Week 9: Going to prison and going straight

"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 civilization of any country." - Winston Churchill

We know what the prison system is supposed to do. Prison is a more severe punishment than a community sentence or a fine; a prison sentence is how you punish a relatively serious crime. Sentencing is supposed to punish criminals (retribution and denunciation) and reduce crime (deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, restoration). Locking criminals up works as a form of

• retribution: you're punished by being locked up, and the length of the sentence sends you the message of how much society thinks you need to be punished
• denunciation: you're humilitated by being removed from society and put in prison clothes; again, the length of the sentence tells you how much denunciation you're getting
• incapacitation: you're locked up to keep the rest of us safe
• rehabilitation: you're locked up until you've become a reformed character
• deterrence: we lock you up to scare other criminals, or else to scare you into not re-offending when you're released

The fact that imprisonment can, in theory, serve so many different purposes is a worry. If the appropriate level of retribution for your crime is twelve months, but at the end of that time the authorities think you're too dangerous to release, what happens to the retributive 'message'? If you're detained for another year, does that mean that your crime has suddenly become worse than the offence committed by another prisoner who got an eighteen-month sentence? Deterrent sentencing - "making an example" of somebody, "sending a message" to other offenders - makes things even more complicated. (Remember the Facebook Two?)

So sentencing doesn't work perfectly (shock news!) and there's a definite potential for some people to be treated worse than they perhaps deserve. Which people in particular?

One way of looking at crime and criminal justice is to ask what they tell us about society more generally. Crime surveys enable us to identify who suffers the most from crime - and it turns out that in many cases the people hit worst by crime are already having a pretty hard time of it. (People living on run-down and disordered estates are more vulnerable than average to burglary; members of ethnic minorities are vulnerable to racist crime, as well as being statistically more likely to live in high-crime areas; and so on.) In a divided and unjust society (it can be argued), crime makes the effects of division and injustice even worse.

But what about the criminal justice system? Does the prison population - which probably represents the people who are most severely affected by the system - have any particular characteristics, or is it a representative cross-section of society? The answer is quite definitely (a). Celebrity criminals like the ex-MP Chris Huhne make the news when they go to prison, but the great majority of prison inmates are as far removed from them as you could imagine. Prisoners are far more likely than the general population to be unmarried, unqualified, illiterate, out of work or homeless, or to have drug, alcohol or mental health problems. In a divided and unjust society, the prison population is right at the bottom of the heap.

Which is why the treatment of people in prison - and after they leave prison - is so important. Do you focus on their needs and 'deficits' (the skills and abilities they lack), or on their actual and potential strengths? Do you tell them to dwell remorsefully on their past or look ahead hopefully? Do you tell them they're a menace to the public or an asset to the community? What message is most likely to help an ex-offender go straight, bearing in mind that ex-offenders mostly start out with severe disadvantages (a criminal record not least)?

Homework: read the Maruna paper (on Moodle) and have a think about it.