Why use prisons at all?

For most of my adult political life, the prison population in this country has hovered around the 45,000-mark.  It now exceeds 70,000, having risen by 10% in the year 2002 alone.  And it could, it would seem, rise as high as 100,000. 

This is madness.  It is coming to mirror the madness of the USA, where some 2,000,000 people are behind bars.  Something is going seriously wrong with our “theory of imprisonment”.  Incarceration is running out of control. 

Could it be that imprisonment ought not be used for “punishment” at all?  Given low detection rates, the threat of punishment cannot act as a credible deterrent, certainly not among those operating within a criminal sub-culture. And for the majority, it is not imprisonment but the risk of lost social status which is the real “deterrent”, the real driver of middle-class conformity.  

Modern prisons started to flourish only after 1850, at the end of deportation, when it became politically unacceptable to despatch convicted felons to the Colonies.  Within a short few years (say, 1850/1870) the UK State was forced to find an alternative to deportation.  So the Government built prisons. The change was not “informed” by any doctrine of reform, or “penal theory” or even simple revenge.  There was no theory at all behind it.  It was a pragmatic necessity.  And upon that slender foundation, there has subsequently been erected a whole panoply of theory, a superficial rationale.   

But imprisonment, as a punishment, simply does not make sense. It is very expensive.  Prisons are very difficult places to “manage”.   Prison creates veritable academies of crime, corrupting the young and entrenching the middle-aged in their ways.  Imprisonment makes adjudication mistakes far more difficult to remedy.  It deepens social divisions, wrecks families, triggers inter-generational imitation.  And there is no indication that it reduces levels of crime. 

Imprisonment does of course have certain proper functions to perform, in any system of judicial administration, for example –  

Let us therefore confront the key question.  Why should all crime not be dealt with, in the first instance, by fine or other non-custodial verdict, to be followed up by the use of imprisonment – not so much as a matter of “punishment” for the original infraction, but as a means of dealing with non-compliance with the Court Order?  For example, much more use could clearly be made of the requirement for compensatory payments to be made to injured victims, by their convicted attackers – very like a County Court award of damages.

All criminal proceedings are attended by some degree of publicity, and that is itself a salutory public order consideration.  The Police are increasingly aware of the importance of appropriate publicity in improving public understanding of criminal and public order issues.   The publicity would constitute a continuing deterrent, to those potential criminals concerned with social status (i.e. the majority).  There would be emotive cases in which special measures had to be taken to protect convicted criminals from vigilante or other vindictive communal action, but that is already a feature of our system.  

Such changes would downgrade “prison” as a penal system, and focus on other modes of retribution.  It would dramatically reduce the prison population. And it could herald the emergence of a kinder, and more understanding, civil order.