A Globe of Witnesses


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Locking More People Up

By Peter Selby

There’s a competition I am not proud of our country winning. The United Kingdom is now the country in Europe imprisoning a higher proportion of its citizens than any other. But don’t be anxious: we are nowhere near to competing with the United States. A former colleague recently reminded me that he and I used to belong to a criminal justice group in London some 15 years ago and we used to worry greatly because the prison population of the U.K. had reached 41,000 and was still rising. We are now up to 73,000, and it is predicted — and nobody much disagrees — that we shall be up to 110,000 by the end of the decade.

We notice that the language used by the prison service is changing: they are no longer speaking about a crisis of prison numbers, but as often as not are drawing attention to how well they are coping with the number there are in prison.

There are other sinister features. Although there are still far fewer women in prison than men, their numbers are rising more rapidly. So is the proportion of young offenders. In the wake of those developments come other alarming developments: the incidence of suicide and self-harm is far higher than it should be. And we notice that the language used by the prison service is changing: they are no longer speaking about a crisis of prison numbers, but as often as not are drawing attention to how well they are coping with the number there are in prison.

There are many reasons for this. We should not forget that Tony Blair won the leadership of the Labour Party, and therefore the Prime Ministership, by means of his famously tough stand on crime, something with which Labour had not been associated. And something seems to happen to people when they become Home Secretary (the Secretary of State responsible for the penal system in general and the prison service in particular). They feel they have to show their toughness by engaging in an auction with their political opponents over how tough they are — often measured in the numbers whom they lock up and the length of their sentences.

Then there are the changing patterns of crime. Drugs offences, and the crimes associated with the need to feed a drug habit, are on the increase — something that plays a major part in the increased incarceration of women. And these trends all produce a reflex reaction in the form of locking up more people for longer. Not that that is particularly logical: after a recent shooting in Birmingham the government introduced a new five-year prison sentence for unlawful possession of firearms. But as many have pointed out, the rational response to gun crime is to stop guns getting into the hands of the street gangs, not to lock up for increased periods the small percentage of them you are able to catch.

The whole matter has become like a beautiful illustration of "original sin." You couldn’t explain it better to people than to point to a situation where everyone agrees we need to cut down the numbers in prison, and everyone conspires to take measures which will inevitably result in increased numbers in prison.

The whole matter has become like a beautiful illustration of "original sin." You couldn’t explain it better to people than to point to a situation where everyone agrees we need to cut down the numbers in prison, and everyone conspires to take measures which will inevitably result in increased numbers in prison. "The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do." What happens when an issue — in this case crime — is deemed to be high on the voters’ list of priorities is that it becomes more important to be seen to be doing something than to take the time, money, and rational thought necessary to devise means of reducing criminal activity.

There is a government bill currently before Parliament which defines as crimes a huge list of clauses, new offences, new reasons for being arrested and new minimum sentences. Worse than that, it contains the beginnings of serious breaches of the protections of the innocent. It will become more possible for jurors to know about the previous convictions of those on trial, something that is bound to increase the likelihood of the conviction of innocent people. As a judge said to me the other day, "When I was studying, I was taught that the principal concern in a trial is to acquit the innocent. Now we are constantly told that the aim of a trial is to convict the guilty." Under the pleasant code name of "rebalancing the penal system in the interests of victims," what is actually happening is the steady increasing of the power of the prosecution.

There is no doubt that we need the continuing and greater involvement of church members in dealing with those guilty of crime. We have the largest number of volunteers, and the greatest inherited wisdom about the character of the human person. Above all we must not allow the increased fear that stalks the post-9/11 world that drives us into an attitude of mind that demands "something must be done" whether or not it is effective, and whether or not it is humane.

The Rt. Rev. Peter Selby, author of Grace and Mortgage: The Language of Faith and the Debt of the World (Darton Longman and Todd, 1997), is the Bishop of Worcester, England. He is an occasional contributor to the "A Globe of Witnesses" website, through his column Money & Power.

Witness readers interested in criminal justice issues are encouraged to submit articles to the UK publication "Justice Reflections," for which Peter Selby is a patron supporter.