What is the purpose of imprisonment? Part 2
Having identified the different categories which merit imprisonment, the next question is exactly how those different categories should be dealt with. There are a number of potential tensions at work. One would not wish to keep prisoners in unacceptable conditions. This would also be counterproductive from the point of view of any rehabilitation work. On the other hand one would not wish them to seem to have access to facilities that ordinary citizens do not.
What plainly follows from any consideration of prison policy is that whatever rationale is followed undue pressure on prison places without corresponding resources to deal with prisoners will undermine whatever proper purpose for imprisonment is being pursued. Therefore whether it be release of prisoners or prison building, any strategy to deal with prisoners has to address the overcrowding issue.
No consideration of prison policy can ignore the cost of custody. In no other area of government expenditure would one fail to "value" the benefit of what is being done against the cost of that step. It is difficult to see why similar considerations would not apply in respect of prison policy. In the next article in this series I shall consider in more detail what tests one would expect to be applied to analysis of imprisonment policy.
In the interim there seem to be some fairly simple steps that could be taken to free up prison places at a considerable cost saving. However there might be practical difficulties in terms of implementing the steps having regard to the Human Rights Act given that one could expect a plethora of challenges.
The first point deals with foreign prisoners. Prisoners really fall into two categories. Those whose offences or lifestyle leads one to suppose that they may have undue influence, and those who do not. One would obviously wish to ensure that no serious villain was effectively able to benefit from such status and so noted gangsters or drug dealers would have to be exempted from the following suggestions(Due to a risk of bribery). Put simply, virtually anywhere in the world would be cheaper to imprison people than in England. It would be relatively simple and cost-effective to enter into economic arrangements with countries with prisoners in different parts of the world. Although prisoners could not necessarily be returned to their country of origin, African prisoners could serve a sentence somewhere in Africa, eastern European prisoners somewhere in Eastern Europe etc. Save in respect of those citizens with EU rights, any foreign national convicted of any serious offence should normally be automatically deported at the conclusion of the sentence and placement abroad would facilitate this.
Nor would this approach necessarily be limited solely to foreign prisoners. Let us say an arrangement was made to house prisoners somewhere in Eastern Europe where land and employment cost was significantly lower. Those serving short prison sentences (the type of prison sentence imposed because the court cannot think what else to do) would not suffer undue deprivation from the likely absence of visits, but will be likely to be sufficiently averse to the idea to possibly regard such sentences as a deterrent.
Others may have their own ideas. However if prison policy is to work effectively the first thing to be done is to reduce pressure on places. The two suggestions above would be unpopular in various quarters but a potentially effective start.
Next week we shall look at how these categories should inform prison policy.