Truly criminal

If you want to get a true picture of crime in the UK, look at the raw numbers of crime recorded by the police. This shows that reports of violent offences against the person have gone up by a staggering 283% in the last ten years.

In the same period, reports of sexual offences went up by 61%, robbery by 34% and property crime went down by 15%.

Of course, you have to take into account trends in reporting crime. But most of us do have a clear sense of society getting more violent. This is reflected in these figures rather than in the Government’s favoured British Crime Survey, which fails to properly include households in high crime areas because of difficulties of access.

I got these figures from Inside Time, a newspaper specifically for prisoners which is distributed for free in our jails. Inside Time is professionally produced and is probably the best way to gain an understanding of prison, other than going inside one yourself. Novelist Rachel Billington has a regular column in it; she wrote about The Dialogue Trust in one issue. Check out the website: www.insidetime.org

The crime figures in Inside Time came from the Home Office itself. They also show that in ten years drugs offences went up by 888%. Perhaps it’s about time Government ministers listened to people like Julian Critchley, the former director of the cabinet office’s anti-drugs unit, who says drug legalisation is favoured by the “overwhelming majority” of professionals in the field, including ministers, police officers and health workers?

Legalisation doesn’t necessarily mean a free-for-all. Correctly handled, drugs would be properly controlled and regulated and would become safely available to those who needed them. Crime would be cut by half and we’d all sleep safer in our beds.

It’s time to talk

One of my lasting memories of the HMP Wandsworth dialogues was that among the scores of prisoners we worked with over the year from 2005-6, we were never treated badly or threatened, even though no prison staff were present.

The prisoners were men we randomly invited to the dialogues when we met them on the ordinary prison wings and landings of the largest prison in the country. There were no security checks, no weeding out of undesirable people. We worked with drug addicts, robbers, thieves and murderers and they treated me, my co-facilitator and the volunteers who came into the prison with us with respect.

I always felt safe, despite being really quite defenceless among criminals who were seen by many as ‘scum’, and often treated in a way that made them feel like ‘scum’. Treat someone well, they usually respond well.

Yet when I recently spoke to a high ranking officer working on the infamous D-wing at HMP Pentonville, he said he certainly wouldn’t feel safe as a prisoner on this, the largest wing in the prison. I wondered how safe it felt for staff. I wondered if dialogue might help.

I was visiting on behalf of the Howard League Commission on English Prisons Today. We were allowed to see every part of the prison – except D-wing. A bit like officials telling us about the good work that goes on in prisons – but not telling us about the huge mass of prisoners that the work does not reach.

Criminologists have warned of an ‘epidemic of violence’ fuelled by our spiralling prison numbers. Violent crime is on the increase, as are suicides in prison, generally accepted as due to dire conditions caused by over-crowding and by a severely under-resourced service.

Now the number of people in prison in England and Wales has topped 82,000 for the first time in history. While the numbers increase, the humanity of the system inevitably decreases, as does the ability of establishments to manage humanising interventions such as dialogue.

How many more prison wings will go the way of Pentonville’s D-wing as a result?

Disturbing prison statistics

We are not great fans of statistics, but these tell a disturbing story.

Firstly, reports indicate that prison suicides are running at two a week. Inevitably, the increase is put down by many to prison overcrowding – prison numbers in England and Wales have now hit 81,000 for the first time ever. Why? There’s been no significant increase or decrease in crime. The increase in prison numbers is due to more people being given prison sentences when convicted, and for longer.

Also more people are being recalled to prison for failing to comply with probation orders. Previously, they were given more chances because probation officers know that change comes slowly and incrementally for the people they work with. But government has given them new and more punitive orders to work under. Part of politicians’ competition to look ‘toughest on crime’.

Try this: we have more people on life sentences in this country than anywhere else in Europe, and more than France, Germany, Italy and Turkey combined. The number of men serving four years or more in prison increased by 86% from 1995 to 2005. One could go on and on but it makes for desperately annoying reading. Are we really more criminal in this country than elsewhere? We don’t think so!

At over £40,000 per year per head on average, the country’s increase in the use of custody is an expensive policy. So, is our money being well spent? Let’s hear what the Prime Minister’s own Strategy Unit said in its 2003 Carter report: “There is no convincing evidence that further increases in the use of custody would significantly reduce crime.”

That doesn’t sound like money well spent to me, and that’s without taking full account of the damage being done by imprisoning so many people. Apart from the fact that the prison regime will be greatly impoverished, leading to anger, bitterness and despair, there’s plenty of well-researched evidence that the prison environment is in itself a ‘criminogenic’ one, which means that it’s a cause of crime: it creates crime rather than reducing it.

In addition to the impact of this on society as a whole, there is the impact on prisoners’ families. The Home Office estimates that 17,700 children are separated from their mothers by imprisonment each year. Far more suffer from separation from their fathers: around 150,000 have a parent in prison. In March 2007 there were 9,311 young adults and 2,413 children in prison – that last figure has doubled in the last ten years. Children as young as 14 have committed suicide while incarcerated by us.

If prison doesn’t reduce crime, the main reason for imprisoning people (other than those who are a danger to society) must be retribution; in other words revenge.

We know, and the government knows, that the majority of the people who commit crimes have generally suffered the most deprivation and poor life chances. That’s why they do it. Perhaps society should grow up a little and realise that, by imprisoning some of the most vulnerable people in the community, we are fuelling the fires of crime as opposed to damping them down.

People in the field are fully aware there are better ways of dealing with offenders. Once again, government has failed to listen to the professionals, has used the country’s money ineffectively. And it’s not just the criminals who suffer for that. When they are released into the community without proper preparation, which is what now usually happens, we all pay the price.

Statistics from Bromley Briefings: Prison Factfile, May 2007, Prison Reform Trust, London.