Too many criminals are sent to prison and punishing them in public instead could be more effective, the Bishop of Liverpool said today.
The Right Reverend James Jones, the Anglican bishop for prisons, said it was simply not enough to lock up criminals.
He added that community payback schemes could act as a deterrent for others and help to reduce reoffending.
“… punishing them in public …”
He did mean public floggings?
#1 I suspect he is more likely to be proposing that a pillory and a set of stocks be placed outside Liverpool Cathedral at which passers by can throw Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets rather than vegetables which are harder to find in Liverpool nowadays.
Delightful, PM (#2).
Joking aside, this is a very serious problem. Here in the USA, we face enormous problems due to the vast number of people incarcerated, a staggering 3.3 million behind bars. That’s by far the highest incarceration rate in the whole industrialized world. Further aggravating the problem of our over-crowded prisons and jails is the fact that some states (like my state of VA) have abolished parole and a growing number of convicted felons are sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole. The Church (all denominations) isn’t doing nearly enough to deal with the massive challenges that presents us.
Given the high recidivism rate among those sent to prison (usually over 40%), not to mention the fact that it generally costs over $30K a year to house a criminal in state prisons, it would be very wise for us to encourage more creative ways for judges to sentence non-violent criminals, i.e., those who don’t need to be locked up to protect society.
Out of curiosity, PM, would you care to weigh in with an assessment of +Jones of Liverpool? (Others may weigh in too). He certainly has the reputation of being an evangelical, or at least he comes from a strong evangelical background, and yet some folks say that he’s compromised and moved to the left. What say you?
In any case, I’m glad he’s spoken out on this important issue.
David Handy+
#3 Rev Handy
I believe that +Jones is recuperating from heart surgery, and he has my prayers. As for his theology, who knows – wibbly wobbly recently. I suspect he would like to demolish Liverpool and turn it into an ecopark.
This is indeed a conundrum on a number of levels, at least here in the States. I won’t attempt to comment on the situation abroad, though I imagine it is not dissimilar.
On the one hand, the reason a lot of states have gone to mandatory sentencing laws is that judges were notorious for letting people off easy or paroling people who were suppose to get life in prison but who go out again in 15 years or so and go on commit more heinous acts. Lawyers like to bellyache over the injustice of all this, but the fact is that crime is crime, and justice is justice. No all incarcerated people can be rehabilitated, no matter how much money the Government tries to spend to “re-educate” them.
On the flip side of that, though, there are a lot of people sent to prison because of this usually-too-often-bloodthirsty retributive justice call from the legislature (who are trying to not look soft on crime) to an electorate.
As an complete aside, I think this is one of the holes in the Pro-life movement argument because they all seem to want to criminalize abortion, but if you try to pin them down and ask them, “Well, do we send these women to prison who have abortions?” There is usually this dread silence and birds chirping because they don’t really have a good answer for that, other than to mumble something about, “Well, we’d go after the abortion provider…” or “Well, they’d pay a fine or something.” Well, you said abortion is murder…a fine to pay for a murder? While I am Pro-life, I don’t have a good answer myself on that.
But, back to the topic at hand. I am not sure what this bishop has in mind by “community payback schemes.” We have community service and fines a lot of times as a full or partial sentence, but that does not seem to stem the tide of all these crimes that are cyclical in nature, so I do not know how much productivity that would have in breaking the cycle of drugs or whatever else you want to classify as a non-violent offense.
Creative sentencing on the part of judges was what brought the mandatory sentencing thing to the forefront to begin with. We tried that, and it led to more Justice problems than it solved. Loose and creative sentencing created the problem here addressed to begin with. Yet another cycle that seems to be repeating itself.
As was noted above in jest, that seems to leave the public shaming bit. Maybe some good old fashioned stocks would be effective. I can’t imagine how, but that seems to be the only logical conclusion I can derive from this good bishop’s comments.
And I point to the comments on this link as a reference to the Retributive Justice “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality that politicians feel the need to pander to.
I wonder if there’s some countries out there with relatively low rates of incarceration whose bishops are saying, “We need to imprison more people” or does this only work one way?
I don’t have a problem with the idea that some countries do imprison too many people and for too long, but is this just a push to not imprison (or not imprison very much), or is it a genuine concern to get the numbers in the right ballpark?
I don’t have an answer as how to administer criminal justice over the whole realm of criminal activity. But I do have strong opinions regarding our anti-narcotics effort throughout the entire United States.
The illegal narcotics trafficking in the USA is a major industry with sales in the billions and billions of dollars each year. It involves the importation of illegal narcotics and the importation/exportation of pre-cursor chemicals, the domestic production of illegal narcotics, the processing and packaging for market of those narcotics, the national distribution of those narcotics, the local retail sale of those narcotics, the cash flow from the point-of-sale of those narcotics back to the corporate treasurers of the narcotics organizations, money laundering on a HUUUGE scale, the export of drug profits overseas on a HUUUGE scale, the corporate policing and management of the narcotics organizations, and all sorts of communications required to keep the organizations working smoothly.
Although the national narcotics organizations often have a distributive style of organizing themselves, they inevitably end up with some sort of pyrmidal structure. This structure includes the bosses at the top, regional managers, local wholesale distributors and neighborhood retail distributors.
Our politicians, law enforcement officers and courts tend to focus on the neighborhood distributors and the actual drug addicts/users at the bottom of the drug organizations’ organizational pyramids.
The result is that we lock up a lot of addicts/users and low-level neighborhood distributors.
But you don’t seem to read much about (except for some sensational drug intercepts involving relatively low-level people) the arrest of upper management drug traffickers and being sent to jail in the USA.
The end result of attacking the bottom of the drug trafficking pyramid is a whole lot of inconsequential people being locked up for drug offenses while the key actors in the drug trade usually get away with breaking our counter-narcotics laws.
Food for thought: Could the billions and billions of dollars being made in the narcotics business have been protected through spending some of those billions to corrupt politicians, judges, juries and key counter-narcotics personnel?
I don’t have a problem with alternative means of punishment, especially for non-violent crimes. However, #3, the rates of incarceration are self-reported. There is a very valid argument that China’s reported rate of 110 to 115/100,000 is no where near the reality. First, China states they only report persons who have been “sentenced” while the US reports everyone, including those awaiting trial for various reasons. Second, it has recenlty come to light that the Chinese, like all Communists, have “Gulags” and also commit political prisoners/disseneters to mental institutons without a hearing or any due process. Also, a big part of the reason US jails are so full is because of drug trafficking. That is a whole new debate about closing our borders, improving public education and having a sensible and reasoned discussion about our drug policies, but is way off topic here.
Criminal justice is a complex subject and there is no simple answer.
Advocates of “lock ’em up and throw away the key” often use (and believe) very simplistic arguments. It is only later that the real cost of mandatory sentencing and stricter bail regimes become apparent in two ways:
(a) Prisons cost money. A lot of money in fact, both to build and to maintain. Harsher prison and bail regimes require more prisons and related infrastructure, and each prison costs the same as several medical or police facilities. Getting a new prison sounds great, until you realise this is impacting on things like health care for your family and policing to keep them safe.
(b) One of the major goals of criminal justice is rehabilitation of the criminal. This is not a matter of “bleeding heart liberalism” but of public finances – if a first-time offender goes on to commit more crimes, the drain on the public purse is significant. The more first-time offenders that can be turned away from further offences to become positive members of society, the less of my taxes are spent dealing with them.
That is why giving judges the discretion to craft sentences (even light sentences) if they believe it lessens the chance of the person re-offending, is a really smart idea.
Unfortunately this dimension of the law and order debate is often ignored in the popular press, until the public cost reaches crippling levels. By that time, the ignorant fools who pressed for heavier sentencing and bail regimes regardless of circumstance often escape censure – they should be forced to work as prison guards or rehabilitation officers!
Personally I am all for bringing back public flogging. Especially for stuff like drug crimes which incarcarate an enormous number of young people. I am also in favor of wiping the slate clean after 7 years of good behavior so that former convicts can find jobs and return to being normal member of society.
Of course, the growth in for-profit prisons and their lobbyists isn’t helping us have a rational conversation much, either.
My cousin works in drug/alcohol rehab (quite a growth industry) and just got a job working in Drug Court, which I originally thought wad a new sitcom like Night Court but he says it is actually quite successful in diverting addicts out of the criminal justice system for good. http://www.nadcp.org/learn/what-are-drug-courts.