Why do prisons exist?

I have recently started doing massive online open courses (MOOCs) in my spare time. I’ve had a lot of time sitting doing very little on a train as I’m now commuting to London for work. This is a lot of time to read, learn and keep the mind active.

My second course was on writings from US prisoners called ENG142x Incarceration’s Witness:American Prison Writing. (For anyone interested, my first was Much Ado About Nothing: In Performance and I am currently doing LOUV2x International HumanRights).

Incarceration’s Witness got me thinking about why we have prisons. Often when someone convicted of a repulsive crime gets sentenced, I have seen people on Facebook saying that they hope the convicted felon gets treated harshly in prison. This has struck liberal little old me previously as overly vindictive. Surely that can’t be the point of prison?

I have summarised briefly below a few arguments for the purpose of prisons and my thoughts on them.

Punishment

When a crime is committed, people may demand justice. This usually comes in the form of punishment of the criminal. These demands don’t always come from the victims but people who have no direct relation with the crime – sometimes no direct relation with the victim of the crime. They will empathise with the victim and demand justice on their behalf.

Victims don’t always demand this punishment. There are cases, admittedly quite rare, when the direct victim is forgiving whilst those around him bay for blood (in the case of Bill Pelke, this is a literal demand for blood).

Locking someone up in prison can be seen as a punishment. The liberty of the criminal has been removed, and therefore they are being punished. Prisons punish people more than this, though. They are not only losing their liberty but may be treated badly both inside prison (which is another debate entirely) and upon their release.

There is stigma attached to ex-convicts who have to declare any convictions on job application forms. They can struggle to find work (they are banned from certain types of positions), their social support networks may collapse and above all else, they may well end up reoffending and back in prison. Recidivism in the UK is 26.8% as at January 2013. In the US, it is much higher, where three quarters of released prisoners are back inside within 5 years. 

Why should punishment for a crime continue after release from prison? The criminal has served their allocated time and should be able to move on with their life. When a judge hands down a sentence, they are actually sentencing them to much more than losing their liberty for a certain number of years.

Rehabilitation

When we imprison someone, we are telling them that they need to play by the rules of our society and that because they haven’t done so, they are going to be locked away for a certain length of time. The prisoner has broken these rules and so their internal system of rules does not match up with those of the country. They therefore need to be educated and we need to convince them to buy in and live by the rules we are forcing upon our citizens.

Prison may actually make it more likely that an individual will commit further crimes. If someone is incarcerated for theft but imprisoned with a large number of individuals who have committed worse crimes, their influence may rub off on them and rather than being rehabilitiated, they actually become more of a threat to society. I feel it is important that the prison system is smart about where it houses certain individuals to reduce this risk.

Prevention of further crimes

It is obvious that when an individual is in prison, they will be unable to commit further crimes – at least against members of the public.

There are certain crimes which will not be repeated by the prisoner. If a woman kills her husband in self-defence, she has committed a murder but she is not a murderer. She is not likely to go out and start killing further people simply because she has already killed one.

Deterrent

It is argued that prison can be used as a deterrent for crime. This is true to an extent. Whilst I may want a new game for my PS4, I’m not going to walk into Game and just take it. However, only a small part of the reason for me not doing so is because I am afraid of going to prison. The main reason I’m not going to do so is because I have been brought up with a sense of ethics and a good value system.

The prevailing theory on the death penalty is that doesn’t work as a deterrent.  It is the case that in states without the death penalty, murder rates are lower and so the argument that it is an effective deterrent is rather weak. Why should we therefore see imprisonment as a valid deterrent if someone is not deterred by the loss of their own life?

It is also the case that certain crimes won’t be deterred. If you are extremely poor and unable to afford food to eat, you may well steal food, even if it is only from the bins in Tescos. Other crimes will also fall into this category where the needs of an individual are so extreme that they are prepared to break the law to have them fulfilled. 

Population Control

In the UK minorities are over-represented in prison. There may be a number of reasons for this. It may be that minorities are more likely to be working class which would have been driven by the white male bias that has been prevalent in the UK since time immemorial, and - as working class - they are more likely to be deprived (especially with recent welfare cuts). It may be that the justice system has an innate racial bias when sentencing. It could be that it is a result of cultural bias within the police force who are 6 times more likely stop and search you if you are black. 

It is not just skin colour that will make you more likely to end up in prison. Mental health issues will also increase your likelihood of ending up inside, with male prisoners 14 times more likely to have a mental health issue and female prisons 35 times more likely. This may be more a failing of the health system to either adequately diagnose or treat those with mental health issues, or it may be that it is felt by the authorities that it is easier to put them in prison than to help deal with their issues.

These two examples seem to show that prison is used to deal with issues which  our society is not able to deal with and it can be seen as an avoidance tactic, transferring the duty of care from the government to the prison system.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the only genuinely defensible reason for locking criminals in prison is to prevent them from committing any further crimes whilst they are being rehabilitated. We should invest more money into ensuring that when someone is imprisoned, they are educated, helped to reform and become a functioning member of society. Unfortunately our government (and others, but not all) has cut the funding for education programmes within prisons and allowed recividism rates to reach all-time highs.