Revisiting Christian principles is the key to fixing our current prisons crisis

This weekend as we mark Prisoners’ Sunday, Catholics across England & Wales will be asked to consider how we, as individuals, as a Church, and as communities, are serving our brothers and sisters affected by imprisonment.

In the famous Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus makes clear our duty to help actively those in need, with special consideration being given to supporting those in prison: “I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” (Matthew 25:36).

Andy Keen-Downs, the CEO of the Catholic prisons charity Pact, has recently described the UK prison estate as being “a system in crisis”.

“It is a crisis that is decades in the making – prisons and probation have endured years of funding cuts at a time when we have locked up more and more people for longer and longer,” said Andy in response to the publication last month of the latest Prisons Inspectorate Annual Report.

The slow and demoralising decay of our prisons system is a reflection of many factors – from sustained underfunding and low prioritisation by government, to changing social attitudes and conflicting ideologies, and to profound shifts in the definition of crime and the severity and nature of offences and punishments.

Debates about the form, function and purpose of imprisonment have raged since the first cells were built, but the advent of the digital age has changed fundamentally the way that society responds to crime, and to the mechanisms sought to reduce it. One only has to look at social media activity over the past few months to see that public behaviour, the decisions of the judiciary and the treatment of crime – and especially newly created misdemeanours – have swept out into the wider public narrative. Never before has the public been so exposed to the processes that lead to incarceration, and the often-controversial and confussing rationale that can see a person quickly lose their liberty – often for substantial periods of time.

A fundamental change has also been that old notions of a separate category of human person, or easily definable set of circumstances that lead to criminality, have been shattered by the incarceration of otherwise law-abiding citizens who have found themselves on the wrong side of an mushrooming legal system that is increasingly criminalising the random misdemeanours of the population.

In the wake of the Southport riots and other such recent eruptions of public discontent its seems that many legislators have been driven to a state of civic panic in their responses to the sudden awareness of a zeitgeist that has actually been bubbling up for decades. Given that rioting, social misbehaviour, protest and petty criminality has been hardwired into the British psyche since the day governments started to demand taxes, you might have hoped that the establishment would have learnt a thing or two about how to deal constructively with public disorder, but sadly we only seem to be getting less adroit and more chaotic. More disturbingly, we are starting to create a dangerous two-tier prison state in which irritable citizens and hardened criminals are increasingly being drawn together, in a post-Victorian infrastructure that was never designed to handle and rehabilitate large numbers of demi-law-abiding citizens.

At the side of the A4212 road in north Wales a boulder and plaque marks the site of what was once a camp that housed German prisoners of war. In the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin the British government thought it might be a good idea to get all the surviving troublemakers well out of the way, so they shipped some 1,800 Republican radicals to Frongoch, believing that the isolation and harsh conditions of Merionethshire would give them time to reflect on their folly. Indeed it did, succeeding in retraining and radicalising an otherwise motley collection of inmates into what was to become known as ollscoil na réabhlóide, the “University of Revolution”, with all the dreadful consequences and havoc that was unleashed subsequrntly on British society.

Whilst our modern-day prison system has become an obeessively ordered, and highly regulated institution that makes every effort to isolate hard criminals from minor miscreants, the ‘Frongoch’ effect is still very evident throughout our prison system, and to my mind is one of the main reasons that reoffending has increased relentlessly.

Ironically, the UK prison system has probably been subject to more analysis and debate than any other corporate institution, and yet we have never been further from meaningful answers. A recent report by the Howard League for Penal Reform  – Sentencing Inflation: a Judicial Critique – has revealed that over the past half century both custodial sentence lengths and the overall prison population has doubled – and yet crime rates have fallen. So something is going fundamentally wrong here – it can only be that we are throwing more people into prison, and for sentences that ought otherwise to be dealt with in some other manner.

Our system of UK law is well short of perfect, but nevertheless it has always been held up as being one of the best in the world. Our law dictates that imprisonment should only be imposed if there is no suitable alternative, and that even this should be for a minimum period commensurate with the crime, and that rehabilitation and reparation should be the emphasis of a prison stay. For centuries our lawyers and judiciary have by-and-large curated this burden with reasonable professionalism and fairness, but increasingly we’ve seen government pushing its way into the legal system with impositions on sentencing and the redefinition of the seriousness of many relatively minor crimes.

This has effectively pushed up the prison population to breaking point, and has brought us to the bizarre situation where just last month 1,750 prisoners had to be set free just to clear enough cells to hold the newly-criminalised. Whether or not you think it’s a fair exchange to let out robbers, vandals and drug pushers to make room for climate protestors, nationalists and paint throwers is one thing – but the reality is that such a strategy is having a catastrophic impact on a largely privatised prison industry already collapsing under the impossible weight of servicing its customers.

As an aside it’s also worth mentioning that recent governments have also imposed laws on the judiciary that have increased the term of more serious offences – for instance manslaughter sentence lengths have risen 80% since 2008, GBH with intent rose 38% in the same period and the average sentence for all crimes have risen by some 44%. According to the most recent figures it costs around £50k a year to house a prisoner, so increasing prison numbers not only puts untold stress on the physical capacity of the prison system; longer sentencing also has a financial impact on funds available for the prison service.

Society has been debating relentlessly the best and most humane ways to deal with criminality over the years, but few of us ever thought we’d reach a point where convicted felons would have to be released early in order to free up space for new convicts. It’s been described as a ‘sticking plaster’ solution by many politicians, but it’s actually a far more profound moment, as to the general public there is utterly no sense in such a strategy, and the justice system has clearly collapsed into ridicule. It’s also highly damaging for all those involved – not least because the current state of overcrowding and under-resourcing in prisons means that the vital process of rehabilitation for prisoners simply isn’t happening, with the consequence that rates of suicide, violence and self-harm in prison are skyrocketing. This is especially leaving those released early in a very vulnerable and unprepared state when they are simply tossed back into the community – with all the consequences that has for them and those around them.

Our new Labour government made a manifesto promise – in a paper called Take Back Our Streets – to review and increase sentencing, whilst also making a commitment to building more prison spaces. But the continuing disconnect between the intent of imprisonment as a punishment and the actual use of sentencing makes it impossible to use prisons as anything other than punishment for the most serious of offences as, however feverishly the government works, the number of incarcerations continues to outstrip the availability of places.

The old mantra about being “tough on crime” has made a significant reappearance under our new Labour government and although much of the rhetoric contained in the Take Back Our Streets document has a wearily familar ring to it, the signposts to solving the prison crisis are there, and actually have little to do with focus on the prison estate, nor to do with being “tough” on anything.

The Christian campaigner and social activist Steve Chalke was interviewed recently about his radical project Oasis Restore, a replacement youth jail on the site of the former Medway secure unit in Kent that will house the most violent young prisoners.

“As a society we have always followed the Victorian idea that you lock people up and punish them,” said Steve.

“Then you release them through the gates and wonder why they all reoffend. But you can’t help a person by harming them. You can’t take people who are wounded and punish them, hoping that the punishment will cure the wound.”

“With the abolition of hanging we gave up on physical punishment. But since then we have psychologically punished people. We lock them up. All the research shows this does not work. People come out of prison worse than when they went in. This is about care and restoration, it’s not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

The Catholic Church also has a very active and diverse prison ministry, which focusses on restorative justice rather than punishment. Over the past 20 years our Catholic Bishops’ Conference has released four landmark documents pointing to potential strategies for developing an effective and constructive prison and rehabilitation system – A Place of Redemption (2004), The Right Road (2016), Belief and Belonging (2016) and Journey of Hope (2018). These documents have sought to identify and address the needs of victims, offenders, families, and wider society “in a positive-sum game of justice and mercy”.

The Catholic prisons charity Pact also does remarkable work in its very active ministry to prisoners and their families, and I’d encourage all Catholics to support their mission.

With social unrest and minor crimes only likely to increase in the years ahead, it is highly damaging to herd ever more members of the public into an environment that is already deeply deprecated and damaging to the human spirit, and it’s a completely unsustainable social strategy that will only wreak havoc, as more and more people become criminalised and impacted negatively by their incarceration.

The churches have long and meaningful experience in this area, tracking right back to the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark: “I was in prison and you came to visit me”. We’ve learned a great deal since those words were issued – and planners and legislators could do a lot worse than come to us for advice if they are genuinely serious about getting to grips with our justice system, and the wider social exclusions that can lead our neighbour onto the pathways of crime.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian