Quaker calls for action on prisons
'Comments by Tom Shakespeare followed an ‘urgent notification’ about conditions in HMP Wandsworth issued the week before by Charlie Taylor, chief inspector of prisons.'
The Quaker writer and broadcaster Tom Shakespeare has called for new thinking to fix the current crisis in UK prisons. Against a backdrop of overcrowding, violence and high rates of reoffending, the former Swarthmore Lecturer said we need a clearer vision of what prisons are really for. ‘We want them to do lots of rather different things: punish people who have broken our laws; protect the public from violent criminals; rehabilitate offenders and teach them useful employment skills. Yet we are guilty of stigmatising people who have spent some time in prison,’ he said, on the BBC programme A Point of View on 19 May.
The comments by Tom Shakespeare followed an ‘urgent notification’ about conditions in HMP Wandsworth issued the week before by Charlie Taylor, chief inspector of prisons.
The warning came after inspectors found that England’s second-biggest prison is stricken with severe overcrowding, vermin and rising violence among inmates. The prison’s governor, Katie Price, resigned during the inspection earlier this week.
‘HMP Brixton is little better,’ said Tom Shakespeare, highlighting the fact that more than 10,000 dilapidated cells have been closed. ‘People can spend many weeks on remand without being found guilty of anything, which counts for one in five of all people in jail.
‘This week there are nearly 88,000 people in prison, of which more than 84,000 were men,’ he said. ‘By 2026, this number is forecast to exceed 100,000. We have a higher proportion of people in prison than any country in western Europe. Prison brutalises too many, rather than reform.’
In A Point of View, Tom Shakespeare also spoke about prisons in other countries. ‘Germany imprisons less than half the number we do. The Netherlands has shrunk its prison population by forty per cent since 2005. Norway has reduced reoffending from seventy per cent to twenty per cent. What have they done? For a start they don’t have large centralised prisons like in the UK and US. The average Norwegian prison has seventy cells… They put emphasis on maintaining family relationships to ensure that criminals have a strong support system after you get out.’
Comments
Please login to add a comment
