The Gazette 1974

a r e sent to prison. Therefore, it would appear that the de terrent effect of prison is not very substantial. v 1 0 *rouiein of Rehabilitation in Prison As for rehabilitation, the prison statistics contain a Mple evidence that prison does not rehabilitate. The statistics do show us that two out of every three pris- oners behind bars in 1971 had been in prison at least ° n ce before, one out of every three had been in there a t least five times and one out of every ten had been to prison at least twenty times. These statistics have ee n more or less similar over the past ten y ea rs. Nevertheless, the high rate of recidivism to this country is a monument to the failure : prisons to do anything for prisoners. Most these recidivists have become so institution- •sed that they cannot survive outside and must con- Mually return. Of all the people affected by the futility our prison system the recidivist is the person who f ftors most. Prison is indeed a "collection of its own lai lures". Most Prisoners not Reconvicted A better way of measuring the efficacy of imprison- ®nt in reducing crime is to follow the activities of l ^ o n e r s released from prison and discover whether / will commit another crime within a certain period th P e r d o d taken is usually three years). Research of ls type carried on in the U.S. for instance by Daniel a s e r has shown that approximately 70 per cent of ^ 0 s e released from prison have not been reconvicted. °Wever, it is generally recognised that even figures p . as these are no real indication of the success rate. instance many of the prisoners may have committed u'Mes which were not reported to the police or even, re ported, not traced to the offender. Secondly it is not . ays possible to ensure that a subsequent conviction J® tr aced. Thirdly, as Nigel Walker points out even if e can believe with certainty that he has infact "gone a ight" we have no way of proving that this is the ,cs ult of imprisonment unless we can claim to know ^ nether he would have gone straight even if he had not imprisoned. In other words, the offender might have decided not to commit any more crimes. 1 herefore, it would appear to be almost impossible to scover how effective is any one penal sanction and ether one penal sanction is more effective than ^ other one or indeed more effective than none at all. ^ovvever, in 1958 Leslie Wilkins carried out a survey ^ the efficacy of probation versus other sanctions and ^ came to the amazing conclusion, which has yet to sa r e I u t e i I ) that reconviction rates appeared to be the ^ e > no matter what form of disposal was used. Dr. :°ger Ha r t, summarizing the conclusions of comparative of p 1CS t r e a t m e n t results in a report to the Council Lurope in 1964 came to the same conclusion. In other r ds if reconviction rates are taken as our criterion, toe n it \v e Prob' would appear to be absolutely irrelevant whether put the offender in jail, fine him, put him on "nation or just discharge him. When one considers e tremendous economic and social cost of putting a rson in prison it is unbelievable that we have not £ rted down our prisons long ago. Th a t 's not all, how- 1 er - T h e vast majority of the prisoners in 1971 spent ij/ S than six months in jail. I would suggest that it is /"possible to rehabilitate anybody in six months no t , a tter how good the conditions. J udge Ke nny ma de e same point recently at the Law Conference in

Galway. Yet our judges continue to send hundreds of prisoners to jail each year for such short periods. T he Justice must know that such a sentence won't rehabili- tate the prisoner. They are imprisoned merely to get them out of the way for a few months. Defects of imprisonment as a sanction It is now time to discuss the defects of imprisonment as a sanction. Firstly, it is the most expensive sanction in use. According to the Prison Study Group Report it costs over £ 70 a week to keep a man in prison. Proba- tion costs approximately £ 3 a week and fines cost nothing. Secondly, imprisonment of an offender not only punishes him but will also punish, both economi- cally and socially, his wife, and family, who, of course, have not been found guilty of any crime. Thirdly, while he is in prison society will lose any of the positive services he was capable of contributing. Finally, while he is in prison he will be associating with others who can teach him new criminal techniques. However, the worst defect of imprisonment is the effect on the prisoner himself. As the Working Party of the Labour Party on Prisons reported in 1946 : "A prisoner is withdrawn from society and condemned to a life of uselessness. He is left in silence and darkness for long periods of unbroken monotony to nurse a grievance against society and against the community. When he returns to the world from which he has been withdrawn for years he is a stranger to the normal way of life." Elsewhere Goffman states: " The pris- oner comes to prison with a conception of himself ma de possible by certain stable social arrangements in his home world. Upon entrance he is immediately stripped of the support provided by these arrangements. He begins a series of abasements, degradations, humili- ations, and profanations of self. His self is systematically if often unintentionally, mortified." He is, therefore, rejected—and more importantly he sees himself as re- jected. In the end he turns his back on reality and lives in a contorted world of make-believe, he refuses to accept rules of fellow mortals and makes ones that fit in with his own little world. He is emotionally and sexually deprived. Most of all perhaps the little free- doms which we take for granted—freedom to decide when to get up, when to eat, where to work, what time to go to bed—are all taken from him. He is then thrown back into a society full of stress and strain— into a society that hates and despises him, that won't give him a job because he has been labelled a criminal. It is no wonder that so many wish to go back. The Pattern of Criminal Behaviour Let us now stress the following points. Firstly, it is impossible to completely eradicate criminal behaviour. Th e very fact of having rules at all will invariably mean that these rules will be broken. Instead, the aim of penal system should be to control types of behaviour consid- ered particularly damaging to society. Secondly, we must realize that criminal behaviour, like all behaviour is not "the manifestation of pathological individuals" —on the contrary, it occurs in the interaction with others in the community—it is part and parcel of the community and cannot be separated from it. Wilkins has pointed out that it is easier to talk of a maladjusted offender than a maladjusted society. It can be shown that there is nothing in the criminal that sets him apa rt from others except the fact that he has been labelled a criminal in wh at Garfinkel calls a status degradation 129