One of many promises the coalition Government hasn’t delivered
on is the so-called ‘rehabilitation revolution’: the long overdue systemic
reform of our outdated, overcrowded, expensive, ever failing penal justice
system. It was always going to be a hard
ask. Particularly given the Conservatives have ‘previous history’. Just
remember Michael Howard and Anne Widdecombe. But events over the last few days have taken an
even more comical and depressing turn.
For starters, we have Chris Huhne. The Lib Dems, clearly
learning from their coalition partners, have produced the next high profile
politician ready to be imprisoned for perverting the course of justice. Huhne
follows in the careful footsteps of hubris laid down by Jonathan Aitken and
Geoffrey Archer. Though it’s unlikely Huhne is going to be in prison for long,
the costs of his imprisonment are significant.
By the time of his sentencing, it will have cost around £65,000 to
imprison him, taking into account the police, court and other expenses. Then
there is at least a further £40,000 for each year of incarceration. Huhne is a millionaire. A final sum of around
100k would be fairly small fry. But of course, it won’t be Huhne who is paying.
We are. The taxpayer will cough up around £100,000 for a politician from a
Government that based its standards on deficit reduction. That isn’t just ironic, it is bitterly symbolic.
For it is the Government’s behaviour – both as individuals, and through their
policies – that is responsible for what we are all paying for now.
Before Chris Huhne packs his overnight bag for sentencing,
he would do well to digest Chris Grayling’s comments from the Mail on Sunday’s ‘I
smacked my children when they were badly behaved’. It’s a headline that might interest David
Cameron too, given recent grumblings inside the Conservative party. Grayling,
though, is the Minister for Justice. He
is tasked with overseeing the institution Huhne is about to incarnated in, and –
one hopes - for the ‘rehabilitation revolution’ that promises to reform the way
it (doesn’t) work. If Huhne’s past behaviour
reflects badly for a former minister of climate change (I imagine most people who
care about climate change don’t speed, let along lie about it), then Grayling’s
behaviour as a child smacker doesn’t exactly suggest that ‘rehabilitation’ is anywhere
near the top of the Government’s agenda for justice.
In the Mail on Sunday article, Grayling suggests that he ‘smacked’
his children to ‘send a message’. As @bberrybeth365
responded on twitter, ‘That message is the parent has lost control, their
temper, and the plot!’ For Grayling and many others in the Conservative party,
it is a message of deterrent that they believe is equally applied to the importance
of prison. Smacking a child might make a
parent feel they are sending a message about discipline and boundaries, but the
experience of being smacked is altogether more complex and sometimes deeply damaging.
Given high re-offending rates in prison,
one has to wonder if ‘the message’ is of less significance than the actual
impact of ‘the experience’ on a person. If you look at criminal justice statistics from
2012, they show that nearly a third of
defendants convicted of serious offences had 15 or more previous convictions or
cautions.
Grayling goes on to clarify, in typical Daily Mail language,
his belief that prisons should be ‘spartan but humane, a place people don’t
particularly want to come back to’. Tellingly, there is no reference to rehabilitation
here. Prison is a place lacking meaningful support for individuals to develop what
they need to live healthy, sustainable, crime-free lives in society. This is
not just a question of being humane; it’s an imperative part of prison as a
process that is meant to rehabilitate as well as punish. Most people who ‘go back’ to prison don’t do
so because they didn’t get the message; they do so because they didn’t get any
help to change. For £40,000 a year, we
should expect a lot more.
Dostoevsky wrote that ‘the degree of civilisation in society
can be judged by entering its prisons’. Looking at the Minister for Justice
smacking his children, and an ex minister about to be imprisoned for perverting
the course of justice, one is left with the sickening feeling that our society
lacks proper leadership. Maybe that is
the real ‘message’ that Grayling and Huhne are sending out to us. It’s time we
listened, learned, and rehabilitated ourselves.
