BBC Radio 4 2016-07-21

Good morning.

According to the Chief Inspector of Prison in his annual report published on Tuesday, there is, despite the ‘sterling efforts’ of many in the prison service, ‘a simple and unpalatable truth about far too many of our prisons.’ Partly because of the increasing availability to prisoners of a new generation of drugs, prisons have, to quote him, ‘become unacceptably violent and dangerous places’. Assaults, serious assaults, incidents of self-harm and self-inflicted deaths, all are up – by figures ranging from 25% to 31%. The previous Justice Secretary committed himself to radical prison reform – and the new Justice Secretary has said she will press ahead ‘at pace’ with his programme. Since the Chief Inspector met prisoners who had volunteered for solitary confinement in order to escape the violence, Liz Truss’s sense of urgency is fully warranted.

This disturbing account of the state of our prisons brought to my mind a common image of Christ from the late middle ages, referred to in short hand as Christ on a cold stone. Sometimes in a painting, more strikingly in a sculpture, Christ is depicted in an imagined moment after his condemnation and before he is led away to his death – a forlorn and dejected prisoner, sitting on that bleak stone, typically with his hands bound, and sometimes with a rope around his neck.

The popularity of this image suggests that our forebears found it especially affecting – and for the reason, I think, that in this scene Christ was understood as sharing the general human condition, not merely the condition of particular prisoners, literally understood. We are all bound by our histories, our desires, our needs, our circumstances and what we call fate. None of us is simply at liberty so Christianity teaches – and so Christ most fully shares the human condition when he is himself constrained, when he became a prisoner for the sake of prisoners, which is to say, for us all.

There is an argument which holds that while Christian belief has become somewhat fragile in a sceptical world, practical Christianity has held its own. To take an example, concern for the sick, suffering and hungry – what Christians used to refer to as works of corporal mercy – is now recognised as a governmental responsibility, and one which ought not to be limited to one’s own country, but must reach round the globe. Whatever you make of that argument, you would have to say that caring for prisoners – also one of the works of corporal mercy – has not achieved such wide-spread practical acceptance. Perhaps the implicit message of that forlorn image of Christ needs to be taken to heart – that prisoners, despite the crimes they have committed, are not a class apart, and are deserving of compassion as those on whom the constraints of social circumstance, lack of opportunity and disordered desires, to which all human beings are subject, may have fallen especially hard. Prisons should certainly not be violent and dangerous places – but nor should they be cold places of dejection and despair.