We all know that life isn’t fair but what everybody wants is a fair chance at life. While visiting a couple of prisons as a commissioner for the Howard League Commission on English Prisons Today, I was struck that the prisoners I spoke to all asked for just that: a fair chance.
They desperately wanted training and education that would give them a chance of getting work when they came out, so that they could steer clear of crime. At one large London prison, inmates spoke about their frustration in the prison as well as their worries on release.
They said they had to wait months to get on courses offering education and training, and that all too often they were moved to another prison before completing them. And then they were back to square one.
The Governor was also frustrated that the prison had so little to offer and had drawn up plans for extra capacity in that direction. A slight problem was that these plans also involved building capacity for an extra 600 prisoners. It’ll be needed if we fail to help prisoners re-train.
If we are not going to make proper provision for people whose lives more often than not have been blighted by failed family and schooling, we are setting ourselves up for ever high crime levels. The government seem happy to take that route: they are cutting 3% of the budget for prisons and generating new plans to build three monstrous ‘titan’ prisons to house the fall-out. How short-sighted and, at root, how inhumane.
Lack of resources for proper rehabilitation in prisons has been shown up by the High Court, in its recent ruling on indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPPs). Prisoners on IPPS must demonstrate to the Parole Board that they are fit for release but not enough money has been made available for proper rehabilitation courses.
The Appeal Court called this “an unhappy state of affairs” and judged that: “There has been a systemic failure on the part of the Secretary of State (Jack Straw) to put in place the resources necessary to implement the scheme of rehabilitation necessary.”
Will the Justice Department do anything in response? Fat chance.
Tags: Appeal Court., capacity, education, Howard League, inmates, Jack Straw, Justice Department, offender management, offenders, preform, prison, Prisons, rehabilitation, release, the Dialogue Trust, titans, training
