Is punishment really working?

The Great Debate at Dartington
Friday 14 October 2011, Great Hall

By Alex Ali, guest blogger

Capsar Walsh’s emotive tale of a frightened child, hearing a police radio crackle and fizz during a raid to arrest his father, fittingly illustrated the very real consequences of crime and its subsequent punishment at the fourth Dartington Great Debate last week.

Following on from debates on the Alternative Vote system and nuclear armament, Caspar Walsh, the director of the Write to Freedom Charity, which works with young offenders, and Juliet Lyon CBE, director of the Prison Reform Trust, tackled questions on crime and punishment in the UK.

Walsh’s autobiographical account of his father’s arrest, his fear, incomprehension and the fabricated tales of his father’s daring-do served to demonstrate that the commission and punishment of crime has far-reaching and deeply felt consequences for more than the victims and perpetrators alone.

Projected onto the stone wall above the enormous fireplace in Dartington’s Great Hall was the statistic that 88,000 people are currently incarcerated in the UK – a greater percentage of the country’s population than any developed nation except the USA. Yet our reoffending rates remain higher than the rest of Europe.

Against this context, Tony Corcoran, the governor of Her Majesty’s Prison Channing Wood, a mere eight miles away near Newton Abbot, was ‘disappointingly’ advised by the Ministry of Justice’s press office not to take part in the debate, explained Dartington’s Director of Social Justice, Celia Atherton.

Still, Ms Lyon spoke eloquently about the need for reform and how the economic downturn may force prisons and those who mete out punishment to do more with less. Currently it costs £45,000 a year to keep a person incarcerated and the government has already announced swingeing cuts to public services at it attempts to claw back the country’s spiralling national debt.

Ms Lyon said that as a nation we had become used to locking people up for longer, citing the catastrophic case of one prisoner who had originally been sent to jail for 71 days, but was still languishing there five years later because he was unable to demonstrate he was ‘no longer a risk’.

She also said using prisons as a ‘gateway to treatment’ was ‘desperately misplaced’. And while Ms Lyons laid out the facts and figures her organisation faces, Caspar Walsh told of his journey through the UK’s prisons.

First, as a visitor to his father, then as a prisoner on remand as a young man in his early 20s, and finally returning to work with young men following his own emancipation from the shackles of crime and degradation. Walsh’s charity Write to Freedom works with some of the most marginalised young men in the country and his pioneering creative writing techniques and contemporary rites of passage work in the wilds of Dartmoor allows these children to examine themselves, with positive results that the jail continues to support and endorse.

Two short films produced by the Prison Reform Trust and Write to Freedom, screened during the two-hour debate, brilliantly set the scene, capturing issues that were explored in more depth during the next day’s Social Reflections session, a group discussion facilitated by psychotherapists Farhad Dalal and Angelika Gölz.