International Prisoners’ Day (10 August) arose out of a protest in Canada. It followed the suicide of a prisoner who had been placed in solitary confinement after requesting transfer to another unit. The day has become widespread as it continues to publicise and to protest against brutal treatment of prisoners. It also encourages wider reflection on the widespread reliance on imprisonment as a routine response to illegal behaviour.
Few people would deny that people who break laws should be held responsible for their actions and suffer some disadvantage as a consequence. Nor would they deny that those whose actions pose a continuing threat to the community may rightly be held outside the community. The goal of this separation, however, should not be to punish them, but to address the causes of their criminal behaviour and to change it.
COUNTERPRODUCTIVE
The use of prison as the default response to antisocial behaviour was initially a reform. It replaced the routine use of execution and corporal punishment. In a modern society, however, it is counterproductive. It is neither effective in deterring people from committing crimes, nor does it help their rehabilitation. It makes people much more likely to reoffend and return to prison. This should not be surprising. Prisons break the personal relationships on which people must rely if they wish to begin life freshly when they leave gaol.
The harm caused by imprisonment is not only external. It also affects people’s minds and hearts because of the stigma attached to it. Our society imagines prisoners as violent criminals and see them as a dangerous group of people, as a waste of space, and not as the unique persons who they are. When they leave prison, they carry with them this stigma that can affect their relationship to family and neighbours, their chances of finding employment and shelter, and their relationship with police and the public service.
STIGMA
The most insidious effect of any stigma, however, is that those touched by it also come to believe they are worthless. When people are seen as a waste of space and are forever defined by their punishment, they come to believe it of themselves and so to read contempt in the eyes of everyone they meet and even of their family and close friends.
This stigma is reinforced in the choreography of gaols – their clanging doors, countings, and the ill-fitting uniform prison dress, for example. This kind of humiliation forces people to withdraw into themselves and not to speak of their feelings and desires. It subverts any attempt to establish the confident and trusting relationships that prisoners will need when searching for a better life after leaving gaol.
The humiliation bred in gaols threatens even the fragile sense of self that many prisoners have had since childhood. Most prisoners come from relatively few local areas in which people suffer from many kinds of disadvantage that reinforce one another.
ENTRENCHED DISADVANTAGE
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 prisoners first 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 some the prison 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. In many cases, 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. That is the strongest indictment of a society that tolerates the conditions that breed crime and relies on prisons to recycle the consequences.