| V. A prison is still a prison, however much fresh primrose paint you slap on its rock-heavy walls. | ||
| Walking around Wormwood Scrubs, one of Britain's biggest and the one where all life sentences | ||
| start, it's at first hard to realize, though, that the thousand or so inmates are being held in there | ||
| by force. For the first impression is cheerful enough: men busy in workshops, prisoners trotting | ||
| 5 | purposefully through the long corridors on errands. Only the high wire fences, and the dogs and | |
| the groups of warders watching the men in their blue denim uniforms walking round and round | ||
| the windy exercise yard remind you that this is not, in fact, a barracks or a big boarding school. | ||
| It is the sheer ordinariness of the prison that forces so insistently the question nobody answers: | ||
| what is it all supposed to be for? The Victorians, who built the Scrubs as if it were a model | ||
| 10 | fortress, had no doubts: a prison was for punishment. But that's now considered barbaric and | |
| ineffective. | ||
| Is it there to reform the men? That was Elizabeth Fry's notion, to be accomplished with Bible | ||
| readings and useful work; but in practice there's precious little of either. The Scrubs has a small | ||
| therapeutic unit where those who opt for it get group therapy, five hours a day, remorselessly for | ||
| 15 | months, but even when it works, that's just for a tiny minority. | |
| Is it there to keep people off the streets, so they can't hurt anyone while they're inside? Not a | ||
| bad idea - but th en, the length of time you 're inside ought to depend on how likely you are to do | ||
| it again. So the persistent petty thief would be in for ever, and the man who had used a once-for-all | ||
| meat cleaver on his faithless wife would walk free. | ||
| 20 | Perhaps the real answer is the one given by one of the saner warders: he said simply 'to ease | |
| the conscience of society'; by shutting these men away, people can let themselves off worrying | ||
| about why the crimes were committed. | ||
| Not that the prison people worry, either: the crime's the last thing they think about. This | ||
| warder said he didn't even know the crimes of three- quarters of the men in his charge: there's | ||
| 25 | even a sort of prison convention that you don't mention whatever it was the man's in for. This is | |
| the thing that is most amazing to the outsider. After the first few days, they all agree, the only | ||
| thing that counts for the prisoner is making things as tolerable as possible - as it is for the | ||
| warder, only from the opposite point of view. All enlightened people concerned with prisons | ||
| take the same line: perhaps they would find it intolerable, in their day-to-day dealings with these | ||
| 30 | men, if they had to think 'He's the one who bashed up that old lady'. But if the crime's not | |
| important, what are they doing there at all? | ||
| The men are in prison because of a crime; yet the prison doesn't seem to relate to the crime in | ||
| any way. It can 't punish and reform at the same time; so in practice it doesn't do either. It is | ||
| simply a parallel society, out of which, in due course, a man will emerge: maybe better, maybe | ||
| 35 | worse; but probably much the same as before. | |
| Small wonder that concerned people more and more ask what on earth could be tried instead: | ||
| they'll look at anything that seems to extend the range of the three standard options of fine, | ||
| probation* or prison. More money has just been voted for those who, since the 1972 Criminal | ||
| Justice Act, can do community service; that's something. One or two judges in Germany have | ||
| 40 | tried punishments that do seem relevant - making motorbike tearaways, for example, go to work | |
| in an accident ward; but of course half the time there isn't any such appropriate punishment | ||
| available. | ||
| We buy crime books in their millions, we watch crime series on TV five times a night; we're | ||
| obsessed with the idea of those who committed a crime being caught and brought to justice. But | ||
| 45 | when that's all over we seem totally uninterested in what happens next. Put them away, shut | |
| them up, hide them; and we can forget all about them - until the next time when we can get | ||
| indignant all over again. | ||
| The Observer, June 6, 1982 |