What hope for prisoner rehabilitation?

Prison is meant to rehabilitate. Eric Allison writes on prisons and criminal justice in the Guardian’s Joe Public blog, on questions of mistreatment of officers by other officers and asks what hope there is for prisoners in such an environment. – 9th April 2008.

Read the full article

Comments included:

“Nobody takes real responsibility for rehabilitation; it’s against the spirit of our punitive times. Lip-service only is paid to it. Probation was long ago converted to an organisation devoted to ‘managing’ offenders (public protection) or dispensing community punishment. Prison governors always, and I mean always, have security as their number one priority. And so there is no real advocacy for rehabilitation. What is needed is effective case work on behalf of individual prisoners to assist rehabilitation. Offender behaviour programmes, education, resettlement initiatives and the rest are delivered piecemeal. There are some successes, but in general prisons do containment and punishment reasonably well, but not rehab. Which, in the end, produces negative and demoralising effects on prisoners and staff alike.

To introduce a proper rehabilitative regime in prisons and on release will take political vision and courage. It ain’t there”

and …

“Not using the opportunity prison provides to do something positive is one of the most mystifying state failures. Here you have criminals, both career and nascent, gathered together, under government control, 24 hours a day. And what do we do with them? Educate them? Teach them skills that could lead to jobs in the outside world? Give them serious and continued help to get off drugs?

Nope, we just lock them up for hours on end, and pay thousands for the privilege. Bonkers, absolutely bonkers.”