10 August is International Prisoners’ Justice Day
The Commonwealth and the Victorian state budgets this year were marked by a contradiction. Both committed more money to preventing crime by incarcerating more people in detention centres and jails. Yet both also limited programs to change the lives of the people confined there, ensuring that they would reoffend and return. Such points of contradiction are usually signs of a bad policy flowing from a shallow culture.
In our culture, we instinctively see prisoners as different from other people similarly restricted in their movement. To visit people in hospital or a nursing home somehow seems more natural than to visit them in jail. Our images of jails, too, are of bluestone walls and cells or of surgically cold places on the edge of the city. Prisoners are people who have been excluded from the places where other people live and gather freely. The stigma attached to being a prisoner makes us keep our distance. It also makes us see prisoners as a group, and not as persons like ourselves. They are not defined by their inner life but by the crimes of which they have been accused. Most reports about prisons describe riots, stabbings or drugs. They make us imagine prisoners as violent and powerful creatures.
These prejudices prevent us from seeing prisoners as people like ourselves and from asking how they came to be imprisoned. In fact they are more likely than most of us to have seen and experienced domestic violence as children, to have been exposed to drug abuse, to have lived in crowded accommodation, to have had learning difficulties at school, lack social skills, to be affected by mental and physical ill health, to have been under the welfare and juvenile justice system, to be unemployed like their parents, and to have had little access to childhood health and welfare services. They have not had our advantages.
Imprisonment weakens people’s already precarious connections with family and with their local society. In addition to forced separation, the stigma of imprisonment and its erosion of self-esteem erode people’s frail personal relationships and their connections with workplaces. Connections made in jails can help sustain some prisoners during their sentences. But for others, the most significant connections made promote anti-social attitudes and skills.
When people are freed from jails, their underlying mental illness and lack of respect for themselves will not have been addressed. They will be unable to maintain or build on relationships already weakened by separation. They will struggle to find work. Many then seek comfort in the bad company and environments they lived before. As a result of being in jail, they will be more, not less, likely to offend again and return to jail.
This not to say that no one should be detained. Society has the right and duty to hold people responsible for actions that have injured other people, to ensure that they have not gained from their wrongdoing, and to protect the community from vicious behaviour. This may require holding some people in detention.
The principal purpose of detention and other forms of response to crime, however, should be to encourage people to take responsibility for their actions and to prepare them with the resources to return to society and to contribute to it. The best place to do this for most people is within the family and community in which they live. The money saved by keeping people out of prison can then be diverted to address the social circumstances that lead to them being there.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
