On prison reforms

Deterrence as a tool to bring down criminal deviance is found to be inadequate. Reformation seems to be the only rationale for the incarceration.

Words alone cannot describe the horror and despair of this hellish place. Surely not even the jails of Turkey or Kosovo could match Belmarsh for degradation and human suffering. In the cell below me is a 17-year-old charged with shoplifting. This same young man will now be spending at least a fortnight with murderers, rapists, burglars, drug addicts and perjurers. Are these the best tutors he can learn from? - Jeffery Archer in Prison Diaries (Macmillan 2004)

I VIVIDLY recall a distinguished politician telling me a few years ago how debilitating and destructive a prison term could be, even to the strongest and the bravest. (Sir Jeffrey Archer, the famous novelist who was held for perjury in three different prisons is a supreme example). The fact that one has been incarcerated for advocating a political cause and not for any dishonest act hardly makes a difference. Mind you, this acquaintance of mine is known for his immense fortitude and integrity, and has weathered many a storm in public life. I am sure he was reflecting the true impact of imprisonment on the human mind. I recall this in the context of the current media focus in London on the rising number of suicides in British prisons. According to one report, there were 95 self-inflicted deaths during 2004. There have already been 50 this year. The situation is grave if one takes into account that, apart from the suicides, there were more than 17,000 recorded self-harm incidents during 2004. A few weeks ago, the Durham prison reported the hanging in its cell of Louise Giles, who was just 20 years old. She had been guilty of murdering another woman with a kitchen knife about a year ago. A few days earlier, another jail witnessed the end of a 19-year-old boy in similar circumstances. These suicides, coming in close succession, have attracted wide attention and a fresh controversy over what is it inside prisons that promotes frequent self-harm.

Anne Owers, a well-known human rights activist and now the Chief Inspector of Prisons for the country - the first woman appointee - points fingers at prison overcrowding. "It is actually saying to everybody out there, `if you lock up this number of people this is the consequence'... our prisons aren't going to be able to do the positive stuff nearly so well." In a media interview, Owers recalled how, during a recent inspection, she found the prison staff cutting down six women after they had tried to hang themselves. All in one jail, and about the same time. Can there be anything more pathetic about how we treat our prisons?

Let us not imagine that this is true only of the United Kingdom. The world over, prison conditions are abominable, and they are deliberately kept so, because most of us believe that prisons are meant to punish, and only occasionally, to rehabilitate. It is, therefore, unpopular for anyone to take the stand that prisons should reform rather than inflict pain on those confined. A few months ago, Lord Chief Justice Woolf of the United Kingdom, a colourful and controversial Judge who is retiring this month after five years in office, invited the wrath of the public and sections of the press when he proposed that even a murderer deserved sympathy and understanding if he/she admitted his guilt at the earliest opportunity. Woolf's new guidelines would mean that a murderer who confessed during trial could be sentenced to 10 years instead of the minimum of 15 years. His plea was that less number should be sent to jail and for shorter terms, and the accent should be on restorative justice, whereby an offender compensates the victim for the injury caused. There was an uproar over the Judge's comments, and he was derisively called "Lord Let'Em out"! This acerbic reaction to a reasoned appeal from a well-meaning Judge to criminal justice policymakers is proof how difficult it is to break a mindset that bays for retribution.

WHY is a prisoner driven to the extreme decision to put an end to himself or herself? There are several factors - chiefly overcrowding and harsh treatment meted out by the jail staff - that contribute to acute mental distress and desperation. There are 37 prisons for men and 13 for women in England and Wales. Statistics of the packing of prison cells here can shock even the toughest. At present, there are nearly 76,000 in the England and Wales jails. The number could go up to 90,000 by the end of the decade. Excess of prisoners over the built-in capacity is at any time more than 20 per cent. The only saving grace is that the number of women prisoners is falling, thanks to a growing consensus in the judiciary and the executive (British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie included) that women offenders deserved a non-custodial penalty, especially if they had children to look after. There is a definite case for spreading this message among the lower judiciary in India.

Overcrowding leads to abysmally poor service, much below what each prisoner is entitled to. Ramsbotham, a former Chief Inspector, describes the situation vividly in his memoirs, Prison Gate: The shocking state of Britain's prisons and the need for visionary change (Free Press, 2003). His account of Holloway, the largest female prison in the country, is touching. The jail came into existence in 1852 and was re-built in the 1980s. When Ramsbotham visited it, it had more than 500 prisoners, although it had staff who could service only 400. The place was totally unhygienic. Very little information was made available to each prisoner as she arrived, on what her routine in jail was. This naturally led to disorientation and consequent stress. While, in theory, 140 of the 538 prisoners could attend educational classes, in reality, only 38 could. Ramsbotham found one prisoner reading Bertrand Russell. His enquiry revealed that she was a graduate in philosophy. When asked as to why she was not working in the prison, she replied that she was still waiting to hear of the fate of her application. Ramsbotham was appalled that all talk of gainfully employing prisoners was glib and superficial.

One cause for prisoner stress is the constant switching of cells or prisons. Whenever there is too much of an excess, prisoners are mindlessly transferred, at very short notice. This callous treatment results in the need for mental adjustments to a new cell or prison, which an already battered individual can hardly do. Anne Owers believes that suicides occur more often in the first days of imprisonment or immediately after transfer to a new prison.

Court production of prisoners is another source of harassment and humiliation. In many cases, a prisoner may have to travel hours under escort to make a brief appearance in court. The wait in court can sometimes be excruciatingly long. On such days, little attention is given to the need for good food and rest, two requirements that are especially vital for aged prisoners.

Bullying of prisoners, both physical and verbal, is a widespread problem known to almost all prisons. Prison officials and fellow-prisoners indulge in this undesirable practice, which demoralises a fragile inmate. This problem is endemic in poorly supervised prisons, especially those where overcrowding has exceeded limits. It is not known how many suicides have been directly caused by such bullying. I would be surprised if the number is small. The truth is bullying is suppressed by many prisoner-victims for fear of reprisal. There is also the feeling that it is futile to complain against officials, because prison managers hardly trust an inmate to speak the truth. Not surprisingly, the last Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales devotes a whole chapter to the problem and suggests several measures to alleviate it.

Mental illness among prisoners either at entry or subsequent to incarceration has also been grossly under-reported. There is an interesting classification of prisoners referred to by Ramsbotham. Prisoners can be divided into `bad, mad and sad', and it is a matter for conjecture as to which class is the largest. It is generally believed that fewer prisoners are bad, and many are just mad. A report entitled "Psychiatric Morbidity among prisoners in England and Wales", released in 2001, was categorical that 70 per cent of male and 50 per cent of female prisoners surveyed in 1997 did have one or more identifiable problems, such as personality disorder, psychosis, neurosis, alcohol misuse and drug dependence. It came to the conclusion that only one in ten prisoners interviewed did not have evidence of any of the five traits. The report was based on a study conducted by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on a direction from the Department of Health. What is most significant about the report was its finding that as many as 46 per cent of the male prisoners had thought of suicide in their lifetime, and 27 per cent actually made an attempt in that direction. More revealing was the fact that even a higher percentage of women prisoners had either thought of or attempted suicide. The wave of suicides in British prisons about which there is now a furore fits into the pattern unveiled by the ONS report.

A number of researchers and human rights activists believe that unless a prison is treated on a par with a mental health institution, we will be unleashing a group on the community that will create problems of misfit and disharmony. Professional psychiatrists attached to a group of prisons who are known for their spirit of service can do wonders. They will, however, have to be supplemented by devices such as prisoner listeners who can talk to troubled prisoners at length and give them a feeling that they are being cared for. The potency of this therapy can hardly be exaggerated. In combination with suicide prevention coordinators, such listeners can definitely bring down suicide rates in prisons.

In the ultimate analysis, deterrence as a tool to bring down criminal deviance has been repeatedly found to be inadequate. Reformation seems to be the only rationale for incarceration. The objective after all for civilised governments when they formulate a sentencing policy is to examine how to prevent recidivism. Only if we are able to hone our strategies to bring down re-offending by released prisoners, can we justify all the money that we spend on prisons. One way of doing this is to create an ambience within prisons that encourages good conduct on release. As organised now, overcrowded prisons promote only mental disorder among a vast majority of prisoners. As a result of this, few prisoners understand the distinction between criminal conduct and good citizenship that is based on adherence to law and respect for fellow-citizens.

I would identify the overcrowding of prisons as the villain of the piece. The Howard League for Penal Reforms, a renowned non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the U.K., is clearly for minimum use of custodial punishment of offenders. It pleads for a jail term only to those who are violent or are guilty of serious offences and their presence outside is dangerous to the community. This is an unexceptionable stand. The prescription of mandatory jail terms for non-violent offences only leads to overloading of the prison system that has nearly broken down all over the world. Unless reform starts with sentencing policies, there is precious little that the judiciary can do. This was the crux of the polemics that the U.K. witnessed a few years ago between Home Secretary David Blunkett and Chief Justice Woolf, with the latter complaining that Parliament was eating into the discretionary powers enjoyed by judges. This is a serious matter for the consideration of our legislators who get emotionally surcharged whenever a rape takes place in some part of the country, and there is a demand for mandatory death sentence for the rapist. Very few protagonists of severe sentences understand that, as you make penalties stiffer and stiffer, judges are going to demand higher and higher standards of proof, which investigating agencies can seldom produce, save in a small number of cases.

While legal reforms, especially in the area of sentencing standards, take a long time to be accepted, we can at least bring about marginal improvement in the quality of prison management. I am impressed by the institution of Chief Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales. This is not part of the bureaucracy. The Inspector is an outsider who is appointed for a term of five years. The incumbent, Anne Owers was appointed in 2001. Her appointment was particularly welcome because she was known for her anti-establishment views.

While functioning as the director of an NGO called Justice, she had clashed swords with the government on many issues. The Chief Inspector does a variety of reviews through announced and surprise inspections, and reports directly to the Home Secretary. I am not aware of parallel machinery in India that performs this vital role, which alone can ensure an improvement in the state of our prisons. It is an entirely different matter that not many prison administrators in our country would welcome such a supernumerary.