Our criminal justice system is in crisis; our prisons are full-up, our courts are backed-up and our police are fed-up.
That’s what happens when governments get ‘Tough on Crime’; more arrests, more convictions, longer sentences until the system runs out of room, time and capacity. Then the people trying to make that system work cry out for more resources: more staff, more money and a lot more prison cells. And (as always) we all miss the point:
PRISONS DO NOT MAKE BAD PEOPLE GOOD.
Prisons make good people bad, bad people worse and crazy people violent.
Prisons turn first time offenders into career criminals.
Prisons don’t quarantine inmates from criminal activity (every illegal substance is readily available in any maximum security prison) they don’t change behaviours (at least half the prison population will reoffend) and they introduce offenders into criminal networks while compounding the isolation between the individual offender and their society, which is probably where a lot of the real problem lies.
Governments who get ‘Get Tough’ increase the number of people going into a toxic system that makes nothing better and everything a whole lot worse, both for the individual and their society.
And here’s the weird thing: crime is not on the increase, it’s barely keeping pace with population growth and in many areas it’s been dropping for years, unlike the media coverage of crime which has exploded and along with it, the fear of crime, which is our deeper problem.
Because more fear means more governments promising to Get Tough when we should be Getting Smart.
dave isles
well put Jason.. incarceration has a poor track record as an effective deterrent, punishment and means of ‘rehabilitating’ offenders.. i am thinking that judges, who should be ‘wise’ people, know this and yet they do not agitate for a better way of dealing with offenders.. are there examples from other countries where a smarter way is in place?
cheers, Dave I
Jason
I have read about villages in Africa where an offense is thought to be the result of a disconnection of the offender from their community and incarceration seems like the quickest way to make that isolation so much worse. They encircle the offender and, in a ceremony that has been known to take days, ask each member of the village to express what that individual means to them as a way of ‘reweaving the threads’ that connect the accused to their society. Then there’s a party to celebrate the community becoming whole again. I have heard of a remand centre designed to be as comfortable and humane as possible, expressing the presumption of innocence before trial as architecture. And I know of Scandinavian countries where drug offenders are rehabilitated, not punished. In my experience, there’s always a better way and chances are someone’s already doing it… so we don’t even need to be inventive, just interested.