staff development – or ultimately disciplinary action – must ensure a safe and dignified environment for other workers and for prisoners. For the rest the sapping of morale is significant. Added to which, in situations such as those where ‘life must mean life’ and prisoners are robbed of what little incentive remains to good behaviour the repercussions for the staff can be seriously corrosive.

 

1.  In Church visits to prisons, we detect a dispirited workforce. Prison officers top every survey of stressful employment. They manifest record sickness levels, the highest in the public sector[145]. There is a high level of staff vacancies. And there has been a high level of staff turnover, most worryingly at governor level, in recent years[146]. Moreover, there have been no fewer than six different prison ministers since 1997.

 

1.  The analysis of those inside the service is disturbing. “There is so much waste in prison organisation that it is impossible to know whether or not adequate financial resources are available,” is the conclusion of the last Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham at his departure[147]. So bad was the situation that in 2001 the then Director-General of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, made a speech extraordinary for its candour, in which he said:

 

“We have to decide, as a Service, whether this litany of failure and moral neglect continues indefinitely or whether we are going to reform … I am not prepared to continue to apologise for failing prison after failing prison. I’ve had enough of trying to explain the very immorality of our treatment of some prisoners and the degradation of some establishments[148]”.

 

We have seen small evidence on the ground that things have changed much for the better since he said that.

 

1. 133.             Undoubtedly some of the workforce in our prisons, including at leadership levels, needs renewal. But having said that there are some remarkably talented prison governors, men and increasingly women, who have dedicated themselves to one of the least recognised elements of public service. It would be a missed opportunity if some of the most gifted, who are on the point of seeking more rewarding labour, cannot be included more fully in the development of public policy. We call on the authorities to discern who are the exemplary public servants in this sector and then listen to them and indeed cherish them. It is an important part of a Christian presence and ministry within our penal institutions to foster and resource the vision of those in the criminal justice system whose daily work is directed towards the transformation of offenders. At the same time it is important for the authorities to root out those elements within the prison staff whose vision has been corrupted or jaundiced to the extent that it constitutes an impediment to change.

 

1.  Prisoners

The imago Dei is not simply restricted to the soul but also includes the body. The whole person therefore has a right to integrity. Society has a responsibility for the physical and psychological as well as spiritual welfare of prisoners. Not to promote the interests of prisoners would, in the words of Pope John Paul II, “ be to make imprisonment a mere act of vengeance on the part of society[149]”.

 

1. Our concern, therefore, is for a range of issues inside our prisons. At the most basic is the indignity which comes from overcrowding. One prisoner recently wrote to the Prison Reform Trust explaining that he had spent five months sharing a cell in which there was “insufficient space to move around, can’t walk in a straight line from window to door. Insufficient ventilation for one, let alone two people. Windows do not open. Toilet not enclosed. Less than three foot from toilet when being used by other inmate”. Such conditions do not recognise that the prisoner is made in the image of God. Not does the fact that many prisoners are still locked up for the majority of every day and some prisoners are locked in their cells for up to 23 hours a day, according to the Prison Reform Trust[150]. The Prison Service should add to its Key Performance Indicators one monitoring toilet conditions and another concerning itself with the amount of time spent inside the cell. Another concern is the violence which can be part of the small change of life in jail. There were 5,882 serious assaults recorded in our prisons in the year 2003-2004, a number which meant the Service failed in its target for reducing such violence[151].  Such a climate of violence is a cause for concern for, as Pope John Paul II has observed, “prisons can become places of violence resembling the places from which the inmates not infrequently come [and] clearly this nullifies any attempt to educate through imprisonment[152]”.

 

1.  But establishing a physical regime conducive to human flourishing extends well beyond the physical. Conditions in prisons can be inhuman or degrading not only in their physical awfulness but also if the full range of provision is not there to make a coherent rehabilitative theory of punishment work in practice. In practice prison life runs the risk of depersonalising individuals, because it deprives them of so many opportunities for self-expression. Whether behind bars or in an open prison inmates lose their job, home, freedom of movement and their freedom to chose their companions. In practice they frequently lose their self-respect and sense of identity, and all too often find themselves adrift from their family. The psychological toll of all this is alarming. In the financial year 2002-2003 there were 105 suicides in prison – almost one third of them within the first week of a prisoner arriving in jail. This is the highest ever recorded total – up 40 per cent on the previous year – and is clearly a cause for considerable alarm, especially since research indicates poor management has much to do with the problem; changes in the prison system in the United Stateshave cut the suicide rate there dramatically[153]. The news that August 2004 produced the highest number of suicides ever recorded in a  single month underlines that this is clearly an area the UK Government needs to address as a mater of urgency. Strategies based on reducing prisoners’ opportunities for self-harm need to be augmented by ones which concentrate more on promoting well-being.

 

1.  The concept of imago Dei, in acknowledging that perpetrators are always moral agents, insists that they must not only be held responsible for their actions but also be allowed to be capable of reform and rehabilitation – and must be given the wherewithal to fulfil that. “None of this,” says the Pope, “should be considered utopian[154]”. In practice, as we shall come on to consider in the next section of this report, this will entail the possibility of a mixed pattern of custody and supervised work and restorative exercises. But it will also bear upon two other aspects of the treatment of those in prison. First it will mean that it is inhumane, however horrifying their crimes, to leave prisoners with no hope of release once they have ceased to be a danger to society; the Government should acknowledge this. The second concerns their right to continue to protest their innocence even after the state has concluded they are guilty and sentence has been passed.

 

1.  Given that no system of law or criminal justice is immune from mistakes, and therefore cannot invariably be absolutely assured of delivering justice, offenders must have the right to maintain their innocence after they are convicted. One of the most difficult cases for any criminal justice system is where the person convicted of the crime refuses to acknowledge their guilt. Sometimes this is a sign of deliberate or unwitting refusal to accept the true nature of earlier actions; this is particularly the case with some of the most dangerous offenders, including many paedophiles and some murderers. But sometimes, as high profile ‘miscarriage of justice’ cases remind us, this is a sign of innocence. It is vital that review and advocacy are an important part of any penal system. Government ministers should re-examine the inclination for the parole system to deny early release to those who refuse to ‘show remorse’ for a crime which they maintain they did not commit.

 

 

The passive and the active prisoner

 

1.  One significant area of concern which the concept of the imago Dei highlights in our present prison regime is the extent to which inmates are treated as objects rather than as subjects. Even where concern is shown for prisoners’ welfare it often takes a passive form. Sometimes this is understandable. A dangerous or depraved prisoner, as part of their sentence, has forfeited the right to be present at their own family gatherings of joy and sorrow. Where such a prisoner is given compassionate leave to attend a dying mother at her bedside or at her funeral that is appropriately an act of mercy by the authorities. (It would be interesting to see some research done as to whether such concessions play any part in changing the wider attitudes or behaviour of such prisoners). But it would be a mistake to see this as a matter of justice; it is clearly one of mercy.

 

1. Since acts of mercy proceed from the authorities in such situations the involvement of the prisoners is inevitably passive. But as Pope John Paul II has said: “Our prejudices about mercy are mostly the result of appraising them only from the outside[155]”. They do not betoken a relationship of inequality between the one offering it and the one receiving it, nor does mercy belittle the receiver or offend the dignity of the imago Dei. The parable of The Prodigal Son reveals that the reality is different: the relationship of mercy is based on the common experience of the dignity that is proper to the human individual.

 

1. Yet too often our criminal justice and penal systems – and recent official reviews of it such as the Carter Report and the Home Office response to it – see prisoners chiefly in a passive role. They are people in receipt of the state’s services, rather than who need to take responsibility for themselves and be encouraged to embrace a more active citizenship. They are merely “serving time”. Life in prison often contributes to a loss of responsibility among prisoners[156]. They see discipline as a purely external phenomenon, and neglect the need for them to develop self-discipline. Much of the change required here is attitudinal rather than physical. Some prisons operate “Listeners” programmes in which a few inmates are trained on how to offer support to their fellows during difficult times; a few prisons have experimented with prisoners’ peer groups which offer mutual support mechanisms in both life inside and in preparation for housing, benefits and employment on release. These have a remarkably empowering effect, but as yet there are too few such groups[157]. At present disempowerment remains the norm. The Government should encourage the development of more Listeners Programmes and prisoners’ peer groups.

 

1. One symbolic touchstone of this is that those in prison are also stripped of their right to vote. The disenfranchisement of convicts goes back to the Forfeiture Act of 1870. It is rooted in the philosophical concept of ‘civic death’, the notion that sentenced prisoners face a form of internal civic exile which involves the withdrawal of citizenship rights. It is a practice which Government ministers have continued to justify in recent times – despite a ruling in April 2004 by the European Court of Human Rights that it violates Article 3 of the Human Rights Act – by suggesting that those who have been removed from society do not deserve a say in how that society is governed: the disenfranchisement, they say, is temporary, legitimate, proportionate and reasonable. The Government has lodged an appeal against the decision of theStrasbourgcourt.

 

1. 143.                      Certainly it is true that, while the right to participate in decisions affecting our lives might be considered an intrinsic one, the right to vote is one which society confers. To speak of voting as an inalienable human right is to overstate the case. However there are reasons in the Christian anthropology of the imago Dei why the right to vote should be restored for convicted prisoners.

 

1. The primary causes of crime today, as we have seen, are related to social exclusion. Civic death, under a law dating back 134 years, is not an appropriate response to such offending behaviour. Indeed it is only likely to exacerbate the problems in the already fractured relationship between society and offender. Anything which further isolates prisoners already on the margins of society – and encourages their sense of alienation from the community to which they will return when they are released – should be questioned. The ban on voting for sentenced prisoners does not protect public safety nor is it part of an effective deterrent. It is not a means to correct offending behaviour. Nor does it assist in the rehabilitation of offenders, and indeed may well serve to disrupt the process of reformation. If anything it is unfair, since the notion of civic death is applied selectively to prisoners; while in prison they continue to pay tax on savings or capital gains that accrue while they are serving their sentence.

 

1. More significant however is the need to inculcate in prisoners a sense that they have a continuing stake in the society to which they will return. Encouraging them to play a positive role in shaping their futures by their own efforts and commitment is part of the psychological and spiritual realignment which a truly rehabilitative regime inside prisons should embrace. Voting, and engagement in the course of an election campaign which prisons could encourage, could then be part of the process of preparing prisoners for resettlement in their communities – a process which Anne Owers, the new Chief Inspector of Prisons has concluded that “can still best be described as patchy[158]”. Moreover politicians’ agendas are determined by votes. There is no incentive for MPs to consider the problems faced by prisoners – such as unemployment and homelessness on release, increasing rates of suicide and widespread drug use – when people in prison are a group with no political voice. If sentenced prisoners had the vote politicians would be forced to take more of an interest in prisons and the issues raised by prisoners. The right to vote is thus not a moral reward, but a tool of rehabilitation.

 

1. 146.                       The truth is that the current ban on prisoners’ voting is part of the business of forgetting about prisons and the people in them. Restoring that right would have a positive impact on the processes of reform and rehabilitation. It would symbolically renegotiate the balance between the rights of society and the rights of the individual. And it would restore to prisoners some sense that they have to become the authors of their own transformation. The Government should withdraw its appeal against the decision of the Strasbourg court which rules that removing prisoners’ right to vote it illegal.

 

1. We may conclude by quoting the words of a former Catholic bishop with speciality responsibility for prisons: “The criminal is a threat so we must restrain him. He is a misguided delinquent so we must reform him. But as a human being we salute him – he is a son of God and our brother in Christ.[159]”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The story of the man at the Ironing Board

 

Many months later Angela Hall, the counsellor from the Prison Advice & Care Trust, and the man she had met by chance at the ironing board man, had been working together for a considerable time. He had told her about his life – and a painful life it had been, of abuse, neglect and deprivation. He began to come to terms with the past and was able to have a different sense of what could be his future. His work with Angela had been trying to deal with rage he had inside, the reasons for it and ways of diminishing anger that had been so corrosive to him and others around him.

 

One day he said to her: “Do you know, I think God sent you to me. That day when you came to The Fours there were loads of men on the wing and yet you walked all that way past them down to me at the end and spoke to me. I was really shocked. I didn’t know why you asked me. You had to be sent to me.”

Part III: Hope and Redemption

 

 

The story of a killer forgiven

 

A man was serving a life sentence for manslaughter. He had been for years a difficult and violent prisoner and had spent a considerable time in prison punishment regimes. Then one day almost out of the blue, he received a visit from a member of the victim’s family. Because the majority of killings are committed by someone known to the victim the dead person’s family knew of the whereabouts of the prisoner. The visitor had come specifically to tell the killer that the family had forgiven him for what he had done.

 

The visit, and the announcement of forgiveness made during it, brought about a great change in the prisoner. He became much calmer and more amenable. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from him. In due course it was deemed safe to move him to less secure conditions.

 

Grace and the constant possibility of change

 

1. When we say that every individual is made in the image of God we are saying something about our essence. But we also speak about our potential. The human being is never a closed or determined entity. There is a proper freedom which belongs to each of us, which is the source of our moral status, our creativity and is also the ground of our responsibility to God, ourselves and to other human beings.

 

1. To help us exercise that freedom properly, and act morally, we all are constantly offered God’s grace. The possibility of our receptivity to the action of God’s grace is ever-present in every human being by virtue of our human nature. However depraved a criminal act, the Christian can never despair of God’s grace and therefore of the capacity in even the most dangerous criminal for remorse and rehabilitation. God’s mercy and power are always on offer and always potent. The truth of this is evident to Catholics from our sacramental theology too, even as we move from Penance to Eucharist so we move from repentance to redemption.

 

1. Everyone can be redeemed, which is why our penal system must provide opportunities for reform and rehabilitation at every stage for all those in its care, rather than the mere ten per cent who at present complete programmes accredited with being effective in reducing re-offending[160].

 

1. The Christian understanding and experience of hope is related to this. It is not founded on a general optimism about human nature but on the sovereignty of God’s grace attested in the imago Dei both as a grace of creation and secured in Christ, who is the imago Dei fully realised. From the Christian perspective, the reality of Christ and the activity of the Spirit hold open for every human being an authentic possibility of realising their end – even when that may be otherwise circumscribed by their situation. Grace has no boundaries. We are always in the presence and opportunities of grace. This places upon every human being the obligation to realise their own nature and fulfil their purpose. This means that the possibility of change is there for every one. It also places on society the obligation to create the constant opportunities which will enable each individual to realise that potential, providing always that the fundamental rights, freedoms and dignity of others are also respected.

 

1. Within a penal system this means that resources – human, material and educational – must be available to every prisoner to support and enable their development and rehabilitation. But society has another obligation, in addition to the requirement to provide the resources for a penal system genuinely committed to rehabilitation. It also has to recognise individual transformation when it does occur and has a duty properly to receive offenders back into society when they have convincingly reformed. It is commonplace here to talk of prisoners “repaying their debt to society” but it is important to bear in mind that the concept of “debt” is not an adequate metaphor here. For a start society clearly has, if not a debt, then an equal responsibility towards prisoners in its obligation to offer an environment conducive to reform. But more than that, when commercial debts are discharged no change in behaviour necessarily follows; yet here changed behaviour is required from both prisoner and society[161].

 

1. The key additional quality which must be at work here is forgiveness, which requires transformation on both sides. Forgiveness goes much further than the act of mercy. Forgiveness is a moral act of gratuitous love that introduces a new opportunity into history and opens up a new possibility in relations between individuals, and between an individual and society. Forgiveness recognises a rupture but refuses to be bound by its logic. It is not about the erasure of truthful memory; it does not deny what has been done or its consequences. But it is determined that the event or action should only positively direct to new future possibilities. Forgiveness, therefore, is concerned to break the cycle of repetitive crime and retribution, in which both the offender and the penal system seem caught at present.

 

Change inside prisons

 

1. Change must obviously begin within prisons themselves. Society has the obligation to provide the wherewithal to make prison a place of reformation not just one of punishment. That means creating a climate which is conducive to human flourishing, and providing the human, material and educational resources to enable the development and rehabilitation of prisoners. It also means that prisoners have the obligation to apply themselves to take advantage of the possibility of change which is on offer.

 

155.         The response of the church

The Church has a longstanding commitment to visiting those in prison. “When I was in prison you visited me[162],” is one of the direct statements Jesus makes about the activity of those who will be found at the Last Judgement to have served him. At present every prison is visited by chaplains, Catholic and of other Christian communities and other faiths, at least once a week though many have a daily witness. In June 2004 there are 139 prisons in England and Wales[163] served by 310 full and part-time chaplains of all communities and faiths, as well as other who visit prisons on a sessional basis. The churches increasingly work in an ecumenical style inside prison. There are also priests with part-time responsibilities and dedicated members of the Christian laity assisting with regular faith activities and worship as well as with general prison visiting. Prison ministry is the work of the whole faith community and the chaplains have been appointed to represent the community within the penal establishment.

 

1. The role of prison chaplain is an ambivalent one. The Prison Act places the chaplain firmly within the context of the prison yet although chaplains are within the penal system they have a duty to remain critical of it. Chaplains in prison organise worship, bible study, discussion and courses in spiritual renewal and personal formation. But the core of their work is more informal; some of their most important ministry is conducted in casual conversations and passing contacts. Chaplains deal with the spiritual, emotional and human needs of those in their care. All prisoners are seen by the chaplain on reception to the prison, or within 24 hours, many of them in a traumatised state. Arrest is a dehumanising experience and prison exacerbates that. Inmates find their self-esteem is diminished, they lose their identity and become a number, their physical life is basic and restricted. As Pope John Paul II has put it: “prison life runs the risk of depersonalising individuals, because it deprives them of so many opportunities for self-expression.[164]” When a chaplain addresses them as an individual of dignity and worth, someone made in the imago Dei, that can be the first step on the road to hope and redemption. The chaplain breaks down barriers which are far more profound than prison walls.

 

1. The environment for all this is far from easy. As the Church of England’s Bishop for Prisons and its Chaplain General have put it:

 

“Prisons are places of constant movement and noise. They are authoritarian and regimented. They bring together the violent, the immature and the weak-willed. As institutions, they cannot avoid generating anxiety and loneliness. Not infrequently, they give opportunity to the bully and the pretentious. All this makes any ministry in prison a sobering and testing experience. It is front-line work of care and calls from those who undertake it a considerable degree of self-knowledge and a sure grasp of faith and personal value.[165]”

 

Chaplains must balance a sense that the prisoner is both to be supported and also helped to come to a new self-awareness which will involve the offender passing judgement on himself. The chaplain must therefore offer a clear moral framework alongside a sense of standing alongside the prisoner. Above all he or she must be a good listener prepared to take as their motto the words of Ezekiel who ministered to the Israelites held captive by Babylon: “I sat where they sat[166]”. To those who ask to come to prison to “bring the prisoners to God”, one experienced prison chaplain often replies: “please come, but you may find that God is already here and that often it is the chaplain who has the conversion experience[167].”

 

1. Chaplains also have a ministry to those who work in prisons. Staff too can be affected by the dehumanising institutional culture of our prisons and can develop a view of human nature which is jaundiced rather than balancing a sense of realism with the possibility of change. Support for staff is a vital part of the chaplain’s role in helping create a climate conducive to human flourishing. So too, occasionally, is challenging the behaviour of prison staff. Chaplains can also act as sounding boards for governors inside prisons, as points of liaison with voluntary groups working with prisoners, and as a vital bridge with the outside world when prisoners are released. As bishops we commit ourselves to improving the work of the Church within our prisons.

 

159.         The role of education

Education in prison has improved significantly in recent times. There has been an increased focus on numeracy and literacy. Prison Service targets for the number of prisoners achieving skills qualifications were significantly exceeded in 2002-2003, with 41,300 Basic Skills awards being made (43 per cent above target)[168]. The Prime Minister has announced that he hopes increased invested in prison education will double the number of educational qualifications achieved by prisoners by the end of next year[169]. This is to be applauded. Research highlighted by the Government’s Social Exclusion Unit has found that prisoners who do not take part in education or training are three times more likely to be re-convicted. By contrast basic skills learning can contribute to a reduction in re-offending of around 12 per cent[170].

 

1. Increasing the provision of accredited offending behaviour programmes for prisoners has been one of the Prison Service’s priorities. Accredited offending behaviour programmes are based on evidence-based practice and have been accredited as conforming to principles derived from what works in reducing reoffending. The two most widely available programmes are Enhanced Thinking Skills and Reasoning and Rehabilitation which are designed to develop thinking skills, social perspectives and moral reasoning. In recent times questions have been raised over the effectiveness of offending behaviour programmes. Two recent Home Office studies[171] found no difference between re-conviction rates for prisoners who had participated in the Enhanced Thinking Skills and Reasoning and Rehabilitation programmes and for those who had not. The Prison Service has been disappointed by these results and has cut the target for such programmes and divert resources to drug treatment courses. We would urge the Government to reconsider this. Such programmes should not be seen through a  purely utilitarian lens, for education is a good in itself, and is one of the key tools for realising the potential of the imago Dei in each individual. At present there is danger that education in prisons is becoming too narrowly focused on achieving the basic skills targets and not on the needs of individual prisoners. The prisons inspectorate has reported that: “Again and again in education inspections we point to the need to construct education and training plans around individual needs assessments. And the focus on education should not be at the expense of providing recreational and cultural opportunities, which may be the pivotal thing that a prisoner responds to”[172].

 

1. But if there has been progress in prison education it is from a fairly low baseline. Half of all prisoners are at or below the level expected of an 11 year old in reading, two-thirds in numeracy and four-fifths in writing[173]. Yet in 2002-2003 an average of £1,185 per prisoner was spent on education[174]. And according to the Offenders Learning and Skills Unit in the Department for Education and Skills, just under a third of the prison population is attending education classes at any one time[175]. And the average number of hours prisoners spent in formal learning activities, for the period September 2002 to August 2003, was just nine hours per week [176].

 

1. These problems are compounded by the current overcrowding crisis. One of the consequences of crowded prisons is the constant juggling with inmates to try to make places available in the jails to which new prisoners are sent. The result is that significant numbers of prisoners are moved from one prison to another. In 2003 there were some 100,000 such transfers. This ‘churn’, as it is known within the prison system, results in a number of problems, mainly affecting those on short sentences. (This is despite the fact that it is these short-term prisoners who would most benefit from interventions; Home Office research indicates that drug misuse is most prevalent among offenders sentenced to less than a year[177]). It is not uncommon for families to turn up for prison visits only to be told that their relative has been moved, sometimes quite considerable distances; one family arrived at Feltham near London recently to discover their relative had been moved to Northumberland.

 

1. 163.                      The consequence in education is that prisoners who have been making good progress in one programme find themselves suddenly in a prison without a programme or in one with a different one, since national parity in delivering programmes is virtually impossible to maintain[178]. The National Audit Office has highlighted the high number of movements of under 18-year-olds between prisons to make way for new arrivals, disrupting education and training courses and leading to inconsistent support and supervision[179]. It is hardly surprising therefore that a recent study by the Prison Reform Trust of inmates’ own perspectives on education concluded that “despite the highly appreciated efforts of some education staff there was a desultory second-best feel to prisoners’ accounts of education[180]”. There is clearly a need for the Government to do more to improve education in prisons and in particular to address the issue of disruption to education programmes caused by the constantly rising number of internal prisoner transfers. There is a need to establish parity in the delivery of rehabilitative programmes throughout United Kingdom penal institutions.

 

164.         Drug and behavioural treatment

Over half of all prisoners confess that they have a drug dependency problem[181]. That means there are currently more than 40,000 prisoners in need of treatment. But though In 2002-2003 there were more than 40,000 entrants to detoxification programmes for drug misuse. (nearly double the target) and although there are highly successful drug treatment and rehabilitation programmes in 60 prisons – aimed at prisoners with moderate to severe drug misuse problems – only 4,386 prisoners entered these programmes in 2002-2003. (And the target is for March 2004 was only 5,700 entries per year.) Some allowance needs to be made here for the fact that the Prison Service restricts access to the programmes to those sentenced to two years or more because of the length of the treatment courses which are a minimum of 12 weeks. Even so it is clear that there is a huge deficit between need and provision when it comes to drug treatment in our prisons.

 

1. Most prisoners do not receive help with their drug problems. According to the Social Exclusion Unit, officers at HMP Manchester have estimated that 70 per cent of prisoners come into the prison with a drugs misuse problem but that 80 per cent of these have never had any contact with drug treatment services[182]. There is a particular problem with young offenders: nine out of ten young adult prisoners say they use drugs prior to imprisonment but only one in three Young Offender Institutions provide drug treatment programmes[183]. Some of those who do benefit from such schemes find that transfers between prisons due to overcrowding often disrupt drug treatment. Ironically those who are most often transferred are short-term prisoners among whom drug misuse is most prevalent and who would be those most to benefit from treatment programmes. The result is that drug use on release from prison is very high.

 

1. A study by the Office for National Statistics found that about half of prisoners using illegal drugs, and who had been receiving treatment whilst in custody, reported being offered help to obtain treatment on release. But only 11 per cent had a fixed appointment with a drug agency and four months after their release half were back to using heroin on a daily basis. One Home Office survey of prisoners who had predominantly served short term sentences, and had used drugs in the 12 months before imprisonment, found that 77 per cent admitted taking illegal drugs since release. With drugs at the root of so much crime these figures are alarming, for they indicate that the prison system is missing the chance to assist prisoners on a matter of particular vulnerability and failing to engage with one of the chief causes of crime when it has people in custody and the opportunity to do so.

 

1. We have concerns too that those prisoners who do undergo successful drug programmes in prison find that help melts away when they leave jail. Treatment and support services in the community for prisoners leaving custody is very limited. Prisoners are often viewed as ‘new cases’ when they are released and have to join the back of the queue for the few community programmes that do exist. The Home Office has no comprehensive tracking systems in place to monitor access to community drug treatment[184]. The recent Government initiative to combine the work of the prison and probation services will go some way to addressing this problem but it is clear that not enough is being done inside our prisons to tackle drug misuse – a misuse which is both an affront to the intrinsic human dignity of prisoners and the direct cause of much re-offending. The Government needs to allocate more money to drug treatment programmes in prison, and for ex-offenders as they leave prison.

 

1. 168.                 Many of these concerns also apply to behavioural treatment programmes. the Prison Service in 2003, for the fourth year running, failed to meet its target for the number of prisoners who complete Sex Offender Treatment Programmes. And over 4,000 sex offenders in prison did not undertake the Sex Offender Treatment Programme, with some prisons – such as Dartmoor which houses a high number of sex offenders – unable to off any sex offender treatment. Such a situation is, as the Chief Inspector of Prisons noted in 2003, unacceptable. We accept that this is not a straightforward matter of resources. Among sex offenders there are larger than average numbers of individuals who deny their offence; engaging them in treatment can be a particular challenge. Even so, this is not an area in which the Government is making sufficient progress, and it needs to examine why.

 

 

169.                     Work inside prison

Catholic social teaching sees work as the quintessential human activity through which men and women subdue the earth and share in God’s creativity. Work, in the analysis of Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) [185], is the defining act which makes us fully human, for our potential is realised through action, work and by acting in solidarity with others as ‘a person in community’. Work expresses human dignity and also increases it. Meaningful work, he implies, is a basic human right.

1. In his Jubilee Year statement on prisons in July 2000 the Pope applies this notion specifically to the penal system:

 

To make prison life more human it is more important than ever to take practical steps to enable prisoners as far as possible to engage in work which keeps them from the degrading effects of idleness. They could be given access to a process of training which would facilitate their re-entry into the workforce when they have served their time. . . Prison should not be a corrupting experience, a place of idleness and even vice, but instead a place of redemption[186].

 

It is unfortunate that when the prison system is under pressure – as it is at present as never before in modern history – the first thing to be sacrificed is what is known in prison as ‘purposeful activity’ . Purposeful activity includes a wide range of activities including: education and training courses; employment; induction; resettlement and rehabilitation activities; sports and PE; religious activities and visits. In 2003, despite the efforts of the Prison Service to bring a huge expansion, with an extra two and a half million activity hours for prisoners, the average number of hours per prisoner did not increase (from 23.2  hours a week) because the huge expansion was absorbed entirely by the increase in the prison population[187]. The Prison Service has now decided to scrap its “key performance indicator” on purposeful activity. This should be retained.

 

171. What our prisons need is more purposeful activity, not less. The current definition of a full working day in a prison workshop is four hours. The work, by and large, is menial low-skilled and poorly-paid. Much of it is mind-numbingly dull tasks such as folding carrier bags, counting nails or manufacturing huge quantities of socks, slippers and jeans in quantities far greater than the prison service needs for internal consumption and of a quality which would not find a market elsewhere. Such a system is deeply flawed. It pays scant respect to the dignity of the prisoner. It is ineffective in helping the prisoner towards a reform of attitude or towards gaining the kind of skills which would be helpful in rehabilitating them in the outside world. It does little to assist the working of the prison nor to contribute towards the considerable cost to society of running the current system.

 

172. Our prisons need a revolution to make work more meaningful. A full working day should be introduced to parallel that of the outside world, eight hours a day, five days a week. The work too should relate to the outside world, with prisoners learning the disciplines, skills and standards they will need for resettlement when they are returned to society. Such a system would help inculcate the work ethic which is normal among most of the population, and to which many of those in prison have never been exposed. It would teach them transferable skills. It would pay them real wages, from which they could send money home to their families, pay reparation to their victims and perhaps even make some contribution to their keep.

 

173. Such a notion is not utopian. A number of pilot schemes – developed in partnership between the prison service, private companies and charities – have pointed to the viability of such a system. The Mount prison in Hertfordshire has a self-financing printing shop, together with workshops in engineering and electronics, and plans for a bricklaying course. Prisoners are here doing real work for real contractors to real standards. The Road Haulage Association, with its industry short of 50,000 workers, is looking to train and employ prisoners. National Grid Transco, which needs more than 3,000 new gas engineers in the next five years, has run a pilot in a young offenders’ institute to train and employ prisoners which has been so successful that it is to be extended to more institutes and prisons. To date, more than 80 inmates have qualified from the Transco scheme and some 70 per cent found employment; only five were reported as re-offending. Contrast that with the general situation whereby 75 per cent of prisoners leave prison without a job and 70 per cent are released with no education, training or employment[188].

 

174. There will be complicating factors on this. There will be issues about the balance of the local job market. There will be concerns from trade unions if competition from prison shops is perceived as unfair (though it may be that jobs, such as those in administration and call-centre work which are currently being ‘out-sourced’ abroad, could be done in prisons with prisoners being paid and taxed and beginning their process of rehabilitation). There may be ethical issues about private companies profiting from prison labour, though they already do from running private prisons in the first place and it is hard to see why private sector activities in prisons should be any more questionable than firms making a profit from health or education. But, once such matters are resolved, such pilot schemes should be extended nationwide making the employment of ex-offenders much more attractive to employers than at present.

 

175. Such an approach would also make more viable the concept of clusters of community prisons which was advanced by Lord Woolf in his 1991 report on prisons after the Strangeways riot. Following Home Office research showing offenders who maintain links with their families are six times less likely to re-offend, his proposal was for each region of the country to have a cluster of sufficient prison places to hold all the various types of prisoner. If each area had its own cluster of prisons – high security, training, resettlement, women’s and young offenders – the system would be able to customise its care for different types of prisoner, reducing the dehumanising institutionalisation which goes with the modern trend towards larger prisons, and also enabling prisoners to keep in contact with their families as well as allowing community involvement in their rehabilitation and resettlement[189]. All of this, research shows, would reduce rates of re-offending. Such an approach would be more consonant with Christian concerns about human dignity than the suggestion, made in the Carter report[190], that old and unsuitable prisons should be replaced by larger institutions, providing better value for money. We would like to see the Government set out a timetable for moving to the system of clusters of community prisons.

 

 

Using prison less

 

1. Faced with the many inadequacies within our prison system it might be argued that the solution is simply to spend more public money on the system – building more prisons and then staffing, equipping and resourcing them properly. Regardless of the cost to the taxpayer, it might be argued, society has the need to lock more people away for its own safety and security while at the same time ensuring that those offenders undergo proper reform and rehabilitation programmes. Many people will disagree with this notion simply on grounds of cost: spending on prisons and probation has already increased by over £1bn (in real terms) in the last decade to £3.5bn, which is public money which might well be better spent elsewhere. Others will point out that other countries manage without this, reminding us that for every 141 prisoners the UK holds in prison Germany has only 98 and France just 93 without those European countries being less lawless or unsafe as a result. Indeed crime levels in Britaina nd the other major Western European countries are broadly comparable[191]. But a Christian anthropology will go further. For there are clear arguments for suggesting that the principles of justice and mercy, of human dignity and the common good, insist there is a need for our society to change our thinking on the use of custody. Building more prisons is not the answer.

 

1. Some 70 per cent of those in our prisons are there for non-violent offences. In 2001 some 42 per cent of women convicted of motoring offences in the Crown Court went to prison (compared to just eight per cent a decade earlier). In 2002 around 40 per cent of women imprisoned were sent down for shoplifting, theft or handling stolen goods[192]. Since the containment and incapacitation of such criminals is not the primary grounds for their imprisonment there must be a case for considering whether alternatives to custody are not more appropriate for a significant number of prisoners.

 

178. The traditional assumption which underlies our national penal policy is that punishment progresses through a graduated response, starting with fines and moving – where fines do not work – to community service, and thence for those offenders who do not respond by changing their ways, to prison. The underlying philosophy is that a custodial sentence is, so to speak, the default position for every offence.

 

179. The political slogan which epitomises this approach is: Prison works. On this basis governments, of both parties, have introduced measures making increased use of custody. Mandatory sentences have been introduced, after a third offence, of three years for burglary and seven years for certain drugs offences. This was in response to evidence which showed that, previously, the average sentence for a third offence of burglary was just 17 months, with 19 months for the seventh offence. This went some way towards satisfying public outrage; burglary is a crime which arouses strong public opinions – 83 per cent of burglary victims report being emotionally affected, with 11 per cent suffering depression and 12 per cent panic attacks. In international surveys Englandand Waleshas one of the highest proportions recommending custody for a convicted domestic burglar[193]. Since a relatively small number of people were responsible for the majority of burglaries, the aim was to target an easily identifiable criminal group. As a result someone convicted of a first-time offence in burglary had a 48 per cent chance of receiving a custodial sentence by 2000, compared with just 27 per cent in 1995/96. At the same time, the average sentence length had increased from 16 to 18 months[194]. And yet the Carter Report has shown that tougher sentences have only a limited impact on crime: the increased use of prison is estimated to have reduced crime by around 5 per cent out of an overall fall in crime of 30 per cent since 1997[195]. And the reconviction rate for burglars is still 75 per cent[196].

 

180. So if, as this demonstrates,  prison does not work, then what society needs is less of it,  not more.

 

181. There are both practical and philosophical considerations here. The Government’s new Sentencing Guidelines Council started work in early 2004. Part of its remit is to study sentences and relate them to what happens to those sentenced after release, to discover which sentences work, and which appear not to, in terms of preventing re-offending. Its members must study the relative merits of prison and probation to ascertain when, for example, a fine may be more effective with a low-risk offender with a low probability of re-offending, than might be a community sentence order or prison. But already most penologists accept that short sentences are largely ineffective, and may indeed be counter-productive, since three to four months in prison is not long enough to offer any serious rehabilitative work and yet is long enough to lose an offender his or her job and home, promoting the likelihood of re-offending.  It is alarming that the current increase in the use of short sentences is at the expense of community penalties or fines.

 

182. The Sentencing Guidelines Council should be given the brief not simply of rationalising and systematising sentencing so that it becomes proportionate, consistent and effective. It should also be given the brief of gearing the system so that fewer people are sent to prison. It might start by recommending that large numbers of very low risk offenders be diverted from prosecution by conditional cautions, warnings and reprimands. It might consider how to reduce the needless use of custodial remand. Above all it might look at ways to reverse the inflationary tendency which has crept into sentencing.

 

183. Sentence inflation has a number of causes. Some are complex sociological interactions between public fear, media sensationalism, political perception and the anxiety of judges not to seem out of touch. But some are linked to the Government’s increased use of mandatory sentences. Fixed tariffs – for murder the shortest possible life sentence will now be fifteen years and for most firearms offences, five years – appear to have a tidal pull, raising sentences across the board. As sentencers aim to achieve proportionality in their sentencing thresholds are inevitably pushed upwards. This is a trend which needs to be arrested and indeed reversed.

 

184. But the Sentencing Guidelines Council needs to do more than consider issues not simply from a utilitarian standpoint. It must also ask which sentences best balance effectiveness with the maintenance of the human dignity of the offender. A Christian anthropology will have something to say here on issues such as whether sentences should, for the most part, reflect the gravity of the individual offence or whether they should take more account of the persistence of the offender. In the public mind the former is the more common perception; it is what underlies notions such as the ‘punishment fitting the crime’. Talk of what is ‘the appropriate penalty’ carries retributive undertones of prison seen primarily as punishment. But if we are to see prison – in line with a Christian vision of justice and mercy – as a place where rehabilitation should take precedence over retribution then it may not be appropriate for sentences to reflect, first and foremost, the gravity of an offence. Rather they should be a response to how probable it is that any punishment other than prison is likely to fail. This makes sense both in pragmatic terms and in response to considerations of human dignity.

 

185. In part this is saying that society should divert the lowest risk offenders out of the prison system and punish them in the community. It suggests that other offenders should better be punished through restrictions of liberty in the community than through short prison sentences. It insists that custody should be reserved for the most serious and dangerous offenders. But it does more than all this. It challenges the philosophy that takes us steadily and inexorably through a graduated hierarchy of punishment to the conclusion that prison is always the answer.

 

 

Fines

 

186. Over the past decade the use of fines as a punishment by courts has fallen by a quarter. In 1991, 1.2 million offenders received a fine but by 2001 this had fallen to 900,000. The fall was in direct and inverse proportion to the rise in prison sentences. For more serious offences, the fall in the use of fines has been even greater, over 30 per cent. Those inside the criminal justice system are wont to talk of a ‘collapse’ in the fines system. This reflects two things: the increased severity in sentencing, and a perception that many criminals simply refuse to pay fines and that the system is insufficiently rigorous in following-up to collect them. The problem here seems psychological rather than philosophical, for there seems no reason why, with sufficient political will, a new drive could not be injected into the system to rebuild fines as an effective strategy, using new systems such as computerised direct deductions from wages and reinvigorating old enforcement strategies which make effective more severe punishments for those who fail to pay fines. It will take political and administrative effort, but the fines system should be rebuilt.

 

187. It should not, however, be inevitably seen as the line of first recourse for the courts. Many fine-defaulters come from the social group who are not in work and are in receipt of benefits. Previously the strategy with such defaulters has been to dock their benefits. We question this strategy. If state benefits are fixed at a level which gives recipients what is considered the bare minimum needed to live in our society then it is unacceptable to make deductions from this. It is an assault on human dignity to expect people to attempt to survive on less than what is acknowledged to be the bare minimum. Society’s provision of the basics of life to those in need is not contingent upon some notion of moral worth, but rather on considerations of some intrinsic right, which Christians will describe as the imago Dei. From a pragmatic point of view, deductions from survival benefits creates an incentive to crime. It is a social strategy which is setting itself up to fail. For the poorest in society fines should not be courts’ first recourse; sentences of community service, in the form of unpaid work or some acts which focus on paying back to the community, make more sense, as part of a much more comprehensive system of community sentencing, on which we say more below*.

 

1. 188.                      For most members of society there is much to be said in the reconsideration of the idea of Day Fines. Under this a fine is set as a number of days and the offender then must pay in proportion to what he or she earns in an average day. Offenders can either pay in a lump sum, in instalments, or opt instead to work for the community. Those failing to pay face a prison sentence based on the number of unpaid days. This means that punishments would impact upon offenders in direct proportion to their means to pay. It creates a new transparency in sentencing as well as an effective deterrent and punishment. This is a system which has been briefly piloted in the UK in the past[197], but in such a way as did not properly gauge the practicality of the notion, allowing certain anomalies to arise – huge fines for trivial offences, and trivial fines for serious crimes, in certain cases – which a better-thought-through approach could avoid. Day Fines should be restricted to offences that would go to court. Fixed penalty and minor offences would be excluded thus avoiding excessive fines for very low level crimes. Day Fine systems are used successfully in several parts of Europe; in parts of Germany, 80 per cent of criminal sentences are Day Fines. The Day Fines system should be introduced in the UK.

Discovering alternatives

 

189. The system of community service at present available in Englandand Walesis fairly limited. Government has recently made some attempt to extend it, renaming it community punishment. In part this is a response to complaints that the old community service was not tough enough. Indeed some critics have maintained that it is ineffective since the type of offender who often refuses to pay fines also refuses to turn up properly for community service programmes, which are inconsistently enforced, or else attend them with an attitude which is so chaotic and truculent as to render the system meaningless. But, if community punishment programmes are insufficiently effective at present, that is a problem of implementation rather than one of inappropriate conceptualisation. We would like to see a wider range of community punishment programmes which encompass everything from courses to promote a sense of social responsibility to schemes of punishment which are as onerous, if not more demanding, than the present system of time spent idly in prison.

 

190. Catholic social teaching has a concept which may be helpful here. The principle of subsidiarity was defined by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno thus: “It is . . . a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater or higher association what lesser and subordinate organisations can do.[198]” Most usually the principle of subsidiarity is applied to systems of government, indicating that the state should not take over what individuals or groups can do; instead decisions should be taken at the lowest level possible which is compatible with good government. But this principle has an application in the context of penal policy too. Punishment should be set at the lowest level consonant with achieving a balance of justice and mercy, respecting both the human dignity of the individual and the common good of society. This requires a more extensive system of punishment in the community with prison being reserved for those who are dangerous or who violate the conditions of community punishment programmes.

 

Community punishment

1.                                                                i.      The Carter review suggested that the Government makes greater use of rigorous alternative sentences. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 creates a generic community sentence, that will allow the court to tailor a community punishment to offenders needs by picking and mixing from a range of interventions – drug treatment, offending behaviour programmes, community service, tagging etc. New programmes to exemplify this approach are already being introduced. Among the enhanced community punishment schemes is an Intensive Control and Change Programme (ICCP) which is being piloted for 18-20s to provide a range of interventions targeted at the specific needs of young adult offenders. It includes tagging, curfew and police surveillance options, as well as providing 18 hours a week of offending behaviour programmes, employment and training[199].

 

1.                                                              ii.      The sentencing powers of magistrates have been expanded by introducing three new sentences – Custody Plus and Intermittent Custody (which include terms in prison) and Custody Minus (a form of suspended prison sentence that allows for up to two years supervision in the community). The intention is that these sentences will replace the use of short custodial terms of up to six months (in 2002 more than half of those sent to prison were there for jail terms of six months or less[200]). All this is a welcome alternative to prison.

 

1.                                                             iii.      We do have some concerns about the implementation of these new sentences, however. The first is that, though these sentences were designed as alternatives to short custodial terms of up to six months early indications are that they are being used by the courts for offenders who would otherwise have received a lesser punishment[201]. A form of sentence inflation has already begun. Our second concern is that these new sentences, most particularly Custody Minus, may  be set about with conditions such that large numbers of offenders – such as those who have chaotic lifestyles or drug problems – are likely to breach them, causing the offender to be then given a custodial sentence. The new measures should aim to reduce rather than increase the numbers in custody. The Government needs to guard against the danger is that they may do the opposite.

 

1.                                                            iv.      We would suggest that the Government also needs to create lesser levels of punishment in the community. A range of new types of community service should be introduced with particular emphasis on the needs of offenders who are women, boys, elderly or petty offenders or those suffering from mental problems. At the lowest level these should be rehabilitative schemes which do not give the offender a criminal record. For differing offences, and offences of increasing seriousness, programmes with differing emphases should be tailored. Community rehabilitation programmes should tackle offenders’ risk-assessed needs including education, drugs, thinking and behaviour. One example of this is an scheme called the Milton Keynes Retail Theft Initiative, launched in 1994, requires shoplifters to take part in an extensive course that requires them to meet shop-owners who are victims of theft, confront the reasons why they steal, and teaches them skills to move into work and resist peer pressure; reconviction rates fell to just 3 per cent [202]. Another example is the Dordrecht Initiative in Hartlepool in which a multi-agency approach is also used with offenders identified as particularly problematic; based on a successful initiative developed in the Dutch city of Dordrecht, police and probation officers work in concert with a drugs nurse and outreach supporter workers who supervise the offender in a range of training, housing and constructive leisure activities: the result, to date, has been that over half those targeted have not been convicted or any further offence[203]. In programmes such as these different offenders may require basic education skills, or introductions to employment practices which for many offenders may be their first contact with the world of work and its ethic and discipline.

 

1.                                                              v.      Ideally such schemes would lead to employment which, research reveals, is one of the surest preventatives of re-offending. They would also provide a new engagement with the local community in the form of unpaid work or some acts which focus on paying back to the community offended against. This should be a two-way process. It gives local people some say in the work completed by offenders. And it fosters in offenders the growth of a new feeling of responsibility for others, along with a sense of community spirit and social solidarity.

 

1.                                                            vi.      Where possible these schemes should incorporate an approach geared to restorative justice, which makes reparation directly to the victim, and indirectly to the whole community. Requiring offenders to interact in that way may build the empathy they have previously lacked. Evidence shows that, where prison can harden individuals, the experience of restitution often softens them and provides the motivation to reform which the prison system fails to give to many.

 

Drug treatment in the community

1.                                                           vii.      Although drug treatment is difficult, evidence suggests that it can be cost-effective in reducing crime and social harms[204]. Some new initiatives are under way here. The Government has recently introduced a measure called the Drug Treatment and Testing Order (DTTO) as an intensive community sentence to tackle the link between drug use and offending. It involves greater contact with supervision officers, as well as regular drug treatment and testing. In 2002, over 6,000 DTTOs were ordered, under which the offender and his or her probation officer report back every month to the judge or magistrate who originally sentenced them. This practice could usefully be extended to other community sentences since it serves the dual function of constituting an incentive to the offender to comply with the order, and also gives sentencers some idea of the efficacy of their various sentences.

 

1.                                                         viii.      Despite this initiative, provision of drug treatment is patchy and inconsistent across Englandand Wales. Given the clear links between drug dependency and offending, improvements in drug treatments as part of community punishment programmes ought to be a clear priority, both on pragmatic grounds and on those which take into account the possibility of transformational change. Drugs are a peculiarly piteous assault on the dignity of the human individual and on the realisation of the imago which each individual is called to become.

 

Electronic tagging and satellite surveillance

1.                                                            ix.      Modern technology increasingly offers new possibilities of punishment in the community. Electronic tagging is already extensively used to manage offenders without removing them from society. Some 70,000 offenders have been tagged under the Home Detention Curfew scheme introduced in April 2003 in an attempt to ease prison overcrowding. (Under it prisoners can now leave custody under electronic surveillance up to four months before their release date.)  Further possibilities are opened up by GPS satellite technology which is now being successfully used in theUnited Statesto provide more detailed monitoring of offenders in the community. The system allows offenders to be tracked 24 hours a day either in real time or with information provided at the end of each day. An alert is activated if an offender departs from an agreed schedule or they enter a zone from which their sentence has excluded them. It is also possible, using the same technology, for probation officers to communicate with offenders at any time.

 

1.                                                             x.      We would welcome it if GPS satellite technology were introduced in England and Wales since the system offers a regime which curtails the freedom of offenders in a selective way, allowing them to remain in their home and job and in touch with their local community, whilst curbing their activity in areas which might prove occasions of sin and sources of temptation. Such systems allow for a much better balance to be struck between concerns about individual human dignity and public safety than is possible in custody. They would be particularly useful with remand prisoners, one in five of whom are acquitted eventually and only half of whom are ever given a custodial sentence. The Government needs to guard against the recent tendency to significantly increase in the numbers being remanded into custody awaiting trial[205]. At present it is doing the opposite: the 2003 Criminal Justice Act reversed the presumption in favour of bail in certain cases.

 

1. The Government in June merged the national prison and probation services into a new National Offender Management Service (NOMS). We shall watch the development of this with interest. There have been those who have suggested that it is a step in the wrong direction; what is really needed, they argue, is a system which is more independent of civil service bureaucracy – something which is as cross between the old Prison Commissioners and the increasing numbers of private prisons. This is an interesting academic argument, but one of which we do not feel equipped to pronounce. For it is also arguable that the creation of the new integrated NOMS structure could promote rather than hinder the development of a penal system which is genuinely orientated primarily towards reform and transformation.

 

1. If it is to succeed we feel it is important that the National Offender Management Service encourages greater continuity of treatment of offenders, regardless of whether they are given a custodial or community sentence. It should also allow the possibility of a new flexibility which does not see custody and community punishment as alternatives – a flexibility which is part of what this report would like to see. It should make use of sentences which begin in prison and then move to a punishment and rehabilitation programme within the community, at first in halfway houses and then in offenders’ own homes. It should make greater use of curfews and house arrest, surveillance and monitored exclusion orders. It should require offenders to go to prison only at weekends, allowing them to keep their job and home, and maintain their family and community links. It should require them to undergo some custodial rehabilitative programme in most of their leisure time. Such initiatives could not only reduce crime and maintain public confidence but, properly developed, would build a culture more conducive to the theological imperatives which the balance between justice and mercy, human dignity and the common good requires.

 

 

Change in the community

 

1.  Finally, it is essential never to forget that the kind of transformation which the Gospel requires takes place not just within individuals, nor even with institutions, but within a wider social context. As we have noted, both mercy and forgiveness operate as personal acts of the moral imagination. They cannot be demanded or confected but come as a genuine and unexpected offer and gift. Because of their personal character it is more difficult to reduce them to an abstract principle, in the way that societies more easily do with justice. This means that, in our society,  the instruments of hope and redemption will not best be mediated through the official institutions of the state, however humane its penal system becomes. Private initiatives will be required.

1. The Church has a particular role to play in this. Acts of mercy and forgiveness are permanently established in Christian experience through the Cross and Resurrection of Christ and the continuous gift of the Holy Spirit. The Christian community is called to witness to this in its actions. At grassroots level this places certain responsibilities on individual parish communities.

 

1. Some discharge these well at present. Some congregations have in place schemes by which ordinary families can strike up a relationship with the family of someone who is in prison, sometimes merely standing alongside them in solidarity but sometimes adopting a role of mentoring to a prisoner’s family offering role models of reliable love. Some offer not only personal support and counsel, but direct people to the resources and services that are available in the community to those in need[206]. Others help with parenting classes in prisons and young offenders institutions. Yet others offer practical help such as the church in Durham (see Appendix) which has a team of volunteers who make themselves available to meet women prisoners who have no one to meet them on discharge, and after a considerable time in custody are apprehensive about even simple tasks like getting themselves to the railway or bus station. Direct initiatives at parish level to assist ex-offenders and prisoners’ families need to be extended throughout the country.

 

1.     Other Christians choose to work in charitable groups which are not religious in their overt philosophy. Victim Support has 12,000 volunteers who provide practical help and emotional support for those whose lives are turned upside down as a victim, or witness of crime. The organization also supports some of those victims who chose to participate in systems of restorative justice which, as we have said above, is a vital area in which the Government needs to expand work. Such schemes, which can be greatly beneficial for both prisoners and victims, can also make considerable demands on victims. Offering support to them before, during and after this process is vital.

 

1. Others work with statuory bodies like Local Criminal Justice Boards, in which partnerships of professionals – including the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, magistrates and the Prison Service, the Probation Service and Youth Offending Teams – try to draw the local community and its leaders into positive engagement with those at risk of offending or re-offending, such as those whose siblings have got into trouble. Another such semi-official system is Crime and Disorder Partnerships[207] which focus on tackling drugs and alcohol problems and the anti-social and criminal behaviour they provoke; they work at stifling the availability of illegal drugs on our streets and provide services that enable people to overcome their drug problems and live healthy and crime-free lives.

 

1. Other Christians focus on the needs of particular groups. Care Remand Fostering is a project that provides temporary care and accommodation in private homes for young offenders who would otherwise be remanded to custody. Others involve themselves with The Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT) which, among other things, works with prisoners who have mental health needs. Elsewhere more than 1,000 volunteers are active in 80 prisons, in befriending schemes to support and encourage those separated from their families by imprisonment – assisting prisoner’s wives and husbands or working with their children in prison visitors’ centres. Others spotlight particular needs: those who work with Parents in Prison offer mothers and fathers in jail the opportunity to record a bedtime story for their child, and add a personal message.

 

1. Some work with national bodies like Alpha for Prisons, which over the past two years has linked more than 400 discharged prisoners with individual church congregations in a project which has helped more than 60 per cent of those re-settled avoid further conviction and re-imprisonment. Some join more local schemes like the Surrey Appropriate Adult Volunteer Scheme which supports vulnerable detainees through the police custody process or the Kensington & Chelsea Volunteer Bureau’s HMP Wormwood Scrubs project which offers day release opportunities for prisoners in the final year of their sentence.

 

1. Yet others work with ex-offenders when they leave prison. Projects from the Catholic organisation the Depaul Trusts help young prison leavers find accommodation before release and match them with one-to-one volunteers for support in linking them to schemes to build educational qualifications or explore employment opportunities. The Kainos Community, whose programme is based on Christian values, though it is open to people of all backgrounds, helps ex-offenders develop life skills through 24-hour community living, learning respect both for themselves and others.

 

1. The churches are also helping offenders to re-integrate into local communities, through the development of Community Chaplaincy schemes. Volunteers are recruited from churches and other faith groups, to work under the supervision of a co-ordinator or community chaplain, in befriending and mentoring released prisoners. InSwansea, one of the first areas where a local scheme was developed – and inLondonwhere a scheme has been started to support young offenders – a reduction in re-offending by those supported, has already been demonstrated. Most prisoners simply want someone to talk to, and to encourage, them. Some schemes are developing drop-in centres, where advice will be available on housing, education and employment as well as from agencies providing other services. Often the prisoners helped are those who repeatedly serve short sentences for comparatively minor offences, and have few community ties. Community Chaplaincy was first developed inCanada, as were Circles of Support and Accountability, which offer a more intensive form of engagement specifically for released sex offenders, who have often been in prison for some years, and may have been rejected by family and friends. Circles work closely with statutory agencies. The Circle meets weekly, and initially, there will be some sort of contact with the ex-offender, who is known as the Core Member, every day. If the Circle becomes concerned with the Core Member’s behaviour, it will be challenged, and a decision may be taken to share the concern with police or probation. In this country pilot Circles of Support have been funded by the Home Office.

 

1. We would like to see more work done in this field since it inverts the process of isolation or, in the case of paedophiles, social ostracism or even persecution by the local community, which all too often reinforces ex-offenders in the pattern of behaviour which created their offence in the first place. The evidence is that ‘community chaplaincy’ significantly reduces rates of re-offending. It seems to us no coincidence that approaches like this, which appear to be successful, are ones which work with the grain of Christian theology rather than against it.

 

1. Such ideas in action (for more details see the Appendix) give a sense of what is possible. Christians need to be encouraged to participate more greatly in such direct practical initiatives to assist ex-offenders, prisoners and their families. As a Church we have to acknowledge that concern for those in prison is – despite it being one of the baldest of Jesus’s commands as to how his followers are to serve him[208] – is not at present high up the agenda of many Christians. There are many reasons why churchgoing Christians might not put criminal justice top of their list of concerns. Some may see the subject as too political, or too radical, while some may feel safer supporting a mission field far from home. Others may make a simple distinction between the deserving and the undeserving, failing to separate the sinner from the sin. We have to confess that many Christians have been heavily influenced by baser instincts, all too often fed by the tabloid press, which seeks to portray prisoners as less than human and not worthy of people’s time and energy. We need also to address a common propensity to use concern for victims as an excuse to justify an insufficient regard for how our society treats those it chooses to imprison on our behalf. These are issues which Christian ministers must be prepared to address within their flocks. On this we all need to examine our consciences.

 

 

The story of Bob Turney

 

Bob Turney’s descent into a life of crime began at school where he was labelled a ‘stupid boy’ because of what was, many years later, diagnosed as profound dyslexia. His childhood had been difficult in other ways. His mother was deaf. And when his manic depressive father killed himself, it was Bob who found the body. He was just 10 years old.

 

From his early years in primary school Bob was labelled as disruptive, uncooperative and lazy. He was treated accordingly, and behaved accordingly in response. When he left school at fifteen he was barely able to write his own name and soon got involved in his first burglary. That lead eventually to armed robbery, just as alcoholism led to drug addiction. He spent the next eighteen years in and out of prison.

 

His behaviour inside was no better than outside. One fellow inmate ended up with a metal plate in his head after Bob hit him with an iron bar. He became, in his own words, a career prisoner rather than a career criminal. “It offered me a strong sense of security – boundaries I never had in the outside world,” he has said. “And although the attention I got was negative, at least it was attention.”

 

Then, one day, 20 years ago, in one of his stints outside jail, Bob regained consciousness in a public toilet. His shirt was covered in blood and both of his wrists were slit. He had been drinking for four days straight. “I was admitted to a rehabilitation clinic after finally acknowledging I had a problem,” he recalls. It was only the start of a long slow road to recovery. “The psychiatrist said I was institutionalised and now using hospitals instead of prisons to hide in and unless I changed I would end my life as a long-term inmate somewhere.”

 

Though he had the reading age of a ten year old, he began to tinker with a computer in the office of a rehab charity. He started to write the story of his life. His spelling was so bad that when he put the spell-check on, the computer asked him what language he was using.

 

But eventually, after sobering up, Bob got an honours degree in forensic social work from the University of Reading. He then became a Probation Officer is now a consultant to the Probation Service. His book, Going Straight, written with prison rights campaigner and author Angela Devlin, is now a core textbook for the BA in Community Justice Studies at the University of Birmingham.

 

Now an active member of his local church, Bob works as a consultant, writer and public speaker whose venues have included the Oxford Union, Eton College and the House of Lords. He makes audiences laugh and cry, sometimes in the same sentence. A judge who heard him said that Bob’s was one of the most moving talks he had heard in 30 years.

 

To each audience Bob Turney offers the same powerful message. No matter how despicable their crime, no-one is beyond the power of Christ’s saving redemption.

 

 

Epilogue

 

 

204. When Jesus first appeared, after his Resurrection, to his disciples he did so by passing through a closed door. He entered the upper room in which they were locked away from the outside world[209]. As he entered he brought peace and serenity to the hearts of everyone within. Our task  – as bishops, as a Christian community and as a wider society – is to do the same for those for those who have become the prisoners of crime, or the fear of crime, and also for those who are locked away inside our prisons but also.

 

205. It is up to us to ensure that the prison service offers the continuing opportunities for transformation when the moment comes that the prisoner is prepared to embark on the journey of change. That no matter how hopeless their situation may appear to be, we must never give up on anyone. And that every place can be a place of redemption.

 

 

 

Recommendations

 

True justice must have an inherent bias toward the marginalised, vulnerable or oppressed individuals in society. So should our criminal justice and prison systems.

 

Victims

 

• The first imperative must always be to attend to the victim.

 

• Government needs to review the issue of the lack of transparency in sentencing. Offenders fairly automatically serve less time in prison than the sentence handed out by in court. This is a source of unnecessary hurt for some victims.

 

• Greater awareness of the physical and psychological problems of victims is needed from all citizens, most particularly those who come into contact with victims of crime either through official agencies or as employers, landlords, neighbours and friends.

 

• Greater awareness of the needs of victims of crime should be encouraged among Christians at parish level.

 

• There should be far greater use of restorative justice models within our nation’s penal system.

 

Inside prison

 

• Punishment should contain retribution, in its best and most balanced sense, but more importantly it must be reformative and rehabilitative.

 

• A full working day – eight hours a day, five days a week – should be introduced in prison. The work too should relate to the outside world, with prisoners learning the disciplines and skills and standards they will need for resettlement when they are returned to society.

 

• Pilot schemes – developed in partnership between the prison service, private companies and charities – to make the employment of ex-offenders more attractive to employers should be extended nationwide.

 

• There is clear need for the Government to do more to improve education in prisons and in particular to address the issue of disruption to education programmes caused by the constantly rising number of internal prisoner transfers. There is a need to establish parity in the delivery of rehabilitative programmes throughoutUnited Kingdompenal institutions.

 

• Enhanced Thinking Skills and Reasoning and Rehabilitation programmes should not be downgraded. Regardless of their impact on re-offending rates education is a good in itself.

 

• The Government needs to allocate more money to drug treatment programmes in prison, and for ex-offenders as they leave prison. Improvements in drug treatments as part of community punishment programmes ought to be made a priority.

 

• Behavioural treatment programmes for sex offenders and others need to be expanded significantly.

 

• The Prison Service should reverse its decision to drop its Key Performance Indicator on purposeful activity.

•  The Prison Service should add to its Key Performance Indicators a system for  monitoring the amount of time spent inside the cell.

• The Prison Service should add to its Key Performance Indicators a system for  monitoring toilet conditions.

 

• The Government should encourage the development of more Listeners Programmes and prisoners’ peer groups.

 

• The right to vote should be restored for convicted prisoners. The Government should withdraw its appeal against the decision of the Court of Human Rights inStrasbourgwhich has ruled that removing prisoners’ right to vote it illegal.

 

• The news that August 2004 produced the highest number of suicides ever recorded in a single month underlines how urgently the Government needs to address the issue of self-harm. Strategies based on reducing prisoners’ opportunities for self-harm need to be augmented by ones which concentrate more on promoting well-being.

 

• The Government needs to investigate whether members of ethnic communities are more susceptible to be sent to prison than their white counterparts.

 

• We have grave reservations about the current British Government practice of using immigration regulations to detain, without trial, foreigners suspected of terrorism. (There are serious prima facie human rights violations involved in this.) The Government needs to reconsider its approach.

 

• The Government should take steps to reduce the number of women in prison for comparatively trivial offences like motoring offences, crimes arising out of financial problems and debt, and shoplifting – in 2003 more women were sent to prison for shoplifting than any other crime. Depriving children of a family life by sending their only parent to prison – 55 per cent of women prisoners have at least one child under age of 16 – is a step which should be avoided in all but the most serious and violent crimes. We find it impossible to accept that all of these women need to be in prison and all these children deprived of a mother. Judges, magistrates and legislators should be encouraged to find, as a matter of urgency, alternatives to prison for mothers.

 

• Immediate steps should be taken by the prison authorities to strengthen the possibility of maintaining ties between women in prison and their children.

 

• The Prison Service should add to its Key Performance Indicators – for female and male prisoners – one reflecting closeness to home and facilities to arrange visits.

 

• We would like to see all of these factors such as the physical and psychological impact of prison on the children and families of prisoners given more weight by the authorities.

 

• There are some exemplary public servants working to run and staff our prisons. We would like to see the new National Offender Management Service do more to listen to them and indeed cherish them.

 

• For the few prison workers do not rise above the pressures to which the current overcrowded system exposes them we would like to see more staff development to ensure a safe and dignified environment for other workers and for prisoners. Where that fails it is important for the authorities to root out those elements within the prison staff whose vision has been corrupted or jaundiced to the extent that they constitute an impediment to change.

 

• We would like to see the Government set out a timetable for moving to the system of clusters of community prisons as set out in the Woolf Report. Such prisons are more consonant with the human dignity at the core of a Christian anthropology.

 

 

Sentencing

 

• The new Sentencing Guidelines Council should be given the brief not simply of rationalising and systematising sentencing so that it becomes proportionate, consistent and effective. It should also be given the brief of gearing the system so that fewer people are sent to prison.

 

• It might start by recommending that large numbers of very low risk offenders be diverted from prosecution by conditional cautions, warnings and reprimands. It might consider how to reduce the needless use of custodial remand. Above all it might look at ways to reverse the inflationary tendency which has crept into sentencing – a trend which needs to be arrested and indeed reversed.

 

• Sentences should not automatically reflect, first and foremost, the gravity of an offence. Rather they should sometimes be a response to how probable it is that any punishment other than prison is likely to fail.

 

• The Government needs to guard against the recent tendency significantly to increase in the numbers being remanded into custody awaiting trial. At present it is doing the opposite: the 2003 Criminal Justice Act reversed the presumption in favour of bail in certain cases.

 

• The recently-introduced measure called the Drug Treatment and Testing Order requires an offender, and his or her probation officer, to report back every month to the judge or magistrate who originally sentenced them. This practice could usefully be extended to other community sentences since it serves the dual function of constituting an incentive to the offender to comply with the order, and also gives sentencers some idea of the efficacy of their various sentences.

 

• Custody should be reserved for the most serious and dangerous offenders

 

 

Alternatives to prison

 

• Building more prisons is not the answer to overcrowding. We need to send fewer people to prison and consider how to make more effective alternative punishments within the community . This would both accord better with a Christian vision of prison and also be better at reducing repeat offending.

 

• The fines system, which many now feel is enfeebled and discredited, should be rebuilt, using new systems such as computerised direct deductions from wages and reinvigorating old enforcement strategies

 

• For the poorest in society, particularly those on benefits, fines should not be courts’ first recourse; sentences of community service, in the form of unpaid work or some acts which focus on paying back to the community, make more sense, as part of a much more comprehensive system of community sentencing.

 

• A Day Fines system – in which fines are structured to reflect how much an individual earns in a day – should be introduced in theUK.

 

• The new National Offender Management Service should encourage greater continuity of treatment of offenders, regardless of whether they are given a custodial or community sentence. It should also allow the possibility of a new flexibility which does not see custody and community punishment as alternatives – a flexibility which is part of what this report would like to see. It should make use of sentences which begin in prison and then move to a punishment and rehabilitation programme within the community, at first in halfway houses and then in offenders’ own homes. It should make greater use of curfews and house arrest, surveillance and monitored exclusion orders. It should require offenders to go to prison only at weekends, allowing them to keep their job and home, and maintain their family and community links. It should require them to undergo some custodial rehabilitative programme in most of their leisure time.

 

• The Government should introduce a wider range of community punishment programmes. These should include far less severe community punishments than exist at present, starting with courses to promote a sense of social responsibility and which do not give the offender a criminal record.. But they should also include schemes of punishment which are as onerous, if not more so, than the present system of time spent idly in prison. In between a range of new types of community service should be designed with particular emphasis on the needs of offenders who are women, boys, elderly or those suffering from mental problems.

 

• The judiciary should take care to ensure that new styles of community sentences, which were designed as alternatives to short custodial terms, are not given to offenders who previously would received a lesser punishment. Early evidence is that the opposite is happening.

 

• Care should be taken to ensure that new sentences, most particularly Custody Minus, are not be set about with conditions such that offenders with chaotic lifestyles or drug problems are almost certain to breach them and end up in jail. The new measures should aim to reduce rather than increase the numbers in custody. The Government needs to guard against the danger is that they may do the opposite.

 

• GPS satellite technology should be introduced for tagging.

 

 

Parole

 

• It is inhumane, however horrifying their crimes, to leave prisoners with no hope of release once they have ceased to be a danger to society. The Government should acknowledge this.

 

• Government ministers should re-examine the inclination for the parole system to deny early release to those who refuse to ‘show remorse’ for a crime which they maintain they did not commit.

 

 

Social attitudes

 

• All our political parties have a responsibility to guard against irresponsible exploitation of fears over law and order to gain electoral advantage.

 

• Politicians, newspaper editors and tv drama executives who promulgate punitive views, in wilful disregard of the evidence, to gain political or commercial advantage – or who seek to reinforce prejudices rather than convey the overall truth – do a great disservice to the cause of justice. They should be held accountable for their actions.

 

 

The Church

 

• More direct initiatives are needed at parish level to assist ex-offenders and prisoners’ families.

 

• Christians need to be encouraged to participate in debate on the subject of criminal justice and prisons and to apply their faith directly to issues of controversy. Christians need boldly to challenge the myths and prejudices which underlie so much penal populism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the state, and even of convicted criminals, a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment, tireless efforts towards the discovery of curative and regenerating processes, and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man – these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.”

Winston Churchill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

 

We would like to thank Paul Vallely, Fr James Hanvey SJ, and Professor Simon Lee for their help in preparing this document. We are also grateful for the advice of Helen Baly of HMP Wormwood Scrubs, Paul Cavadino, Stuart Dew, Myra Fulford, Fr Malachy Keegan of HMP Brixton, Tim Livesey,  Rev. Dr Peter Sedgwick, Enver Solomon and Charles Wookey. We would also like to thank the Prison Service, the Prison Reform Trust and NACRO for their assistance.

 

 

Executive Summary

 

 

1. The prison population in Englandand Walesin 2004 reached its highest level ever recorded. It is almost double what it was in 1991[210]. We now have particularly high numbers of women, black people, young people and the elderly behind bars.

 

2. The result is terrible overcrowding. Suicide in prisons is up 40 per cent, staff sickness is higher than ever, drug use is widespread and access to education and rehabilitation programmes is being cut. On some prison wings slopping out has been brought back. Our prisons are becoming a public disgrace.

 

1. The cause of all this is not more crime but tougher sentencing. More and more people are being sent to prison, and for longer. This increased severity is a peculiarly British phenomenon. We now have, proportionally, the biggest prison population inWestern Europe.

 

1. Yet there is no sign that this is making our society better or safer. Prison is not working. But our objections are not simply utilitarian. A Christian anthropology makes clear it offends against human dignity and the common good.

 

Justice and Mercy

 

1. Justice

Justice demands when we offend against what is right we deserve to be punished. But retribution must, in the degree and character of the punishment, reflect the seriousness of the offence.

 

1. Our present prison system is a place where offenders have deviant social values reinforced and learn new techniques of crime. Almost two-thirds of prisoners are reconvicted of a further offence within two years of leaving prison.

 

1. But there is more to justice than correction. Justice in its full biblical sense does more than adjudicate between the claims of competing or conflicting peoples to achieve peace and harmony. It requires a bias towards those who are poor or vulnerable.

 

1. Justice for the Victim

Our first imperative must always be to attend to the victim. But true justice must produce a positive outcome for the victim, for society and for the offender. For this reason as Christian bishops we applaud current experiments in ‘restorative justice’ which gives victims of crime the opportunity to participate in the administration of justice – and which oblige offenders to make amends to the victim and the community.

 

1. Justice for the Prisoner

Many of those in our prisons have histories of significant vulnerability and disadvantage. So it is dangerous to make assumptions which straightforwardly equate criminality with moral degeneracy. Justice demands that society addresses the disadvantage of prisoners in education, moral training and lack of family support – assistance in all of which will reduce re-offending. It requires more extensive treatment for drug dependency and mental health problems both of which are inadequately treated in the prison system at present. It means special attention women and those from ethnic minorities.

 

1. Justice for the children of prisoners

Two thirds of female prisoners are mothers and just 5 per cent of their children remain in their own home once their mother has been sentenced. Each year more than 17,700 children are separated from their mother by imprisonment. Often women are jailed for comparatively trivial offences like shoplifting. We find it impossible to accept that all of these women need to be in prison and all these children deprived of a mother.

 

1. 11.  Mercy

For God justice alone is not sufficient. Love and mercy also proceed from the very nature of God.

 

12. Mercy is not to be confused with weakness. The Christian option is not a soft option. Love is the seeking after the good of the other. Yet this, as every parent knows, is not the same as being lenient. This is also true of the love we are instructed to offer to those who offend us when Jesus instructs us to love our enemies.

 

13. Our society offers four rationales for punishment. Its purpose is, variously, said to be to exact retribution, to contain criminals, to deter and to reform.

 

14. Yet none of the traditional justifications for punishment are philosophically adequate or sufficient in themselves. Christian theology insists that any penal system must both reform and restore. Where the claims of retribution and redemption conflict, mercy must take priority. Different kinds of offender require different prison regimes.

 

 

The individual and society

 

15. Individuals are made in the image of God (imago Dei). This gives them certain inherent rights, which society cannot abrogate.

 

16. Society has rights too. These are part of its duty to pursue the common good.

 

17. True justice will involve a dialectic between the rights of the individual and the rights of society. But the needs of the majority must never be allowed to overrule the rights of the minority. Prison must never mean punishment first and then rehabilitation if there are sufficient resources. It requires both as an integrated purpose.

 

1. Politicians and the media

Society needs to guard against the risk of false fears fostered by both politicians and the media who think that a hard line on crime and punishment will bring political or commercial advantage.

 

19. When the media focuses only on the most dramatic elements of criminal justice it distorts the realities of a complex system. Television entertainment programmes all too often give a distorted impression of our prisons. Irresponsible reporting does a great disservice to the cause of justice. So does tabloid scapegoating of individuals; it is inhumane, however terrible their crimes, to leave prisoners with no hope of release once they have ceased to be a danger to society. Politicians and newspaper editors who seek to reinforce prejudices rather than convey the overall truth need to be held accountable for their actions.

 

1. Human dignity

We are all made in the image of God, not just in what we are but in what we have the potential to become. This is true for victims of crime, for staff in prisons and for prisoners themselves.

 

21. At all levels, including leadership levels, the prison service has some remarkably dedicated staff but in our prisons we detect a dispirited workforce – and statistics on stress, sickness and staff turnover reflect this. Society must show a greater duty of care to those who work in our prisons.

 

1. Above all the current regime in our jails is not conducive to human flourishing for the inmates. Conditions in prisons take their toll both physically and psychologically, as record levels of suicide show. In 2003 105 people took their own life in prison, clearly a cause for considerable alarm. This is clearly an area the Government needs to address as a matter of urgency.

24. Underlying all this is the fact that the prison system treats inmates as objects rather than as subjects, placing them chiefly in a passive role. One symbolic touchstone of this is that those in prison are currently stripped of their right to vote. In April 2004 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that this violates Article 3 of the Human Rights Act  but the British Government has lodged an appeal against the ruling. Restoring the vote to prisoners would be an important acknowledgment of the need to inculcate in prisoners a sense that they have a continuing stake in the society to which they will return. The Government should withdraw its appeal.

 

25. Prisoners have the right to continue to protest their innocence in prison. The Government should re-examine the tendency of the parole system to deny early release to those who refuse to ‘show remorse’ for a crime which they maintain they did not commit.

 

 

Hope and Redemption

 

26. God constantly offers us grace and everyone is capable of receiving redemption. The possibility of change is there in everyone at any time. Our penal system should provide continuing opportunities for reform and rehabilitation for all those in its care throughout their sentences

 

 

27. Change in prison

Our prisons should provide a climate which is conducive to human flourishing – and provide the human, material and educational resources to enable the development and rehabilitation of prisoners.

 

1.                                                               i.      Education

Education in prison has improved significantly in recent times, but progress is from a fairly low baseline. Less than four per cent of the annual cost of keeping someone in prison is spent on their education. Far more money needs to be spent on education.

 

1.                                                            ii.      Drugs

Over half of all prisoners have a drug dependency problem – and drugs are a factor in a significant proportion of crimes. Yet only around 10 per cent of prisoners with a drug problem receive any drug treatment. This must change.

 

1.                                                          iii.      Work

The current definition of a full working day in a prison workshop is four hours – of mainly low-skilled menial tasks. This pays scant respect to the dignity of the prisoner and is ineffective in helping prisoners reform their attitude, acquire a work ethic or gain new skills. A full working day should be introduced to parallel that of the outside world, eight hours a day, five days a week. The quality of work too should relate to the outside world, with prisoners learning the disciplines and skills they will need when they are returned to society.

 

A system of community prisons should be phased in, which would help offenders maintain links with their families and communities – links which evidence shows would make them six times less likely to re-offend.

 

1. Alternatives to prison

Our society’s inherited assumption is that punishment should start with fines, then impose community sentences and then use prison as the default position. But there is a case for radically rethinking this graduated hierarchy of punishment.

 

29. The fines system should be rebuilt using new systems, such as computerised direct deductions from wages, and reinvigorating old enforcement strategies. For the wealthier members of society Day Fines should be introduced so that the offender then pays in proportion to what he or she earns in an average day. For the poorest in society – such as those in receipt of state benefits – fines should not be the courts’ first recourse; for them we would like to see the range of community service and punishment options widened considerably.

 

30. We would like to see the current range of community punishment schemes widened significantly to include both less severe and more onerous punishments than at present. For differing offences, and offences of increasing seriousness, programmes with differing emphases should be tailored.

 

31. We also need community rehabilitation programmes to tackle offenders’ risk-assessed needs including education, drugs, thinking and behaviour.

 

32. Modern technology increasingly offers new possibilities of punishment in the community. Electronic tagging and satellite surveillance allow for a much better balance to be struck between concerns about individual human dignity and public safety than prison. Such devices would be particularly useful with remand prisoners, one in five of whom are acquitted eventually.

 

33. But we also need a new flexibility which does not always see custody and community punishment as alternatives. Sentences might begin in prison and then move to a punishment and rehabilitation programme within the community, at first in halfway houses and then in prisoners’ own homes. There is a place for greater use of curfews and house arrest, surveillance and monitored exclusion orders. Sentences which require certain offenders to go to prison only at weekends and/or in the evenings would allow them to keep their job and home, and maintain their family and community links.

 

1. Change in the community

Concern for those in prison is one of the baldest of Jesus’s commands as to how his followers are to serve him: “I was in prison, and you visited me”. Yet this is not at  present high up the agenda of many Catholics. Our parishes need greater involvement with prison visiting schemes and projects to befriend prisoners’ families.

 

34. Our society pays insufficient regard to those it chooses to imprison on our behalf. On this we all need to examine our consciences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix

 

 

 

 

Some voluntary organisations helping prisoners and their families

 

 

 

 

Care Remand Fostering

A Christian project specialising in providing accommodation for young offenders who would otherwise be remanded to custody. Based inBirmingham, the service works with local authorities’ Youth Offending Teams with a telephone referral system, transport to court and same day placements. A foster home scheme (which places only one young offender at a time in each home) and an activities programme to meet the young person’s individual needs is provided. All young people are moved away from their home area so that they can benefit from a new start and clear boundaries. Results so far are very encouraging; most of the young people complete the programme and go on to receive a community sentence.

www.remandfostering.org.uk

 

Caring for Ex-Offenders

During the past two years, more than 400 discharged prisoners have been linked with church congregations through the re-settlement work of Alpha for Prisons. At least 60 per cent of those have settled sufficiently to avoid further conviction and re-imprisonment. Although Alpha for Prisons began as an evangelical outreach, with Alpha courses run for 30,000 men and women in prison, re-settlement now represents a larger part of the organisation’s work. Alpha produces a training manual and recommends that churches have an agreement, or contract, with released prisoners, setting out expectations and ground rules. It is hoping to develop a network of local advisors who will help when difficulties arise.

www.caringforexoffenders.org

 

Depaul Trust

This charity, founded as a Catholic response to the growing number of young homeless people arriving in London, began working with young offenders in 1998 through two projects, Outside Link and One-to-One. Outside Link helps young prison leavers secure accommodation before release, in order to prevent them from being homeless and vulnerable to re-offending. The One-to-One project matches young offenders about to be released with volunteers who provide support and advice, to help them live independently and be integrated into the community. Both projects have demonstrated a reduced rate of re-offending.

www.depaultrust.org

 

 

Kainos

The Kainos Community runs rehabilitative/therapeutic programmes at the Verne prison inDorsetand at Swaleside prison on the Isle of Sheppy. Prisoners volunteer to join these programmes and are expected to stay for a minimum of six months. The basic ethos of Kainos Community is that prisoners develop life skills through 24-hour community living, learning respect both for themselves and others. They gain insight into the way they think, and so are better able to understand their own behaviour and are helped to change. It is a learning experience in which peers and staff give prisoners feedback and support. Although the programme is based on Christian values, it is not a religious programme: prisoners of all faiths or no faith are welcome. Volunteers are an important part of the programme; they range from 25 to more than 80 years of age. There are considerable benefits to the establishments in which KC operates, with improvement in the behaviour of the prisoners. There is also growing evidence that men who have completed the programme are less likely to re-offend.

www.kainoscommunity.org

 

 

Low Newton Drivers

While working in the chaplaincy at Low Newton women’s prison atDurham, Elizabeth McGurk became aware that many women had no one to meet them on discharge, and were apprehensive about getting themselves to the railway or bus station. A plan was drawn up to have a team of volunteer drivers available. Elizabeth spoke about this at three Sunday Masses in her own church, St Joseph’s, Gilesgate; she expected maybe six to volunteer, and when forty came forward she says “I knew this was a work of the Holy Spirit”. There have been obstacles to overcome, but the scheme is now working well. Some women have been taken directly to their probation office and hostel, ensuring that they keep appointments which, if missed, could mean immediate return to prison.

 

 

The Mothers’Union

The Mothers’Unionis a world-wide Anglican organisation, promoting the well being of families, through practical projects established by volunteers within local communities. Members seek to offer that same support and encouragement to those separated from their families by imprisonment. Over 1,000 volunteers are active in 80 prisons, in befriending schemes, women’s support groups, work with children in prison visitor centres, chaplaincy teams, and facilitating parenting groups or courses. Though the work undertaken by MU volunteers is varied, the needs which they are seeking to respond to are consistently similar: isolation, loneliness and a sense of grief, caused by separation from family and friends.

www.themothersunion.org

 

 

Nacro

Nacro is the largest national charity working to prevent crime and resettle offenders. Each year it houses 4,000 offenders and people at risk in its housing projects. It provides education and training for 14,000 offenders and people at risk in its employment training centres. It helps 12,000 prisoners through its prison based resettlement workers. It advises 18,000 people through its Resettlement Plus Helpline. And it works with 12,000 young people through its youth activity projects. It is a secular organisation but its staff and volunteers include many Christians working alongside people of other faiths and of no religious faith.

www.nacro.org.uk

 

 

Prisoners’ Penfriends

This charity enables people who care about prisoners to make friendships through the post. It provides a secure forwarding service to ensure that addresses (and, if required, names) are not revealed to prisoners. There are guidelines for correspondents to make sure that appropriate security measures are followed, and there is an advice service should any problems arise. When funds permit, there will be a newsletter for all correspondents to share news and ideas. Prisoners’ Penfriends is not a specifically Christian organisation, and is emphatically not in existence to attempt to convert prisoners to any religious viewpoint, but many of the volunteers are Christians.

Gwyn.morgan@prisonerspenfriends.org

 

 

Parents in Prison

Mothers and fathers in prison are offered the opportunity to record a bedtime story for their child, and add a personal message. Tapes are sent all over the world, with PIP covering the costs. Most PIP volunteers are drawn from churches. At present, there are projects at Leeds, Highpoint inSuffolk, Holloway and Wandsworth inLondonandEastwoodParknearBristol.

PO Box55, Royston, Hertfordshire SG8 5GE.

 

 

The Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT)

This came into being in 2001 as the result of a merger of The Bourne Trust and Prisoners’ Wives and Families Society – PWFS. The Bourne Trust was founded by two Catholic lawyers to provide better services for prisoners and prisoners’ families. PWFS was founded when a group of prisoners’ wives met together to discuss their problems and to support one another. Their motive for action was one of self-help. The Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT) works with prisoners who have mental health needs, both male and female, and supports prisoners’ families, working towards successful integration of ex-offenders back into the community. PACT provides a free National Telephone Helpline, Visitor Centre management in prisons in the Greater London area and the South West of England, supervised play for children visiting prison, all-day children’s visits, counselling for remand prisoners, and a first night in custody service in HMP Holloway for women with mental health needs.

www.imprisonment.org.uk

 

 

Prison Fellowship

In this charity volunteers and staff from all Christian communities show the love of Christ to prisoners, prisoners’ families and ex-offenders, regardless of their beliefs. Working with prison chaplains, volunteers based in more than 150 local groups provide ongoing support to prisoners. Many befriend prisoners’ families and ex-offenders. Special projects are run by trained volunteers and staff. Its Sycamore Tree scheme is a programme for prisoners on victim awareness and restorative justice; prisoners hear from volunteers who have been victims of crime and take part in symbolic acts of restitution. Its Angel Tree project organises local groups who raise funds to buy, wrap and deliver Christmas presents to prisoners’ children. It is an excellent way of strengthening family ties. The Compass project, based at Highpoint Prison inSuffolkis a six-month Christian values-based programme for prisoners that covers life skills, Christian lifestyle and the arts.

www.prisonfellowship.org.uk

 

The Prison Reform Trust

The Prison Reform Trust is the leading prison charity when it comes to research, education and campaigns. It offers advice and information to prisoners, their families, prison and probation staff, the legal profession, students, academics and interested members of the public. Its quarterly magazine, Prison Report, is the most challenging and influential voice on prison issues. Its annual lecture, conferences and seminars attract high profile speakers and large audiences. The Prison Reform Trust carries out research on all aspects of prison. Recent studies include: prisoners’ views on prison education, the mental health needs of women prisoners, older prisoners, prisoner councils, foreign national prisoners, prisoner votes, and a report into how sentencers make the decision to imprison offenders.

www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk

 

TheSurreyAppropriate Adult Volunteer Scheme

SAAVS supports vulnerable detainees in police custody. Sixty trained volunteers try to ensure that the person’s rights are observed and that they understand why they have been arrested. They also support detainees through the custody process, including the interview, and they encourage detainees to consider taking legal advice (but do not themselves give such advice). The service operates 24 hours a day for 365 days a year and has successfully responded to more than 9,000 calls since 1995. Staff at Custody Centres in Staines, Reigate, Woking andGuildfordare supplied with the names of volunteers and call them in turn. The scheme supports young people aged 16 and under, where parents or guardians are not available, and adults who are judged to be vulnerable, mainly through mental illness or learning disability.

www.saavs.org

 

 

Victim Support

In 2004 the National Association of Victims Support Schemes marks 30 years of support to victims of crime and witnesses in court. Victim Support is based on the principle that communities need to offer a community response those affected by crime. Its 12,000 volunteers provide practical help and emotional support for those whose lives are turned upside down as a victim, or witness, of crime. Victim Support finds that its help is often sought by relatives and friends of those directly affected by the crime – for the impact of a burglary, serious sexual assault or bullying, is rarely limited to the individual . Assistance with criminal injuries compensation claims, attending court to give evidence, and having their story and its consequences heard, perhaps repeatedly, are the day-to-day services freely given by volunteers, trained and supported by professional staff.

www.victimsupport.org

 

 

Wormwood Scrubs Volunteering Initiative

The Kensington & Chelsea Volunteer Bureau has been running this pilot project at HMP Wormwood Scrubs for 18 months. It works closely with the Resettlement Team at Wormwood Scrubs to identify offenders due to be released from the prison within the next 12 months who would benefit from day release voluntary work. Prisoners are helped by volunteers to improve their employment prospects through skills training, befriending and advocacy

www.voluntarywork.org.uk

 

 

based on a list complied by Stuart Dew of The Churches’ Criminal Justice Forum for the Church of England General Synod Report on Criminal Justice, 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a comprehensive list of volunteering opportunities see “What Can I Do?” published by PACT (Prison Advice and Care Trust) on behalf

of the Churches’ Criminal Justice Forum. It can be ordered by post from:

 

PACT

Lincoln House, 1-3 Brixton Road, London SW9 6DE

TEL: 020 7582 1313

E mail: info@pact.uk.net

 

Churches’ Criminal Justice Forum

39 Eccleston Square, London, SW1V 1BX

TEL: 020 7901 4878

E mail: info@ccjf.org.uk

 

Rethinking Crime and Punishment

11 Park Place, London SW1A 1LP

TEL: 020 7297 4738

E mail: info@rethinking.org.uk

 

 

The document can be downloaded via the websites:

 

www.imprisonment.org.uk

www.rethinking.org.uk

www.ccjf.org.uk

 

Index

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