In the flood of days dedicated each year to different groups of people and their concerns, International Prisoners’ Justice Day (10 August) is more like a pond. It is a Canadian Day, started by a small group of friends of prisoners who demanded justice for them. Although the day is small, however, its significance is large. Especially for Christians. One test set by Jesus to the genuineness of our faith was whether we visited prisoners, who in his time depended on visitors for their food.
In our culture we instinctively see prisoners as different from other people who are similarly restricted in their movement. To visit someone in hospital or a nursing home seems more natural than to visit them in gaol. Our images of gaols, too, are of bluestone walls and cells or of surgically cold places on the edge of the city. Prisoners are people who have been excluded from the places where other people live and gather freely. The stigma attached to being a prisoner makes us keep our distance. It also makes us see prisoners as a group, and not as persons like ourselves. They are not defined by their inner life but by the crimes of which they have been accused. The news about prisons that we most commonly read describe riots, stabbings or drugs. They make us imagine prisoners as violent and powerful creatures.
These prejudices prevent us from seeing prisoners as people like ourselves, and from asking how they came to be imprisoned. If we do ask, we shall find that the majority of prisoners come from relatively few local areas in which people suffer from many kinds of disadvantage that reinforce one another. They are more likely to have seen and experienced domestic violence as children, to be exposed to drug abuse, to live in crowded accommodation, to have had learning difficulties at school, lack social skills, to be affected by mental and physical ill health, to have been in the welfare and juvenile justice system, to be unemployed like their parents, and to have had little access to childhood health and welfare services.
As a result, many people in prison came into contact with the police in their childhood, entered the child welfare system, were sent to juvenile detention centres, and finally graduated to adult prisons. For many this is the only predictable world they know, the only escape from anxiety, and so the place to which they return after theft or drug offences. For many, too, the crimes for which they were sentenced to prison flow from addiction or from neglecting to take medication for mental illness.
If prisons hold the people whom Jesus loved and reached out to, they do little to heal them. Too often they are a dumping ground for the people whom society rejects. It is not surprising that one of the main effects of imprisonment is to make it more likely that people will return to prison after release. When they are separated from their families, from friends and from workplaces, and bear the stigma attached to prison, it is little wonder that they face difficulty in connecting with society and taking responsibility for their actions after they are released.
This not to say that no one should be detained. Society has the right and duty to hold people responsible for actions that have injured other people, to ensure that they have not gained from their wrongdoing, and to protect the community from vicious behaviour. The principal purpose of detention and other forms of response to crime, however, should be to encourage people to take responsibility for their actions and to prepare them with the resources to return to society and to contribute to it. The best place to do this for most people is within the community in which they live. The money saved by keeping people out of prison can then be diverted to address the social circumstances that lead to them being there.