There’s a tremendous stooshie going on at the moment about the possibility of the early imminent release from jail of two prisoners convicted of the manslaughter of a police officer who at the time of his death was fulfilling his duty in protecting the public. There is widespread dismay in the community. A petition opposing the early release had gathered by yesterday morning over 800,000 signatures. You can’t have violent criminals walking the streets just because the jails are bursting at the seams. It is said the Prime Minister is exploring legal ways of blocking the release.
My father was a policeman. My cousin is a policeman. Another cousin in New York was a “law enforcement officer”. I cannot have anything but profound sympathy for the bereaved family in this case. But I’m not writing about this case, rather about the general problem of the prison population exceeding the capacity of the prison estate. Still, one thing puzzles me. Is not any decision for early release the responsibility of a parole board, or similar body, and not the responsibility of a politician, government minister, or even Prime Minister? Are the judiciary and the executive not meant to be separate? Or am I just a barrack room lawyer, garnering piecemeal knowledge and basing my prejudices on the latest screening of The Shawshank Redemption?
My own experience of prison is limited (though I’ve always had a dread, and still do, of ending up there. There but for the grace of God… I’m terrified of prison. I think the thing I would find hardest to bear, would be the noise.) I visited Barlinnie as a medical student, in company with a psychiatrist charged with the task of deciding whether two alleged perpetrators of very serious crimes were mad, or bad, or both. I visited a prison, again as a medical student, in Papua New Guinea. It was hell on earth. And I did some forensic work for the New Zealand police, mostly carried out in remand cells. It occurs to me that the problem of overcrowding in prison is closely analogous to the problem of overcrowding in hospital, another problem about which the Prime Minister is exercised. I suspect that many prisoners don’t need to be in prison, just as many patients don’t need to be in hospital. The problem in hospital is characterised as “access block”. People can’t get in, because people can’t get out. Patients, mostly frail and elderly, are called “bed-blockers”, surely one of the most dehumanising terms in the lexicon. They can’t get out, because the system of social care is inadequate. It may be that similarly, prisoners can’t get out because the probation service is already stretched to the limit.
Many frail elderly patients are admitted to hospital, not because they are in need of a technical procedure or sophisticated treatment, but simply because they are in need of nursing care. In a previous age they would have been looked after by the GP, in a local cottage hospital, thereby kept out of the big District General. Similarly it might be possible to keep many convicted criminals in the community, albeit with curtailed freedoms, closely supervised, and carrying out some form of community service. Prisons should essentially be the abode of violent criminals who are a danger to society. It has been suggested that most female prisoners do not need to be incarcerated. And I see that there is a letter in today’s Herald suggesting that Peter Murrell, erstwhile Chief Executive of the SNP, currently serving a lengthy jail term for the crime of embezzlement, should be able to serve his sentence, whatever it might be, in the community.
Some of the letters to the Herald have been rather intemperate. You know the sort of thing. Bring back the hulks. Send Johnnie Foreigner back to where he came from. I laughed out loud the other day when somebody wrote “British jails for British criminals!” Perhaps we will enter into negotiations with Canberra for a new facility at Botany Bay.
I wonder if the analogy between jail and hospital can be taken a little further. We have a National Health Service, and we are currently asking the question, should we also have a National Care Service? I’ve come round to the idea that the separation of the NHS and any putative NCS is entirely artificial. We need to appreciate that there is no qualitative difference between caring for somebody in a hospital, and caring for somebody at home. There is no line of demarcation. Rather there is a spectrum of human kindliness. A National Care Service should be seen as an extension of the National Health Service, and for that reason it should be under the auspices of General Practice. The structures, and many of the facilities, are already there.
Similarly, I suspect we need to exercise our imagination in figuring out ways of “dealing with”, perhaps even “looking after”, convicted criminals who are deemed at low risk of bashing you over the head, in the community.
But what do I – pontificating in my middle class manner over a hazelnut latte in a Costa in Bearsden or Milngavie – what do I know? I dare say if I were the victim of some white collar crime and got defrauded out of my life savings I would gladly cast the culprit into a dungeon and throw away the key. Forgiveness? Ha! Doubtless I would say it is not in my gift. But this idea of shutting miscreants away and forgetting about them, perhaps a community’s way of pretending they are not there, doesn’t really work. Winston, when he was Home Secretary, said that if you wanted to evaluate the humanity of any community or society, look at the prisons. He thought it was very important that inmates have access to books. But it has become apparent that our prisons are in a parlous state. Build some more? That’s like an arms race. It would never end.
I found myself having a chat the other day with a guy fresh out of Barlinnie. Afterwards, a friend remarked, “He’s not a bad lad. He’s just daft.”
Omnis peccans aut ignorans ist, aut incogitans.
jamescalumcampbell 