BBC Radio 4 2016-11-03

Good morning. The Justice Secretary’s announcement today highlights concerns among Prison Officers about increasing violence against staff and suicides amongst prisoners. These complex matters invite us to ask, ‘Why do we have prisons?’ and, ‘What do we expect them to achieve?’
The conventional answer starts with the idea that we’re freely-choosing individuals exercising our rights in an open society. It maintains that when someone infringes another’s liberty by inflicting serious harm upon them, we need to bring that person to account, protect the innocent from further harm, and offer redress to the victim.

But there’s a second way to think about prisons. Rather than see society as an array of distinct individuals, it regards it more like a body, whose every member is indispensable. It takes inspiration from John Donne’s words, that no one is an island, entire of itself – that when you hear of anyone’s death, the bell tolls as much for you as it does for them. So a crime isn’t just the infringement of another person’s rights; a crime is a symptom of a body with a disease, and the person committing the crime is the part of that body where that symptom emerges.

So the tragedy of offending isn’t just the damage it causes to the victim (profound and lasting as that damage may be); it’s also the misuse of the gifts of the offender – gifts that may be extensive, as the elaborate machinations of their crime often indicates; and gifts that, in a period of incarceration, are buried underground, particularly if there are few opportunities for personal development. Society suffers not just from the bad that the prisoner has done, but perhaps even more from the good that they’re not doing. A punishment that’s designed to be an unpleasant but indispensable part of rehabilitation is society’s way of saying to the offender, ‘You have dignity and worth, and we are going to invest in you.’

Consider the origin of the word ‘cell.’ The practice of incarceration as part of a pattern leading up to reconciliation began with the monastic movement. Monks faced solitary confinement, less as punishment, than as a form of discipline leading to their being restored to community. Like the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable, monks sat in the pigsty and came to their senses. Offending shouldn’t mark the end of a person’s contribution to society. It should be the launch-point for truer living, genuine renewal, and deeper relationship.

That’s surely what prisons are for: a space where people dwell for as long as it takes for them to come to themselves and prepare to be restored to community. For it’s only when people come out of prison that the work of reparation, reconciliation and restoration can really happen.