Crime and punishment: what are prisons for?

Crime is currently in the news even more than usual, following numerous high profile events that took place during the summer months. In July, we heard detailed revelations of the illegal activities of newspapers in order to obtain stories and in August, we had the civil disturbances in a number of major cities in Britain.

With anxiety about crime comes the inevitable search for causes and solutions. Why, for example, did people indulge in orgies of looting, vandalism, arson and violence? (Or, for that matter, why don’t they indulge in it more often?) Various predictable suggestions have emerged: for example, it was because the perpetrators were ‘socially excluded’ or had absentee fathers. Or because the police were ill-prepared and lacked the confidence to use their powers effectively.

Since crime is a fact of life, we face the question of what to do about it. In Britain, the most severe judicial punishment a criminal can receive is that of imprisonment. The severity of the punishment meted out to people who had taken part in the riots brought controversy, with many arguing that imprisonment was too harsh a punishment for the crimes committed. But who should go to prison – and why? What is, or should be, the purpose of prison?

When he was Conservative home secretary in the 1990s, Michael Howard famously declared that ‘prison works’. But what is it for prison to ‘work’? And how can we tell whether or not it does? The panel debating Crime and punishment: what are prisons for? at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 29 October will bring together prominent thinkers on the subject – including Jonathan Aitken, former cabinet minister and ex-prisoner; and Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law at George Washington university – to reflect on these puzzling questions – alongside others.

For example, does the mantra ‘prison works’ mean only that a criminal cannot commit his favourite crimes while inside? Howard surely meant something more than this. Perhaps he meant that time in prison deters inmates from re-offending; though presumably the longer the time served, the less time there will be for re-offending. No doubt he also thought that the threat of prison deters others from offending in the first place. Maybe he believed that prison rehabilitates. Or perhaps he wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but hoped that his confident, no-nonsense tone would strike a persuasively reassuring chord in the heart of middle England.

Whatever the merits of the claim, it leads to deeper questions about the nature and purpose of punishment in general – and these should be as much a part of this debate in society as the prison issue. Retribution, as well as deterrence, is a traditional purpose of punishment, yet the two can clearly pull in opposing directions. Life sentences for smoking at work might well act as a deterrent, but they would be self-evidently unjust. On the other hand, paying rapists and murderers not to re-offend might be effective in crime reduction, yet would not satisfy the requirements of just retribution. Criminal justice, it seems, must take offenders seriously as moral beings, capable of exercising some choices. Retribution serves to communicate our moral attitudes to the perpetrators of past crimes, and not merely to influence their future behaviour.

However, there is ample evidence that there is no single criminal ‘type’. Some criminals are undoubtedly vicious and dangerous, but many others are mentally ill, have serious addiction problems, or are functionally illiterate. These things do not negate responsibility per se, but they greatly complicate the problem of what to do with such people. If retribution is supposed to communicate our outrage to offenders, in the language of morality and responsibility, what of those who cannot understand that language? What of sociopaths, who are incapable of normal moral feeling? What about those ‘one-off’ offenders whose long-term prospects can be significantly damaged by a criminal record? Much thinking is now being done to address the whole question of punishment and prisons, to reach a more coherent philosophy of punishment and to make sensitive distinctions between those who should, and those who should not, be in prison. At the Battle of Ideas, we aim to have a lively and reasoned debate, and contribute some rational thinking to this pressing area of social policy.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Piers Benn teaches ethics at King’s College London. He is speaking at the Battle of Ideas debate “Crime and punishment: what are prisons for?” on Saturday 29 October.

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