Hand-wringing over prisons

The ODT and DomPost are running stories today about our failing prison system.

This is from December's Ombudsman report;

• Prison work has been cut officially from 43% to 35% of prisoners in the past three years, and only 19% are actually employed by the prisons’ business unit. The others have only part-time work, such as cleaning their cell blocks or serving the meals. • Education has been massively disrupted by overcrowding and resulting frequent transfers of prisoners when beds become available around the country. The prison education budget was underspent by 44% last year and training is forecast to be underachieved again by 33% in 2005-06. • Many prisons lack proper libraries and rely on donations of old books from the public or from public libraries. • Several prisons, including Mt Eden, Wanganui and Wellington, do not have gyms. • A new booking system for prison visits, combined with a doubling of prisoner transfers has cut visitor numbers, weakening prisoners’ links with family members who might motivate them to reform their lives. The crowding in jails has seen evening lock-up time brought back from 8.30pm to 5pm in many of the country’s 19 prisons, because guard numbers have not kept up with an unpredicted increase of almost 2000 extra prisoners since the Sentencing and Parole Acts were tightened in 2002.

This is terrible. Prisons without gyms.

Look, even I could be seduced by this kind of hand-wringing stuff. So I went back and read some of Stephen Franks stuff. Remember, we have been trying to rehabilate prisoners for decades to no avail - or very little;

Around 80% (of prisoners) reoffend soon after release.

That is up from approximately 45% when I started law practice over 30 years ago. Back then the idealists were claiming that prison didn't work. They used it to justify the loopy experiment we've been running for the last 30 years, hoping that if we are all nice enough for long enough to criminals they might decide to be nice back. It's been a complete failure.

Under the legal system we inherited from Britain, the State claimed the victim's right to retribution. "Leave it to us" worked for hundreds of years. Then the anointed in charge reneged on the bargain. They shudder at what they call "vengeance".

ACT does not. ACT shudders at the harm to the innocent since Sir Geoffrey Palmer's announcement 16 years ago that retribution had no place in the law of a civilised nation. We think the price for that political correctness is paid by the 45,000 bashed, robbed, raped or murdered last year, nearly 5000 per year more than when Helen Clark took over in 1999.

But here is a smattering of what various advocates are saying;

Being confined to their cells, they are restricted in what they can do. It’s turning them into vegetables, said the society’s secretary, John Whitty.

Howard League president Peter Williams said some young people would be psychologically harmed by being cooped up so long in cells which are about 3m square just big enough for a bed, a small desk on one wall and a stainless steel toilet with an attached hand basin on the pipe behind the toilet bowl.

In some older prisons, such as New Plymouth, Prison Chaplaincy Service manager David Connor said some cells are so small that you can stand in the cell and touch the two walls.

These same people champion the welfare system that produces many of our criminals. The only progress we can make is reform both systems. And I don't mean make them more generous. If we aren't tougher, as a society, we are going to keep on paying the rising social costs. Perhaps we just don't grasp what these costs are until personally affected. Then it is too late.