The relationship between crime and imprisonment.

I was going to write something about the relationship between crime and imprisonment when I came across this posting I made on the Guardian's CiF site on 9th September 2008.  It was in response to the proposal to build Titan jails.

The relationship between crime and prison is not as clear cut as both sides of this debate assume. The people we imprison are selected on the basis of their visibility, their vulnerability, their power (or lack of it) and because of their behaviour. Criminal justice agencies focus their efforts on those it is easiest to convict and often prioritise low hanging fruit (e.g. kids hanging around the streets) rather than more serious criminals who through their location, position or wealth are able to operate with impunity. Take a drug smuggler. Divide your cargo among four people who for whatever reason (but often poverty) are prepared to carry it. Three get through, one gets arrested. The smuggler makes very healthy profits, three of the mules get a few bob, and one gets a long sentence justified by a Minister who claims its shows she or he is tough on drug smuggling.

The SEU report commission by the government made clear that our prisons were full of the most socially excluded members of our society. Many of them have committed crimes, but it is the poor, the homeless, ethnic minorities, the educationally disadvantaged, victims of sexual abuse, the mentally ill and other powerless people who pay for their crimes by imprisonment. That doesn't mean that the rest of society is crime free. Of course it is not, but in general we do not pay for our crimes.

The reason why the most socially excluded tend to end up in prison is not because they commit more crime but because they are targeted by the criminal justice system.

Prisons are primarily places of punishment; of course there have been good programmes in prisons and certain prisons have for limited periods been positive places, but just because you see a flower in a desert you should not jump to the conclusion that deserts are good places to grow flowers. Prisons are bad places that, all other things being equal, damage those locked up in them, those who work in them and the families of both. We should oppose the buildings of these prisons because prisons are bad places; they are anti-social and will damage many people. But the solution does not lie in smaller prisons or any other type of prison. When a prison becomes a good place, which actual does good to those inside it, then eventually it is either closed or replaced with a punitive regime, the good place quite simply was no longer a prison, to res-establish it as such the good had to go and the pain substituted for it, it had to be re-established as punishment. We saw it with Norfolk Island in the 1840s, with Borstal after the Second World War and with Barlinnie special unit more recently.

We can't support a system that targets the vulnerable and powerless and inflicts pain on them by pretending that smaller units, NACRO running the resettlement or other recycled failed reformative bollocks with make them work. They work already, as places of pain and punishment. They have never and will never work as places of reformation. The problems which lead certain people to be selected for imprisonment are problems of social inclusion that need dealing with in the community.

The orginal article and comments can be read here. My text above is the same as I orginally posted.  However the links have been added.

Foreskins and dreadlocks - Prison Security as an Excuse for Abuse

Strip searches are routine in penal institutions and are justified by arguments about prison safety. Reading prisoners accounts they perceive the process as being more about power and humiliation.  One regular requirement, particularly targeted at male children is to require the foreskin to be rolled back in front of the guards to check if anything is hidden there. For those who want to check this out I suggest you carry out a practical experiment to establish just what you can hide in a foreskin without it being visible. [Those of you who don not have a foreskin should find a friend with one to jointly conduct this experiment.] 

From my experiments I have concluded it is impossible to hide a gun or a mobile phone. It is also impossible to hide any significant amounts of drugs.  Given the humiliation experienced by those subjected to this procedure any security gain is obvioulsly insignificant. In particular its requirement for children is clearly child abuse.

A recent report by the Associated Press highlights another example of how prison security is used an excuse for abuse. They report how at least 48 prisoners in Virginia are kept in solitory confinement solely on the basis that they refuse to co-operate with security policy on hair and beard length.  The prisoners in segregation include ten Rastafarians who have been held there for over ten years. Rastafararians objection to hair cutting is not about fashion but a religious belief.  Although details of the other prisoners is not available most are likely to be from other faiths who share similiar beliefs (e.g Sikhs).  The justification is security. Long hair could be used to hide guns and other items. The impact of imposing "security" regulations that ignore prisoners faiths is that either the prisoner does something that goes against their faith or they are severely punished.  In this case ten Rastafarians have been subjected to over a decade solitary confinement for sticking to their beliefs.  All in the name of "security".

Soft Prison - How the news is made

On the 9th September just after 11 in the morning a journalist called Sadie Nichols from the Daily Express posted a request on the askcharity webside. Askcharity has been established to help communications between the media and charities. Sadie's request was

I'm looking for someone who has been in prison and thought that it was all quite a cushy life inside - just as we are led to believe - and would be willing to share their experience anonymously for a feature. Please get in touch if you know anyone, male or female, who would testify that life behind bars isn't the tough experience law abiding citizens would hope that it is.

Now clearly our Sadie (or her newspaper) have a clear agenda. They are not interested in the stories of those for whom imprisonment is unbearable pain. She would have no interest for example in this excellent and very moving blog by Raymond Lunn describing his experience of imprisonment. No she wanted to portray prison in a very different light and was looking for a charity to help her.

Sadie's fishing paid off. The next day the 10th September the Express website ran a story under the headline

PRISON? IT'S A FIVE STAR HOTEL

Bob Cummines, the Chief Executive of charity UNLOCK and a former ex-prisoner who spills the beans on the 'reality' of imprisonment. He informs his readership that

Prisoners are given PlayStations, their own flat-screen televisions in their cells, their beds have pretty covers and even curtains at the window.

He tries to slip a reformative message in arguing for prisoners to be made to useful work but his article's main impact is to reinforce the Express's predetermined message - prison needs to be made harder. Prison's are full of the most damaged and vulnerable people in our society. For those prisoner's already unable to cope making prison tougher will just mean more pain, more self harm and more suicides. But Bob has a charity to run and funds to raise.



A interesting final point. Sadie Nichols doesn't write for the Express she appears to write only for the Mail online. Her output there includes some "soft prison" stories. However the Express does have a Sadie Dodds who is a regular contributor. It appears that our Sadie uses different names for different papers. The quality of the journalism is however equally bad under both names.

Tomato crime, the hurt of women inside and white collar prisoners buying an easier time.

One of classic texts on crime and punishment is Jeffrey Reiman’s The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Now in its 8th edition the book sets out how the criminal justice system is distorted by power and as a result fails to address the offending of the rich and powerful and instead focuses on the often petty offending of the poor and powerless.

The evidence for this thesis is overwhelming and we see it everyday. Whilst the financial crisis, corporate killings and MPs “expenses” do not result in criminalisation the forces of law and order have moved swiftly to deal with Mrs Linda Ware, a 61 tear old Grandmother living in a council flat (what more evidence of criminality is needed) who is being threatened with an ASBO and a potential five years imprisonment for growing tomatoes in the communal hallway.

Yet occasionally a rich bastard does get done. This is particularly the case when he (it normally is) gets caught thieving off his own kind. Robbing the poor is rarely a problem but robbing the robbers can provoke a response. These few cases are used as an example that the law applies to the rich as well thus justifying the punishment and imprisonment of thousands of poor and powerless people.


Prison is painful, particularly for those with histories of abuse and poor mental health. Recent evidence of this is the epidemic of self-harm in the UK’s women's jails. But from the States we learn that the few rich people facing jail can use their wealth to prepare by, for $200 an hour hiring a prison coach

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According to the New York Times, Steven Oberfest, the CEO of Prison Coach offers the following services:

His sessions are conducted in his upper East Side apartment and at a training facility nearby. For those under house arrest, Oberfest even makes house calls.

He typically opens with a primer on the nuts and bolts of prison life, demystifying jailhouse routines and things like commissary.

"If you're confused about something, you can't go to a correction officer and ask him what's happening because the other inmates will think you're a snitch," Oberfest said.

He offers up a workout routine suitable for life in a 6-by-9-foot cell and breaks down common prison lingo. Mental training, focusing on meditation techniques, comes next, followed by close-quarter combat lessons.

In the Oberfest school of prison survival, the ability to instantly stop a burly attacker is essential. "If someone is able to totally disgrace you the first day you walk in, that just opens the door for everybody not to respect you," Oberfest said. "The most important thing is mutual respect."

So now even the few rich people who are sent to prison as sacrifices for their class get to buy an advantage. Anyone who has read Archer’s Prison Diary will have noticed how he was able to use his wealth to buy privileges. He even maintaining his supply of bottled water meaning imprisonment never meant he had to do anything as common as drink out of a tap.