Prison Works

Edward Garnier, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, recently expressed his view that imprisoning criminals “is hugely expensive and not working.” Hugely expensive is not the same as too expensive, but Mr Garnier reckons the £37,000 per prisoner per year is too much to pay. Unfortunately citing a statistic does not a cogent argument make. You cannot tell from a price tag whether something is good value. In the case of many criminals keeping them locked up is a bargain at a mere £37,000. And what does “not working” mean? The buggers are off the streets are they not? For Mr Garnier “not working” refers to the high rates of recidivism. However, I’m not aware of Mr Garnier outlining any alternative programme that would be cheaper with less recidivism.

I asked my wife this morning (when she’s particularly grumpy) what she thought should be done to punish the worst criminals. “Kill them,” was the answer. As extreme as that might sound to some ears it would certainly fix the recidivism problem, and how much does a bullet or lethal injection have to cost, eh? Some further benefits of “kill them” include a more effective deterrent, and permanent safety for society from the criminal in question (resurrection and reincarnation aside).

All of this raises the question: How should crime be punished? In our limp-wristed, weak-bellied, pussy-footing, lilly-livered, slack-jawed, croissant-crunching, guilt-ridden, hyper-compassionate, mawkish times there is a massive backlash against imprisonment. In a BBC discussion programme on the question (“What’s Wrong with Prisons?”) two of the four panellists seemed to seriously hint that the abolition of prisons was an ideal, both of them claiming that the abolitionist position was “most consistent.” Now, when pushed a little by the presenter, William Crawley, one of the muppets dissolved into a stuttering, stammering, sweating mess, as if the thought suddenly going through his head was “Oh shit, thousands of people are hearing this and think I'm an arsehole, how do I make it sound palatable.” But, statements exulting the consistency of the abolition position are rather odd. Firstly, “consistent” is a vague term. It implies a relationship, since things are more or less consistent with respect to something else. Things can be consistent with known facts, or with popular opinion, or some wider theory of ethics, or simply internally consistent. In the context of this debate the sense was that of internal consistency. But it hardly matters. Since when was consistency the sole criterion for judging intellectual and moral opinions? Hitler was consistent too - but that fact shouldn’t recommend to us the annihilation of millions of Jews. Anarchism is also rigorously consistent; so, abolish government? Theories can be utterly consistent and yet intellectually vacuous and morally bankrupt. Prison abolition being to my mind an obvious example.

During the programme the panellists seemed obsessed with the rights of prisoners - especially female prisoners who may have children (presumably male prisoners are childless). We had all the typical tired old clichés - prisons are universities of crime, prisons just make people worse by separating them from social support structures, many prisoners commit more crimes upon being released, and so on and so forth ad nauseum. Very little was said about anyone other than the criminal, and even then you got the impression that the vast majority of criminals are mentally ill and deserve our help and pity. Victims hardly got a mention, and the safety of the general public just didn’t seem to factor in their addled minds. Of paramount importance were the “rights” of the criminals. No one said it, but I reckon at least two of the panel counted imprisonment as an infringement of the rights of criminals. Unfortunately they never really got around to suggesting plausible alternatives beyond some vague allusions to some form of community service programmes. So, rather than a lengthy stay in prison a fitting punishment for crimes might just be to send Mr Rapist to mow the lawn at the local school, Mr Murderer to make tea for little old ladies, and Mr Grievous Bodily Harm to run charity collections in the neighbourhood, and at the end of the day they could chat with our hyper-compassionate do-gooders about their thoughts and feelings over freshly brewed coffee and bagels. Fucking Genius.

The major argument spewing forth from the wet-hand-wringing advocates of the increasingly cool and hip position that prisons are a bad thing is the high rate of recidivism. Prisons don’t work because many prisoners - 70% - re-offend within 2 years of being released, or so the argument goes. What an odd statement. Firstly, to point to these recidivism statistics simply won’t do to support the conclusion that prisons are bad. If 70% of people re-offend you need to establish that they re-offend because they were in prison or that they wouldn’t have offended again if they had never been put there. There isn’t one shred of evidence to even plausibly suggest that either of these could possibly be the case. To my mind the most natural explanation for recidivism is not that prisons aren’t working, but rather that sentences aren’t severe enough. If a burglar gets out after 5 years and then continues breaking into houses then perhaps we should think about keeping such people in prison for a bit longer.

In any event to complain that prisons don’t work because of the high recidivism rate is a bit like complaining that your vacuum cleaner is no good for washing the windows - it simply isn’t its job to do so. It’s not the reducing of re-offending that concerns prisons, but rather the reducing of offending in the first place - by acting as a deterrent to people committing crimes and by preventing the criminals from committing more crimes for the duration of their stay in prison. There are those who think a high recidivism rate shows that prison is not an effective deterrent. However, you cannot judge the deterrence rate by looking only at ex-prisoners. To do so is incredibly narrow. By virtue of the fact that prisoners have already committed crimes we know that the threat of prison is not a deterrent to them. The fact of the matter is that a punishment such as prison is almost certainly a deterrent to a sizable number of law-abiding people who on occasion might refrain from certain actions because of the threat of punishment. If you think the threat of punishment is of no deterring value ask yourself what kind of society would exist without it. Welcome to the jungle; a right royal Hobbesian nightmare. In fact, given the fact that a spell in prison often leads to further crime, the loss of money, property, jobs, and social standing, we can see that recidivism itself has a deterrent value insofar as people seeing the lives of others engrossed in crime are even less likely to commit a crime in the first place. Incidentally, a decade ago Britain’s prison population began to grow. During this time the number of crimes actually fell. In the early nineties we had 49,000 people in prison and 19 million recorded crimes. In 2005 we had 75,000 prisons and 11 million crimes. Prison doesn’t work? Sure about that?

Criminal punishment is an area in which libertarians will disagree with each other. I should note first of all that in a libertarian state there would be far fewer crimes, for two reasons. Firstly, many of the things which are currently punishable crimes would not be in a libertarian state - prostitution, television licence evasion, selling alcohol 24 hours a day, killing intruders that break in to your house, to name just a few. Secondly, a libertarian society would allow much more room for achievement and progress by the creation of wealth and employment and encouraging a culture of responsibility.

Anyhow libertarians will often disagree about the mechanics and justification for criminal punishment. However, to my mind the punishment of criminals - even severe punishments such as the death penalty - are justified on similar grounds as we might justify the use of deadly force by our armed forces against aggressors. Government exists to protect the rights - the right to life and property rights - of individual citizens from force. If a foreign nation attacks ones own country then we rightfully expect our government to fight back - using deadly force if necessary - to protect our lives and our property. The same holds true for internal aggressors. If an individual citizen breaches the rights of his fellow citizens then we properly expect our government to take necessary action against him, thus fulfilling its duty to protect the rights of its individual citizens from illegal force. There is no point waffling about the rights of criminals in such cases. The criminal knows the law. He knows that if he kills someone he will be punished under the law. So, in the act of killing a person he forfeits his own rights; his rights are not taken from him. In this way his actions are deliberate self-destruction and akin to an act of suicide. Imprisonment is an essential feature of any rational society that cares for individual rights and the need to protect its citizens from aggressors.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should leave people to rot in prison either. Nobody wants ex-prisoners to re-offend. There can be attempts to “rehabilitate” or educate or to put prisoners to good use. However, no-one has as yet devised a formula for rehabilitation, so we shouldn’t pretend that this is a realistic alternative to prison, or even a magic fix-all when done within the confines of prison walls. Unfortunately there is no magic wand that can be waved to turn hardened criminals into nice-guys-really. Many simply can’t and, more importantly, simply won’t go “straight.” Crime is an easy option for them, a way of life, and often a source of easy money often well worth risking a stretch in prison for. The better solution is to make sure that a life of crime is not worth risking prison for - by handing out longer sentences, by removing the endless opportunities for early release and by making life a little less comfortable for convicts when the prison gates clang shut behind them.

Perhaps education and work should become a focus. Abolitionists are fond of pointing out how many prisoners leave prison still unable to read and write. Here’s a solution - make their release from prison dependent on some form of educational or vocational achievement. And what about the cost of such things? Well, there’s really no reason why the prison population can’t be put to use in some sort of productive activity. God knows they have plenty of time at their disposal. Radio presenter James Whale famously suggested, not completely tongue-in-cheek, that prisons should all be fitted with exercise bikes which could be connected to the national electricity grid, and prisoners could then work shifts on the bikes providing electricity for large parts of the country. Dartmoor prison puts its inmates to work rebuilding stone walls in the surrounding area, saving local farmers a lot of time and effort. Alternatively, prisoners could do some jobs which we currently pay for through taxes - re-building roads, or tidying local parks. Perhaps another way to reduce the costs of prison is to clamp down on pool tables and wide-screen TVs, thus forcing prisoners to find more productive ways to use their mass of free time.

Prisons do the job they are supposed to do: punish, deter, and protect. That much is incontrovertible. They could certainly be made even better, perhaps if we focus more on improvement than abolition. In short: prisons work, and would work even better if the inmates did too.

Stephen Graham B.Th (Hons)

Capitalists Do It Better

Three unconnected stories in the Times newspaper recently illustrated perfectly what is wrong with modern charity. I present these cases as a sort of 3-in-1 blog.

(1) Gordon Hood

What is the purpose of government? To my libertarian mind the function of government is, put crudely, to protect the fundamental rights of its citizens (using rights in the sense outlined many times before in this blog). The purpose of government is not to take money from some of its citizens to prop up the lives of others. And yet our omnibenevolent chancellor Mr. Gordon Brown has gone even further than the typical socialist notion of redistribution of wealth within the nation. He has recently pledged a massive £8 billion of British taxpayers money over 10 years to Africa. Now, it’s not a bad thing to be nice to poor Africans, and I happen to sponsor a young African boy myself, but to do it with other people’s money - forcibly taken - in an effort to make oneself look compassionate is just a little bit sick.

If Gordy and his socialist buddies wish to support Africa’s poor then perhaps they should contemplate doing it with their own dosh rather than spending everyone else’s doubloons. You don’t even have to be a libertarian to see how disgusting this policy is. Even centrists and many left-of-centre should baulk at the sum of money being given away - a sum which could wipe out the debt of the National Health Service, kill poverty and homelessness in Britain and fund all manner of so-called “goods” and “public services” that might conceivably have a prima facie claim to benefiting some of the citizens on the nation. Gordon Brown wasn’t elected by Africans. He was elected by Britons, many of whom thought, however naively, that he might concentrate all his efforts on improving the lot of the citizens that actually voted for him. It simply isn’t his job to try to save the world. His job is to be Chancellor of the Exchequer to the benefit of the country that elected him.

It’s quite likely that Gordy is attempting to challenge the popular image most of us have of him as a rather dour and distant chap; strenuously trying to remodel himself as a man of compassion and warmth - except his compassion is neither genuine nor believable. A man generous with the money of other people is not compassionate. He’s a swindler and a charlatan.

Moreover, to throw money at wasteful, incompetent and morally corrupt administrations is grossly irresponsible. Why don’t Gordy & pals spend a bit more time speaking out about poor government in Africa if they really must stick their interfering noses in at all? The same problem plagued the Make Poverty History Campaign. It’s aims were:

(1) More and better aid (despite the fact that in some areas there was such a flood of aid in the form of cheap or free goods that local businesses - the very things that are essential in improving the lot of any impoverished area - were under serious threat because they couldn’t compete with the charities).

(2) Fair trade (despite the fact that is highly questionable whether its market distorting tendencies are of long term benefit and the fact that practices such a trade tariffs can be counter-productive in leading to low-return activities and low production).

(3) Debt cancellation (despite the fact that such a policy punishes those few governments that are financially responsible and working hard to pay off their debts, while rewarding those governments who don’t give a toss about financial propriety).

Why wasn’t putting pressure on bad, no - abominable - administrations on the table?

One of the countries Gordy has been particularly interested in is Mozambique - a corrupt state with a fairly horrendous human rights record. In fact, Prof Joseph Hanlon, an expert on Mozambique, goes so far as to say that corruption in Mozambique grew in proportion to the amount of aid western governments gave to it. He points out that aid creates dependency, discourages entrepreneurship, and often fails to go where western governments would like. Of course, our governments never like to admit that they have pissed taxpayers money up the wall so they report the success stories while neglecting to mention the endemic corruption. If common sense alone wasn’t enough to tell us that pumping money into corrupt states makes things worse then history should convince us. After aid received from the Live Aid efforts in 1985 Ethiopia engaged in a futile and destructive war. Way to go Bob Geldolf.

In my humble opinion Gordon Brown is a terrible Chancellor and I think he’d be better off focusing on his duty to the British people than roaming off to Africa to hug cute black children.

(2) When Charities Get It Terribly Wrong

In the wake of the Asian Tsunami we were bombarded by all manner of charities to give-give-give to help. So much money was raised that charities couldn’t spend it fast enough and the amount of unspent money built up so much that some charities started giving it away to other causes elsewhere because they couldn’t properly manage it.

So in haste were the charities that it was recently revealed that many have made spending fuck-ups of gigantic proportions. Millions of pounds have been lost because of corruption and bad management. Save the Children and Oxfam are two charities to be ripped off, losing tens of thousands of pounds, with their rebuilding efforts severely frustrated. What happened? They fell prey to unscrupulous building contractors who took their money and built the most inadequate and flimsy buildings imaginable that would have trouble holding up under a mild storm. Indonesian anti-corruption campaigners have assembled a dossier of fraud and malpractice and “calculate that 30% to 40% of all the aid funds … have been tainted.”

Of course, the charities will portray themselves as innocent victims, but they are wholly responsible for the money they have lost. They have failed to be scrupulous in their management of these projects and if someone has screwed them over then it’s purely because the charities representatives and managers failed to stick to the building partners like shit to a blanket in order to properly oversee what was going on. Save the Children built some 741 buildings, issuing contracts worth over £400,000. The contractors, most of whom were controlled by a few people related to each other, failed to lay proper foundations and had a penchant for substandard timber. Save the Children were recommended to flatten all 741 structures. Jasmine Whitbread, Chief Executive of the charity, said: “During routine evaluation and monitoring we discovered the poor workmanship and took steps to rectify the situation … we will tolerate nothing less than the most efficient and effective use of money.” Really? Your routine evaluation and monitoring only discovered problems after all 741 buildings were discovered to be dodgy beyond repair?

There has been a catalogue of errors - major and minor. One aid agency built houses only to find their own staff in occupation of them, others have discovered other kinds of internal corruption - typically theft of resources. Many charities are also misspending money - one in particular paying thousands of pounds over the market price for a fleet of fishing boats they could have got cheaper had they done some research and negotiation.

Charities may not like my saying it, but there isn’t quite the motivation to financial propriety when you’re spending other people’s money that you got quite cheaply. Come easy go easy, but there’s always more where it came from, eh? Lets have some freshly brewed coffee and donuts.

(3) When Capitalists Do Charity

It is widely assumed by socialists and other left-leaning slaves to fuckwittery that capitalists are motivated purely by financial greed and thus cannot be trusted to engage in philanthropy. The truth of the matter is that most of the greatest champions of philanthropy are capitalists, because capitalists are not motivated simply by financial greed. It might surprise some people to hear that capitalists don’t judge value purely in economic terms. Even if something has no financial rewards we will find capitalists investing their money for a whole host of other reasons. Many do it for leisure, others out of a sense of duty, some to make themselves feel good, and a few purely for kudos.

Meet Philip Richards. Richards earns £8 million a year on average, and normally manages to give half of his salary away to charitable projects. Why? It’s not down to altruism. Nor is it for some financial return. Richards is a Christian and believes that he is fulfilling his duty to God by making money and giving money away. He says, “God is creative and, if you are a Christian, you should want to be creative … Business is creative. It creates wealth, [and] all of the things society needs to live on.” While serving a term in Germany as a soldier during the Cold War he became convinced that it was capitalism and not socialism that was a force for good: “I remember thinking that the Soviet Union had got it all wrong. The politics of socialism was the politics of envy and stinginess. It said ‘Lets all be as thoroughly nasty and mean to everyone … then nobody will gain and somehow the people at the bottom will be better off.’ Of course, that never happened. I felt I was fighting evil.”

The 2006 Sunday Times Rich List is about to be published and will show just how much is being given to charitable causes by the super-rich. There is an important feature to be noted about this massive increase in philanthropy. These capitalists are no longer content with being seen to give some cash away to any given charity. They want results. For instance, Ann Gloag has pledged £4 million towards converting a ferry into a floating hospital to sail around Africa providing aid. She writes: “My previous experience of building hospitals in Africa had been that you take in 5000 blankets and 3 weeks later there are none … This way [her boat] you know you stuff’s not going to be stolen. You know exactly where your money is going.” In a similar vein, Peter Harrison set up a foundation worth £31 million to aid education and disability projects. He doesn‘t just give money away, “I want a bang for my buck. I have taken all the skills I used in the business world and applied them to the foundation to make sure the money is not wasted. We scrutinise accounts, have a rigorous interview process and only fund things we think are realistic.

Such approaches to charitable giving are a million miles away from shitting £400,000 down the crapper on a building project as a result of shockingly bad project management, poor research and financial impropriety. Perhaps the big brand charities should take note.

The first story illustrates just what happens when well-meaning but utterly naïve, and deluded, bureaucrats have carte blanche to spend other people’s money that was not freely given. The money should not be taken in the first place, and even then it is spent not so much to help and get a good return, but to make the bureaucrats look and feel good. Governments will throw money at any project that might yield enough success stories for it to televise at the next election, regardless of problems and corruption it often causes. The second story portrays the situation in which people are spending other people’s money despite the money having been contributed voluntarily, one in which an increase in the amount of money available to spend tends to lead to an increase in financial laxity. The third story shows the result of people being responsible for spending their own money. Considering the intellectual rigour and moral superiority of capitalism and the utter bankruptcy of economic alternatives, should we really be surprised at these stories?

Stephen Graham B.Th (Hons)