British Justice

[Gelgoog]

well if re-education in england is anything like the usa, it fails for mainly one reason. when your labeled a criminal, or felon, you really can't get work. you end up only being able to work at a place like mcdonalds, and when your trying to go straight and narrow after years of crime and cant even make enough money to pay your bills much less feed your family, then its real easy to see why ex-cons slip and start breaking the law again, whether it be drugs, theft, fraud, ect.
re-education is only as good as peoples ability to have a chance of a decent life if they leave crime behind them, otherwise it doesnt work.

[Obi Wan Asterix]

Moved to ethos, mores etc.

[Trey]

Exactly. Punishment is a waste of time. The argument that it deters criminals has been proved wrong again and again.

No. Do you even know anyone who has been in prison? I do, and they say it haunts them, and they'll do anything not to go back there. This being said, i don't believe in extremely harsh punishments, but for cases of sex offenders, they are 99% of the time going to repeat, while others (murderers, thieves, etc.) are much less likely.

Edit: My opinion on re-education. Just think about the name, it almost sounds like some Soviet program. Most criminials know what they are doing, thus, they have no need to be re-educated, secondly, those who did in the heat of the moment (murder, assault), were controlled by their emotions, re-ducation for that? No, counseling maybe. Lastly, we come to the mentally ill. These people 99% of the time cannot be re-educated, (most of them are sex-offenders), so they should not be released where they can cause harm to society.

[MaximiIian]

Re-education costs a fraction of long prison sentances.
A night in a prison is as expensive as a night in a luxery hotel, you know.

Then just give the prisoners poorer conditions and bad food. That'll take the costs down a lot. No TV, no beds, no toilet. Just a hole in a concrete floor. No longer give them luxurious meals; instead, feed them corn husks, beans, and water.
If they die from malnutrition, then, well, they shouldn't have broken the law. Thier fault.

[removeduser_487563287433]

You realise that poor conditions and overcrowding is a recipe for prison riots and failure of re-education.

[DougyM]

Commit and offence.

Serve the standard time, get all the re education they can stand.

Commit same offence again.

Be given the choice of being hanged, or sent to the army.

Simple as. They have been givent he chance to re adjust and fit back into society so if they show they cant be bothered then we should simply remove them from society.... permenantly.


And i dont meant some cushy peace time thing... i mean have them being blown up by zealots in iraq and afganistan.

If theres ever no need for them to be meat shields... then just dont offer them the option of going to the army... hang them all.

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.

And yes, please forgive me if i dont think scum who rape kids and kill other people or who sell drugs are worthy of living.

If that ideas not good enough....



SAW.

Make druggie scum/rapists/killers fight to live in some elaborate trap... make them saw off their feet.. make them crawl through razor wire...

I can garuantee they wouldnt be commiting any offences again.

[MaximiIian]

You realise that poor conditions and overcrowding is a recipe for prison riots and failure of re-education.

Re-education? Bah. If they were stupid enough to commit a crime garnering prison time, then no amount of "education" is going to help.
And prisoners won't riot if the guards have automatic weapons, which would be considerably cheaper than outfitting every prison cell with TVs, toilets, and paying for high-class meals.
Besides, corn husks are good for ya. They gots fiber.

[removeduser_487563287433]

Re-education? Bah. If they were stupid enough to commit a crime garnering prison time, then no amount of "education" is going to help.
And prisoners won't riot if the guards have automatic weapons, which would be considerably cheaper than outfitting every prison cell with TVs, toilets, and paying for high-class meals.
Besides, corn husks are good for ya. They gots fiber.

Criminality is not entirely derived from such black and white concepts as being stupid.

[MaximiIian]

I dunno about that. I mean, it's quite obvious that if you commit a crime, you will get punished for it. You'd have to be some kind of idiot or some kind of maniac to not comprehend that and still go through with a crime.

[removeduser_487563287433]

Perhaps driven by poverty? Just off the top of my head.

[MaximiIian]

Perhaps driven by poverty? Just off the top of my head.

Okay, fine, there's an exception. Impoverishment is different from simple greed or anger, though. People with no money can't buy food, and have to get it somehow, either by stealing money to get food, or by stealing the food outright.

[the Black Prince]

well if re-education in england is anything like the usa, it fails for mainly one reason. when your labeled a criminal, or felon, you really can't get work. you end up only being able to work at a place like mcdonalds, and when your trying to go straight and narrow after years of crime and cant even make enough money to pay your bills much less feed your family, then its real easy to see why ex-cons slip and start breaking the law again, whether it be drugs, theft, fraud, ect.
re-education is only as good as peoples ability to have a chance of a decent life if they leave crime behind them, otherwise it doesnt work.

welcome, my friend, to the labelling theory of criminology. you have summed up the theory in sucxh a simple way my lecturer would be proud of you lol...

you can re-educate preople all you want
once you sentence them to prison, thats it. its a life sentence no matter how much time they spend behind bars. a good number of employers will take on a convict who only has a minor record. no real employer is going to take on someone who's been behind bars. once they have that label, that stigma, they can never find decent work again, no matter how qualified they are, how impressive their CV is. its over for them. that knowledge alone is enough to make them not want to bother with re-education, because they don;t see the point.

its stattistically proven that re-education and rehabilitation programs work best when they are community based, and not prison based. the last stats i saw were along the lines of 68% sucess rate in the community to a 48% sucess rate in prison. where sucess is judged by both completion of the course and lack of re-offending within 2 years.

@Hapsburg
only in 5% of blurglaries is the burglar apprehended by the police, and usually only if he is caught red handed at the scene. with such a low clear up rate, its not at all hard to believe that most criminals don;t care about what the punishment is, they don;t believe they will get caught.

also, i believe pruison guards in the US are armed, but they still have had a fair few prison riots.
given the number of prisoners to staff, and the fact that our prison officers are not exactly unarmed, the fact that riots did happen had little to do with the abiolity of the staff.

control in prison requires the prisoners to view the regime in the prison as legitimate, and at some level agree to be held by that regime. otherwise you'd need 2 prison guards for every prisoner.
when a regime is no longer viewed as legitimate by those it seeks to control, then the prisoners will not abide by that regime, and will actively seek to express their grievances with the system, and against those who seek to enforce it.

i'm paraphrasing their from the Woolf report in 1990 about the riot at HMP Strangeways in manchester. the report was written by then Lord Justice Woolf and then HM Chief Inspector of Prisons Judge Turin.

You realise that poor conditions and overcrowding is a recipe for prison riots and failure of re-education.

absolutely correct.
basic decent conditions in a prison are one of the requirenments for prisoners to view the regime as legitimate identified by Lord Woolf and many otrher researchers such as Sparks and Bottoms, who wrote Prisons and the Problem of Order in 1996 and Legitimacy and Order in British Prisons published in the British Journal of Sociology in march '95

[removeduser_487563287433]

Okay, fine, there's an exception. Impoverishment is different from simple greed or anger, though. People with no money can't buy food, and have to get it somehow, either by stealing money to get food, or by stealing the food outright.

There are thousands of exceptions, your opinions are entirely insufficient. How many Caribbean drug mules are in British prisons? The odd pensioner in there for using medicinal cannabis or refusing the pay council tax. Oh man. Running rings around you dude. Give up now.

[Carach]

Anyone who thinks you can reeducate criminals is not living in reality.

some can..vast majority cant.

they need to speak criminal language, harsher punishments to discourage them from re-offending.
get rid of the luxuries they have in their cells (tvs, radios/cd players, CARPET to name a few).. the stuff they get in prison is often more than they get in real life ffs...prisons are places for punishment, not for a holiday.

[the Black Prince]

@Carach
wrong
prison is not the place for punishment - prison IS the punishment.
but unless you want to employ 2 prison guards for every prisoner, and have sanctions imposed on us by the european court of human rights, certain standards have to be met in prisoners, otherwise you'll just face never ending prison riots.

its also proven that harsher punishments make no difference toward deterrence whatsoever, mostly because the large majority of criminals siply do not weigh up the relative sentence against their crime. most don;t even expect to get caught.
do you honestly expect an enraged husband, discovering his wife with another man, pauses to think about what might happen to him in the courts before he grabs the cricket bat in the corner?
only the people who plan crimes weigh up the punishment in a form of cost benefit analysis, and the people who actually plan crimes are those least likely to be caught too... and generally only apply to property offences.



If we want the experience or prospect of serving a prison sentence to act as an effective deterrent, why should we be concerned with the ‘pains of imprisonment’?

For prison to have any prospect of serving as an effective deterrent, a prison must appear to be a harsh institution to those who might end up there. It must foster an image of a place of residence that you would not wish to attend, and indeed, one you might wish to avoid at all costs. However, the harshness of the regime must be effectively offset against a range of fundamental factors that govern how prisons are run securely and legitimately. These factors however, seek to reduce the ‘pains of imprisonment’ that make a regime appear harsh. These “pains” were described by Sykes’ work, The Society of Captives (1958) as:
Deprivation of liberty; the deprivation of goods and services; the deprivation of heterosexual relationships; deprivation of autonomy; and deprivation of personal security. (Sykes 1958:65-78)

Opposed to this though, basic duties and requirements laid out under the European Convention on Human Rights ensure a prisoner must have a basic standard of living. Additionally, certain conditions outlined below must be met for both inmates and outsiders to consider a prison regime legitimate and thereby accept and tolerate the regime. On a less direct level, how we treat the people kept in institutions like prisons also serves as a reflection on our society, a society that these people are also going to have to reintegrate with. A balance must therefore be struck between controlling the impact of the pains of imprisonment and the image a prison radiates to the outside world.

The value of any form of punishment as deterrence has been criticised (see for example Fleisher 2003, Honderich 1989). However, for prisons to be able to deter people from committing crimes, the fear of being sent to prison, combined with the potential length of sentence must outweigh any possible benefit of committing the crime. To do this then, prisons should not be places of luxury; should not provide privileges to inmates; and should not provide a better lifestyle than an inmate might experience on the outside. Prisons should not be cruel and inhumane but “basic conditions in prisons should be decent but austere”, luxuries taken for granted by the public are only available as privileges granted for good behaviour, and taken away for bad behaviour (Howard 1994: c224)

For some though, the loss of liberty, and loss of contact with family members can be especially damaging. Davies et al state that “[some prisoners] suffer mental anguish when they think about their outside lives, homes and families” (Davies Et al 2005:389). Early Victorian prisons were, by comparison to today’s regimes, incredibly harsh, and even pushed many prisoners into insanity, through lack of association, or indeed lack of anything bar the essential food and water needed to maintain a prisoner in life. (Morgan 2002)

Today, such harsh conditions in prisons would inevitably be challenged and ruled unlawful under the European Convention on Human Rights. The articles of this treaty, enforceable through the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and since the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998, in UK courts, specify that all people have the right to be free from “torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (ECHR: Article 3: 1950).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, then HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Judge Steven Tumim published a series of damning reports about the state of prisons in England and Wales (for example, HMCIP 1988, 1990a and 1993 as suggested by Morgan 2002:1144). Reports that were, if anything, substantiated by the series of prison disturbances during the same period, as prisoners attempted to voice their own grievances with the system. In 1990 the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (CPT) visited English prisons and police stations. In their report (published 1991) they found that 3 Prisons, HMP Brixton, Wandsworth and Leeds were in violation of Article 3 (Feldman 2002:423) The government rejected their findings, but later the same year, the Woolf Report (1991), co-authored in parts by Judge Tumim levelled many of the same accusations against the prison system.

With increased awareness of the options open to them, and better complaints and grievance procedure, issues of prisoner’s rights have come before UK courts and the European courts. Change via these routes is slow, and piecemeal, but it is happening (see for example, Whitfield and Others v United Kingdom 2005) and the effect of these is to provide a fairer, safer and more normal experience within prison, relative to life outside. The Government is now under increasing pressure from various groups such as the Prison Reform Trust and the Howard League for Penal Reform to improve the conditions within prisons, and though slow progress has been made, it is progress nonetheless.

Human rights issues aside, basic prison welfare is of considerable importance to the Prison Service. Following numerous prison disturbances and riots in the 1980s, culminating in the riot at HMP Strangeways (now HMP Manchester) in 1990, Lord Justice Woolf (as he was then), carried out an extensive report into the prison service and the management of the prisons. Among his recommendations, he stated that for prisons to function, there had to be some level of cooperation with the regime from the inmates themselves, and for this to happen, the regime had to be seen as legitimate by the inmates, otherwise they would not tolerate it, and incidents such as that at Strangeways would continue (Woolf 1991).

A legitimate regime is one in which the “regime is legitimate because it can be justified in terms of their [the prisoners] beliefs” (Sparks et al 1996:86) or to put it another way, a legitimate regime has “claims to justified authority” (Ibid at 88). These beliefs do not have to be overly prisoner-orientated, but merely some legitimate aspects of life that a prisoner has every right to expect, and without which a prisoner is likely to resent the regime, and also those who enforce it. If the basic prison regime, including its accommodation services and activities fail to meet common standards, the regime may well be regarded as illegitimate by those who experience it. (Sparks and Bottoms 1995)

To give an example, on research into order in prisons, Sparks and Bottoms write on HMP Long Lartin that
The history of stability … the favourable regime and the generally approved staff practices lent to Long Lartin an appearance of greater legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of prisoners (1995:57)

They continued to contrast this with a much harsher regime at HMP Albany, which also experienced increased levels of control incidents. They felt they could say with certainty that
Every instance of brutality in prisons, every casual racist joke and demeaning remark, every ignored petition, every unwarranted bureaucratic delay, every inedible meal, every arbitrary decision to segregate or transfer without giving clear and well founded reasons, every petty miscarriage of justice, every futile and inactive period of time is delegitimising (Sparks and Bottoms 1995:60)


As mentioned above, the 1980’s were a time of great disturbances within the prison service, both between management and staff, and between inmates and the institutions. This led to what has been referred to as a crisis of control, or a crisis of order within the prisons, leading to the Strangeways and similar disturbances in 1990. The inquiry and subsequent report into these riots outlined that there was no one factor that had caused any one of the outbreaks of disturbance, but instead a build up of legitimate grievance within the system, combined with a lack of means for addressing these grievances, lack of trust in such systems that did exist, and the increasing harshness of prison regimes caused by a staffing shortage and staff disaffection within the prison service. As Sparks and Bottoms state “A defensible and legitimised prison regime demands a dialogue in which prisoners voices are registered and have a chance of being responded to.” (1995:59) and this was largely lacking within the prison service at the time.

It must always be remembered that prisoners outnumber staff in these institutions. The staff hold the keys, the authority, and the power of force, but there are ultimately more inmates, and so any regime relies upon some form of implicit consent to the treatment.
Prisons cannot be run by coercion; they depend on staff having a firm, confident and humane approach that enables them to maintain close contact with inmates without abrasive confrontation. (Control Review Committee 1984 quoted in Sparks Et al 1996:9)

So long as that treatment is tolerated by the inmates, then varying levels of order can be maintained, but an increasingly hostile prison population with genuine issues over the legitimacy of the regime proved too explosive a situation for the prison service to contain.

It’s for these reasons that Lord Woolf referred to the “threshold quality of life” of all prisoners and to the “legitimate expectations” that prisoners have of their institutions (e.g. Woolf 1991: para12.129) because without them, prisoners would never accept the regimes. It therefore becomes of vital importance to run a prison system that is fair and just and maintains for the prisoners a certain quality of life.

When looking at the merits of the pains of imprisonment another factor to consider is the impact this has on our society. A society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable people, those who collect pensions and those who are homeless, those in mental institutions, and also those who offend against society. A society which forces offenders to live lives of squalor and extreme hardship is a society that many would consider less civilised or developed compared to a society that treated offenders fairly and justly in humane surroundings. This issue is associated with that of human rights, in that our modern and civilised societies recognise that all people, whatever their current legal status, have basic human rights and we as a humane society have the responsibility to uphold the rights of all people. Those prisons in our system that do not conform to a basic civilised standard, most notably Victorian era local and remand centres, are blights within our society, “Bricks of Shame” upon what may be an otherwise legitimate system (Stern 1993)

Finally, it must be considered what effect the prison experience will have on these people when they are released, for only a small minority of offenders will actually spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. There are here, two possible outcomes. One is that an offender is so appalled and disturbed by their time in prison, they will do all in their power to avoid going back there. Certainly this is the view hoped for by the advocates of prison as a form of deterrence. However the recidivism rates seem to disagree with this analysis. 58.5% in 2002 were reconvicted of a further offence within 2 years of release, and the number has remained consistently above 50% since at least 1997 according to Home Office statistics. Prison experience must therefore serve to prepare an offender for reintegration into mainstream society. It must not be so disassociated and removed from everyday life that such integration is difficult if not impossible, because that would surely cause an offender to fail, and fall back into a life of crime, and potentially, prison. Being in prison is itself the punishment imposed on offenders. Whilst there, it is both appropriate and necessary that they learn skills that can lead them to lawful employment on release, and maintain existing family contacts, so that they have a supportive environment to enter into upon release. None of this is possible in regimes where prisoners spend up to 23 hours a day in a cell, as can be found in some local prisons (Morgan 2002)

Whilst the image of prisons as harsh institutions must be maintained for prison to have any form of deterrent value, the pains of imprisonment, both the specific “pains” outlined by Sykes (1958) and the general poor conditions of being in a total institution, must be somewhat alleviated. International and national law provide certain minimum standards of living that must be complied to and above this, prisoners have certain legitimate expectations, many of them rather basic that make a prison stay bearable. If such expectations are ignored, and prisoners feel they are unfairly treated, it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain control and effectively run the prison. Furthermore prisons need to be forward looking in providing for the future of offenders to reduce the numbers of recidivists who would find their way back into the system. On a more abstract level, it can also be said that society on the whole has a humanitarian duty as a civilised society to provide for and decently care for those who offend against our laws. With these elements in mind, prison regimes themselves will fail (as at Strangeways) if not enough attention is paid to reducing the unwanted effects of the pains of imprisonment. Yes, we want our prisons to be harsh, or even austere (Howard 2004) to effectively deter, but they must not be cruel, illegitimate, degrading, humiliating or purely punishment orientated, for if they are, any positive benefits of the prison in the form of deterrent are outweighed by the much higher cost of maintaining the regime, and the people who will return to it.

(yes, i actually wrote this - copyright Aden Lucas 2006 etc etc, not that i expect most of you actually read it all lol)

[The Alcotroll]

Commit and offence.

Serve the standard time, get all the re education they can stand.

Commit same offence again.

Be given the choice of being hanged, or sent to the army.

No thanks. I wouldn't want to share a billet with some thieving scrote, I wouldn't want to be on a range with a re-offending murderer, I wouldn't want to have a drugged-up delinquent with authority issues giving me covering fire.
I certainly wouldn't want murderers, burglars and rapists being released back onto civvie street knowing how to efficiently negotiate obstacles, handle a firearm (properly, not gangsta-style) and perform bayonet drill.

Personally, I'd bring back hard labour and chain gangs. With a little investment, we could re-vitalise Britain's Heavy industry.

[Tom Paine]

And yet, peadophiles are given mere 6 month sentences for raping 3 year old girls and filling their computers with child pornography.

Can e get something straight out from the off? That is pure wrong. There is one thing in there that's true, and that is that the girl was three. However the paedophile was given a life sentence and the minimum he could serve before being granted parole, which is not automatic and in fact extremely unlikely in this case, is 6 years. So don't base your view of the system of misinformation and dsistortion.

tBP, can we nick that article for the Scrip?

[Erik]

Anyone who thinks you can reeducate criminals is not living in reality. If scolding them and telling them how to live worked their would be no crime.

Re-educating has never gotten a chance except in experiments.
Some of those experiments were very successfull, like the Glenn Mills program. (I'll try to get some figures on that)
So science shows it works.
The problem is that politicians find it very hard to sell re-education because the general public only wants to hear about "getting tough on crime".

Edit: My opinion on re-education. Just think about the name, it almost sounds like some Soviet program. Most criminials know what they are doing, thus, they have no need to be re-educated, secondly, those who did in the heat of the moment (murder, assault), were controlled by their emotions, re-ducation for that? No, counseling maybe. Lastly, we come to the mentally ill. These people 99% of the time cannot be re-educated, (most of them are sex-offenders), so they should not be released where they can cause harm to society.

You made "Soviet program" sound like a bad thing :wink:

And yes: most criminals know what they are doing so they CAN learn to act differently the next time.
The ones who can't control their own behaviour are the hardests to change.
And the mentally ill and those who refuse to take part need to be supervised for the rest of their lives (or until a cure is found), but they are just a small group and they would be in and out of prisons for the rest of their lives anyways.

Then just give the prisoners poorer conditions and bad food. That'll take the costs down a lot. No TV, no beds, no toilet. Just a hole in a concrete floor. No longer give them luxurious meals; instead, feed them corn husks, beans, and water.
If they die from malnutrition, then, well, they shouldn't have broken the law. Thier fault.

Their living conditions aren't what makes prisons expensive, it's the fact they have to be guarded 24/7.
"Luxery food" is still just a few dollars a day, and equipment lasts years or decades so a toilet or a TV costs just a few cents per day.
In the Netherlands prisons cost almost 200 euro's per day per inamte.
Luxeries like TV calms them down so you actually save money.

you can re-educate preople all you want
once you sentence them to prison, thats it. its a life sentence no matter how much time they spend behind bars. a good number of employers will take on a convict who only has a minor record. no real employer is going to take on someone who's been behind bars. once they have that label, that stigma, they can never find decent work again, no matter how qualified they are, how impressive their CV is. its over for them. that knowledge alone is enough to make them not want to bother with re-education, because they don;t see the point.

Nobody wil hire them if they haven't changed.
But if they can show they have been re-educated and won't make the same mistakes again, then people wil hire them.

its stattistically proven that re-education and rehabilitation programs work best when they are community based, and not prison based. the last stats i saw were along the lines of 68% sucess rate in the community to a 48% sucess rate in prison. where sucess is judged by both completion of the course and lack of re-offending within 2 years.

68% and 48% success rate?
So re-education DOES work in most cases.

And it's obly the most troublesome multiple offenders who get to go to the re-education programmes.
If first-rime offenders and regular criminals are put in those programs too the success rates wil be much higher.

[Moosferatu]

Re-educating criminals does nothing. There was one man on the day he got out of prison killed a woman with a brick. Shocking.

[Tom Paine]

Re-educating criminals does nothing. There was one man on the day he got out of prison killed a woman with a brick. Shocking.

Evidence for this? Because I'm not inclined to believe that after the factual inaccuracies of the first post of the topic unless I see proof. Plus prison doesn't re-educate people it simply incarcerates them.