Thought for the Week: The potential of prisons
Catriona Troth reflects on how finding the right moment to reach out to people can set them on a different path
In recognition of the recent Prisons Week and International Restorative Justice Week, Jordans Meeting hosted the latest talk in the Chiltern Area Quaker Programme: Exploring the Potential of Prisons. Some forty people were privileged to hear three remarkable speakers presenting their expectations of prison movingly and eloquently from their different perspectives on the criminal justice system.
Claire, a middle aged former GP, was raped in a station car park by a serial sex offender, just released from prison. The rape led to the breakdown of her marriage, depression and near-alcoholism. Yet, with extraordinary courage, she recognised that what she needed for her recovery was to meet with the man who raped her.
It took her two years of persistence, following his trial and conviction, to arrange a restorative justice meeting. That meeting allowed the offender to start to see her – his twenty-seventh victim – as a person. It also allowed Claire to see him as a person in need, a victim – someone who should have been helped long ago, when he was a young child. Claire had strong views about how prisons and probation services should challenge behaviour in prison and seek to meet needs so that they could provide greater safety for the public.
Geoff, the second speaker, was involved with a skinhead gang who beat a man to death. As a teenager, in the 1960s, he was sentenced to life in prison. Moving up into the adult prison system, he experienced its full brutality. But he learned to use the prison experience and its, to him, rich variety of resources to develop educationally, vocationally and spiritually. Once released on parole, he came to recognise that he had the capacity to help those still on the inside. Debarred from working in prisons because of his record, he used the fact that he was still on life licence to walk back inside – spending another nine years serving as a voluntary prisoner.
There are a handful of moments, he told us, as prisoners pass along the system’s conveyor belt when those working with them – prison officers, chaplains, teachers, counsellors – have a chance to make personal contact and create the transforming moments that could lead to a life-changing path. Those moments must not be wasted.
Someone who is well aware of those rare opportunities is former governor of Grendon prison, Tim Newell from Aylesbury Meeting. He spoke of the challenges facing the prison service. On the one hand, there is pressure to cut costs in the face of an ever-rising prison population. (Britain imprisons people at a much higher rate than any other European country.) On the other hand, restorative justice is becoming an accepted part of mainstream criminal justice, and it holds out the hope, for victims and prisoners, of a life changing opportunity. More therapeutic communities like Grendon have been set up within other prisons. And newly released prisoners are to be assigned mentors to help them adjust to life outside.
These three very different perspectives all held the same core message. If we can find the right moment to reach out to people who have lost their way, then maybe this connection can set them on a different path. And if we can do that, then we can avoid enormous costs – the financial costs of keeping them in prison, but also the costs to their families and, most importantly, the costs to their victims.
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