Prison Reform

Prisons. It seems the Tories are now in favour of prison reform and of reducing the number of prisoners and putting more of a focus of alternative punishments and rehabilitation. I'm sure I'm not the only one who detects a probable Lib Dem influence. I'm rather strongly against the idea that you can solve crime by cooping up people who break the law in a big building for a few weeks/months/years, together with other law breakers, and reform then through a diet of education, menial work and lack of access to the outside world and friends and family, garnished with some efforts at rehabilitation towards the end. In many cases, it probably does work, but there are still going to be many people who come out of prison resenting society for the fact they were put in there in the first place and quite ready to punish society in the best way it knows how – committing more crime. There's also the “colleges of crime” argument – people are being sent to prison for a few months, and whilst they may be learning a decent trade in the prison classrooms by day, in the evenings many of them are probably learning tricks of a rather different trade from career criminals, like how to break into a car without setting off the alarm. Keeping the career criminals separate from the petty criminals – the tax evaders, the normally decent people who had arguments with their neighbours which got out of hand, the vandals – couldn't be a bad thing. It reminds me of a speech I heard from a Lord a couple of weeks or so ago where he basically called for a distinction between criminals and offenders There are probably quite a few categories you could arrange people who break the law into, and quite a few ways of dealing with each, but alternative punishments and reforming offenders before they go into prison into the first place are obvious ones. They just need to make those solutions effective.