Imperiled UK prisons require conservative reform | Dan Mikhaylov
The unavoidable issue at hand
As the public covetously awaited Christmas in 2016, it was shocked by the most violent prison riots since the 1990 Strangeways Incident. At HMP Birmingham, a 12-hour disturbance involved several hundred convicts and produced such vehement chaos that the authorities had to deploy trained prison guards as well as 25 riot police officers. In the event’s immediate aftermath, Mike Rolfe, the national chairman of the UK Prison Officers Association, labelled this prison “a tough place to work” and foreboded: “it is not unlike many prisons up and down the country. We have been warning for a long time about the crisis in prisons, and what we are seeing at Birmingham is not unique”.
He was correct. In our nation almost one in two prisoners reoffend within a year of release. This trend is too overwhelming to be explicated with Bernard de Mandeville’s eminent principle, “private vices, public benefits”, and too heinous to be brooked by society, all the more since UK penitentiaries are overcrowded and fiscally burdensome. Thus, HMP Nottingham, envisaged to accommodate 700 inmates, currently houses more than 1,000, whilst the costs of maintaining one prison place are £5,000 higher than the average wage. Add to this the 300% rise in assaults on staff between 2010 and 2019, and the preponderance of mental health issues within our prison population, and the message becomes unequivocally clear – our prisons, as they currently exist, are not working anymore.
Why both practicality and morality demand renewal
Conservatives should be the first to recognise and hammer this home. For us, prison reform does not constitute a mere economic necessity, motivated by the need to end the squandering of the taxpayers’ money on programmes that neither contribute to the delinquents’ rehabilitation, nor ensure our own security upon their release. Conversely, we advocate for it from the perspective of the common weal: it presupposes a system that simultaneously uproots those who endanger order and tranquillity, and improves and educates wrongdoers. Our system must be undergirded by the Christian principle of forgiveness. The Bible commands us to abandon “bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave” us (Ephesians 4:31-32). Striking a new equilibrium between punishing offenders, in the interest of justice, and showcasing compassion is both an ideological and financial prerogative. Equally, a conservative overhaul of British prisons would align with their contemporary failures.
Before elucidating this proposed overhaul’s intricacies, it is incumbent that we clarify what life behind bars truly constitutes as well as what must be altered. Firstly, we ought to recognise that our institutions have become incubators that today perversely fuel crime and criminal behaviour. The experts agree: the former Chief Prison’s Inspector, Nick Hardwick, testified that prisons all too often metamorphose into “places of violence, squalor, and idleness” with a culture of drugs and misery.
Doubtless, such a hostile environment is not conducive to cultivating good behaviour, and fails its corrective functions. If prisoners are to be released, it is only adequate that we should not expect these individuals to, upon reentering society, be more of a threat to public security and order than when they were primarily incarcerated. Yet this is simply not the truth of the current arrangement.
Although the government is supposed to segregate minor offenders from the more violent, malevolent criminals, this policy has turned superfluous. There are, of course, different prisons of varying levels of security, tailored to the threat perceived to emanate from their dwellers, but this has not stopped the former from succumbing to further lawlessness. The extortionately high reoffending rates mentioned earlier illustrate the workings of this lamentable principle. What makes this trend still more alarming is that as many as 70% of young offenders under 25 conform to it.
Worse still, our supposedly corrective facilities constitute breeding grounds for extremist ideas, which themselves abhor the foundations of our Western civilisation and muster recruits against its ordinary practitioners, i.e. all of us. Again, our society cannot, and should not, stomach this. Precisely because the state did nothing other than host voluntary de-radicalisation programmes to address this crisis, an al-Qaeda member, Dhiren Barot, was able to preach Islam to his fellow convicts and motivate at least one of them, Michael Coe, to reoffend upon release.
The authorities’ connivance similarly manifested itself in substantial cuts to funding and staff. Between 2010 and 2014, the number of full-time personnel in public sector jails diminished by 29% from 45,080 to 32,100. This decision did not take place in a vacuum either, but coincided with the national inmate population for the first time surpassing 85,000. In 2018, some 58% of the country’s institutions reportedly exceeded the Central Normal Accommodation threshold, which determines the maximum quantity of prisoners prisons may hold without overcrowding. With more convicts to oversee and dwindling resources on the ground, it is unsurprising that Britain is losing control over its prison system entirely, and that the prospects of protecting the public from criminals are steadily approaching their nadir.
Secondly, this arrangement is failing prisoners. Certainly, we do not suggest that imprisonment should be despoiled of its punitive component altogether; that would neither resonate with the public, nor corroborate our principle that individuals must be held responsible for their actions, especially if those actions either directly harm or threaten to harm others. Such a desire for justice is a natural and entirely justified human disposition. Yet, a sufficiently compassionate and adaptable society, thereby both a prudent and ethical one, must preserve the opportunity for inmates to recognise wrongdoing and repent, granted that misconduct is not exclusively a product of free will. As Max Weber posited, humans are social creatures; just as we shape our surroundings, so do our surroundings shape how we think and act, this interplay influencing the probability that we behave in a certain manner, including the probability that we assent to certain malicious activities. For this reason, the optimal prison system would enable those behind bars to decipher the endogenous causes of their wrongdoing and attempt to change their flawed nature.
This is currently unimaginable. The aforementioned staff reductions compromise not only the staff’s but also the prisoners’ sense of security, while overcrowding presents an impediment to peaceful reflection. Moreover, the mental health crisis within British jails remains unaddressed. Despite the fact that crime often reflects psychological abuse and deprivation, these prisoners can count on minimal assistance. Thus, some of the UK’s most vulnerable miss out on cathartic treatment of their psychological disorders, or gaining new skills that may assist them to potentially overcome socioeconomic depredation, and unavoidably seek solace in self-imposed marginalisation and assimilation into the criminal world. The problem is most acute among men, aged between 25 and 29, who account for close to 15% of all prisoners, while adults, aged between 18 and 25, provide another 18%. The nation cannot afford to lose its youths, if it wishes to safeguard the intergenerational contract, thought inextricable from a healthy society by none other than Edmund Burke.
Solutions
What must conservatives do to write off the government’s sinister mismanagement of prisons? Herein, we propose the following. A truly conservative reform must remain realistic: we cannot expect all to show willingness, let alone capacity, to reintegrate into society. We need to isolate those deemed fundamentally pernicious and untrustworthy of adaptation, using the existing jail infrastructure. Inter alia, these include proven recidivists, terrorists, and malevolent antisocial elements.
Nonetheless, since most prisoners do not subscribe to the aforementioned mentality and merit assistance along the path to rehabilitation, a truly conservative reform must strive to assist. The core tenets of Christianity, which have historically formed the backbone of our legal traditions, and our understanding of good behaviour, preach forgiveness; whence, we should entrust minor offenders to restart their lives by receiving apposite medical help and acquiring the wherewithal for re-entry into the labour market and a new meaning in life. Most importantly, a conservative approach must see them fathom the values of good citizenship, among them compassion, love, modesty, and sacrifice. Such an approach is not an advocation of naivety, in assuming that mere permissiveness and material generosity will lead to repentant moral citizens, but to state that sufficient education; in efforts to inform the value and utility of Aristotelean and Christian virtue, understood as self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-control, may at least plant the seed of purpose and teleology in estranged and internally disordered citizen’s minds.
The open prison system is also a decent starting point. The notion of designating specific institutions to rehabilitation and equipping them with such facilities as workshops and libraries is noble, as it could provide the foundations for the conservative strategy of prison rehabilitation. The open prison scheme itself could be improved, however. These places could benefit from a rigid curriculum that takes into account the most recent psychological findings and blends them with a profound focus on citizenship values and impactful role models, whether based in the heroes of Antiquity, those Britons who exemplified stoicism, magnanimity, and sacrifice, or in fictional characters.
The important part is that prisoners imbibe the idea that a fresh start is possible, and that nobody is relinquished by society to decay behind bars. This, in turn, should discourage radicalisation; if wrongdoers feel socially included, they would be far less likely to take extremist propaganda seriously, whereas those spreading such destructive ideas would be more easily singled out and addressed by the authorities. Indeed, Norway’s adaptable rehabilitation-focussed approach has yielded results with globally successful low incarceration rate. In Britain we ought to imitate what is best about this insofar as it aligns with the aspiration to be firm, but fair, and is feasible to the intricacies of our significantly contrasting society state.
Moreover, open prisons should mirror the so-called colony-settlements, found across Germany and Russia. There, companies open outlets either within prisons or in their vicinity to train and recruit their inhabitants. Whilst many UK businesses participate in comparable initiatives, with Timpson’s alone filling 10% of its workforce with erstwhile convicts, these programmes would benefit from more coordination by, together with greater financial incentives through, the state. These establishments likewise allow prisoners, all of whom serve short sentences, to venture into neighbouring towns and live with their families on the settlement’s territory, ensuring that they maintain a sense of belonging to the outside world. This aligns with our approach’s localist agenda: offenders would find employment in neighbouring communities and contribute to their development, thereby putting their education into practice from day one. While having the potential scope for significant success, this obviously would require major oversight.
Introducing this practice is more feasible than its Scandinavian equivalent though. After all, the United Kingdom would find itself severely impoverished by constructing the kind of prisons observed in Norway or Denmark. In addition to that, greater spending would stick in the taxpayers’ craw and risk creating a similar precedent to the Anders Breivik case. The far-right extremist brutally slaughtered 69 summer camp attendees in 2011 only to gain lodging in a jail cell more luxurious than most British student accommodation. Penitentiaries should involve education, rather than indulgence.
Certainly, it would be folly not to recognise the historical successes of our prison system. Both the United Kingdom and the wider Western world have attained remarkable progress as regards treating wrongdoers with dignity. The living standards in today’s prisons would have attracted the envy of those who spent time in medieval dungeons or early modern incarceration facilities; and British conservatives should be proud that John Howard and Jeremy Bentham stood at the forefront of global prison innovation.
Notwithstanding the immense value of tradition, Britain should move on: adjusting the nation’s penitentiary system is as necessary as ever, with prisons contradicting the tasks of rehabilitation and deterrence our forebears had placed on them.
Sensible reform that solves problems, and creates not new ones by virtue of radical, premature agency, is the natural ally of every conservative; it is a prerequisite for maximising the common good, which ex vi termini requires the uplifting of the most vulnerable demographics. Convicts, many of whom hail from problematic backgrounds and have a history of suffering from societal marginalisation and economic disempowerment, are precisely one such group. Their wellbeing cannot be disregarded by conservatives, even though prison reform might prove lengthy and in many respects challenging. Demanding it ensures continuity with our historical progress in the field of law and order and resultantly constitutes a conservative cause. Rome was not built in a day, but Romans were hardly idle in laying its bricks.
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