PRISON IS A STICKING PLASTER, NOT A CURE

[Copyright Michael Meech 2006 and 2008. This article first appeared in the Methodist Recorder. It may not be reprinted or distributed other than for individual and personal use, either electronically or on hard copy, without permission from the author]

Britain’s bulging prison population is a sign of a society that has ceased to work properly, says MICHAEL MEECH. We live in an ethical vacuum with selfishness and disrespect the order of the day

IT was late evening when I left the Local Preachers’ Meeting at the Central Hall, in Manchester. Two men leaving a pub saw my dog collar and began to abuse me. One was gripping the lapels of my overcoat and my feet were off the ground, while the other was forcefully suggesting that my Mummy and Daddy were not married!

At that moment Joyce came round the corner. I’d met her through my work as a part-time prison chaplain. Like many other women who earned their living on the street, she did a month inside occasionally and she was not seeing her chaplain insulted.

In less time than it would take you to say parole she hounded off my attackers, gave me a reassuring embrace and presented me with a tin of Cussons Imperial Leather talcum powder as a kind of compensation for what had happened.

I can’t remember how I explained the talcum powder to my wife when I got home. It’s not easy to say, “Oh, it was given to me by a prostitute in Piccadilly tonight.”

Joyce (I have changed her name), according to the Home Office, was one of 28,500 people in prison in the country at that time. Were she in prison today she would be numbered among more than 80,000. We’re in trouble. Deep trouble. And none of us seems to know how to deal with the problem. “The government should do something,” people say, but that’s the everyday response to just about every problem from health and education, to racism and the environment.

Television news and the tabloids comment on someone being sent to prison or the threat of a custodial sentence with that irritating expression “behind bars”. This trivialises justice and punishment, and makes it sound as though we are dealing with the exploits of Desperate Dan in the Dandy rather than real offenders who have caused harm and anxiety to real people.

But hold on. The people of Britain are not fooled. Many of the people who are prescribing prison as the antidote to crime are themselves offenders in more sophisticated ways. The cash-for-questions row in the dying days of the last Tory government is matched by the loans-for-peerages controversy in this government’s third term. And the names Blunkett, Prescott, Mandelson and Jowell read like a role of shame rather than honour.

Even if imprisonment were the way to curb offenders, it isn’t working. More than 50 offenders whom the courts thought deserved a life sentence have been freed. Murderers have walked out of open prisons and have not been traced.

In any case, the real punishment of a prison sentence is meted out more often than not to prisoners’ womenfolk and families. I recall during my prison visits the resigned expressions on the faces of the prisoners as they met their visitors, and it was more than matched by the anguish on the faces of those who came to visit them.

What the government does not understand is that those people, inmates and their families alike – and the rest of us in different ways – are suffering the consequences of anti-social behaviour because we have abandoned the philosophical basis of our ethics. What we believe in determines how we live.

Let me give you an example. Some years ago I represented Methodist youth clubs in a delegation of British youth leaders which visited the Soviet Union. Not only were people who broke the law there in those days punished by a fine or imprisonment, but also notices were put up in the street where they lived and their workplace. These described their offence and declared that it was contrary to the principles of the glorious people’s revolution. Now I’m not a Marxist and hold no brief for the old Soviet system, but at least the Communists made it clear to people what standard of behaviour was expected of them.

In Britain – and we’re not alone in the world – we have thrown the philosophical basis of our society overboard. And in these days of political correctness the government is content that it should be so. Serious belief in God is at an all-time low, Christian congregations and national churches which once shaped our communities put all their energies into survival rather than applying their faith, and moral education whether in schools or at home is neglected. The result is an ethical vacuum with selfishness and disrespect the order of the day.

That’s painful reading. The treatment is to return to our roots in belief and principle. All the huffing and puffing about sending offenders to prison is not going to make any difference until we teach one another, and learn from one another, that the principles of respect and care are essential if our society is to be harmonious. And if these ideals are ignored by our leaders and lawmakers they should not be surprised if they are denied in the lifestyle of the people.

The Rev Michael Meech is a Methodist minister. He held circuit appointments in Somerset, Manchester and Epsom before continuing his vocation in broadcasting