Prison works?

Friend's son, in prison in 1990s for soft drug offences was first offered hard drugs in the jail. He also suffered horribly and too long with a tooth abscess with a hospital with dental facilities just across the road.
Angela - those changes are very sad. The only good thing I recall Gove doing was to allow books back into prisons.

On Friday my eldest gd is in the High Court on a charge of threatening with intent with a blade. Fingers crossed she will get a long sentance. She has been in trouble since the age of 13, its not drug related, assaulted me 3 times and got away with it, constantly assaulted her parents and siblings on so on. Each crime was worse because she was not made to take responsibility and was allowed to get away with it. Even her facebook page boasted they let me out. I reckon prison for people who harm others, children etc should be made to pay however overcrowded the prisons are and more should be put into staffing.

These (like many other) services are at breaking point due to under funding and fragmentation via privatization. Preventive work has gone out of the window.

I have a relative who is 18, but has the social skills of an 6-8 year old, due to brain injury in utero (birth parents were drug addicts). No part of the "services" take this into account or try to help him. His life is chaotic and he has regular run-ins with the criminal justice system, and is at the mercy of canny drug dealers. He is currently on probation. The PO has sent him on a weekly "decision making" course: he has no means of getting there (rural area with no buses; he has lost his driving licence, which is good!); it is at a time when he should be at work (he has a job on a temp basis and only holds this down because his parents take him back and forth and spoonfeed him what to do); he has the organisational skills of a low primary age child and will not be able to concentrate for the length of each session; he has poor temper control and there is no way he will hold it together for an hour and a half at a time. PO also insists on her appointments being at times when he is supposed to be at work.

It all feels completely hopeless.

Health and education services are under such pressure that they cannot undertake preventive or supportive work with folk like this and so they eventually finish up in the criminal justice system, which is itself underfunded - what a freaking mess. It makes me despair.

Just read your post CardiffJ and I couldn't agree more. Good post

I worked with prisoners and their families, and the prisoners often said that their wives were being punished as much, if not more, as they were, as the prisoners didn't have to cope with everyday living.
Another thing I found interesting was that a lot of prisoners said that if their first spell in jail was less than a month, they would try to avoid going back, but that after the first month you got used to it, and the prospect of more jail wasn't so horrifying.

Some observations:

I was a magistrate for over 20 years and sent plenty of people to prison but this was only as a last resort, or because the crime was "so serious" that only prison was the answer.

Most people worked up to prison having gone through the whole gamut of sentencing from conditional discharges to community penalties to suspended sentences. There were also the people who flatly refused to cooperate with probation and were therefore returned to court for resentencing, with prison being the only other option.

I also agree that plenty of people who are in custody shouldn't be there: they should be in mental hospitals or in drug/drink rehab homes but there just aren't enough beds at these places and waiting times for assessment run into months sometimes because the probation service is so over-stretched. In the meantime, they reoffend, thus making themselves prolific offenders in some cases.

There are courses for drug rehab in some prisons but the sentences have to be long enough for them to be eligible to take part, and with prisoners routinely only serving half their sentences this is often not the case.

When they come out of prison it is often difficult to find jobs or accommodation and I have known people deliberately reoffend in order to get a bed for the night and a meal in a police station.

There are so many different reasons for this whole problem and not many solutions. But obviously more community help (as with the NHS) will go a long way in helping.

Isn't privatisation just a way for corrupt government to put money onto their own pockets?

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/jan/18/single-mother-unlawfully-jailed-for-council-tax-debt-wales

This 'criminal' got 81 days

Around 100 people are imprisoned each year in England and Wales for failure to pay council tax debts.

sorry
www.theguardian.com/law/2017/jan/18/single-mother-unlawfully-jailed-for-council-tax-debt-wales

Sorry, I do not care a toss about prisoners. I only care about their victims and the people who have to look after them. I don't want them to have nice meals of their particular choice or heated cells or SKY tv or be able to take a degree for free or change sex or be pushed to the front of the queue for operations. They should be left to be bored out of their tiny minds for the whole of their sentence, locked up for most of the day with just a short time for exercise and given suitable reading matter and some paper to draw or write on. They wouldn't have any chance then to get hold of drugs or riot. I'm disgusted with the comments on here that care about their living conditions when their victims are left traumatised and lacking their possessions. Shame on you for not saving all your concern for those people.

Even if it is the single mother given 81 days for council tax debt?

They aren't working are they? They won't work without adequate investment and taking them out of private hands. As with health systems there are better models than ours out there to learn from. Why don't we? It seems that all governments put these issues on the too difficult pile.
Has anyone read A Sense of Freedom by Jimmy Boyle?

quizqueen Even if you do not care a toss about prisoners you should care about the next victims of the crimes they commit when they are released because prisons are so poor at preventing re-offending and you should care about the tax payers funding this grossly inefficient method of dealing with crime.

quizqueen I am with you on some of those points and not others.

I dont see why they need nicer living conditions than some people live in out the outside.
And dont see why they should be at the front of the queue for operations[didnt know they were].

But as McTavish the magistrate confirms, some of the prisoners shouldnt be in there. They need better mental health facilites and better drink/drug rehabs etc.

Do you agree with that bit?

McTavish Luckygirl and others speaking from experience. Thank you for adding some informed sense to the thread.

If you do not treat prisoners with a degree of humanity you will get criminals becoming even more difficult to manage. Leading to a viscous circle of increasing trouble in prisons and making any chance of rehabiltation even harder and costing us all even more money.

So you think we should show them how horrible and vindictive we are, quizqueen, so that they can feel justified in stealing, mugging, killing us? Even if they are only in prison for not paying their council tax debt.

Are they really at the front of the quesue for operations? I'm not sure I believe that.

I quite agree, Rigby, Amber Rudd is useless as home office minister.

Excuses, excuses, typical Tory. Just like the NHS, they need to invest more money in the system and stop making cuts and more cuts.

It's obvious what is needed, more prison officers.

It seems to me that before the service was privatised, there was probably more control.
Yes of course there was drugs etc, but now it's just got completely out of hand.
Prisoners now seem to have the upper hand. I pity the poor P.O's .

quizqueen - it is precisely because of the victims (and potential future victims) that the criminal justice system needs to work properly to prevent offending (via good education and social services systems) and to rehabilitate offenders. These are the things that will prevent further victims being created.

I do think we could learn from other countries, especially some countries in Europe. For instance, I read that the Nederlands is closing prisons owing to a sustained fall in the need for them. What are they doing that we could do too? Another example, I understand that Sweden has the lowest prison population per capita in Europe. Again, what could we learn? Why aren't we doing it?

The 'lock em up and throw away the key' brigade seem to overlook the huge cost of so doing, both in monetary terms and also in terms of wasted lives.

Demonstrably there are better ways of going about this.

quizqueen When I did my training as an adult literacy teacher, several of my co-students were teaching in prisons. They felt that though some people believed that the majority of British prisoners have a cushy life inside, the reality is very different.

It is felt by some that prisons which focus on punishment and deprivation will naturally discourage re-offending but there is some evidence to suggest that the opposite is the case.

There are other countries, such as Norway, where far fewer people are imprisoned and even those who have been found guilty of very serious offences are treated with dignity. Norway has the lowest recidivism rate in the world. The US, which has a very harsh approach to prisoners, has one of the highest recidivism rates.

Shame on those who say they don't give a toss about prisoners- we all have to deal with the consequences of more crime which will be the inevitable outcome of not treating people humanely, also what about prison officers, shouldn't there be enough of them to control the free for all that seems to be happening in our jails?To restrain violent offenders safely, and to know they have the support of enough members of staff to do things like routine searches of cells for contraband. At the moment, there aren't enough officers to do this.. I don't think prisons should be a holiday camp, but I do think prisoners should be given the opportunity to work, improve their levels of literacy and get help with mental health issues and employability. Locking young hyperactive men and women up for23 hours a day with not enough staff is the sure way to chaos and increasing the likelihood of reoffending.

We know of a friend whose son has just come out of prison after serving a few months and he said it was like Butlins - only better. Television in cells, meals cooked for him and laundry done. Sounded like a little holiday!

It sounds as though your friend's son has very low expectations. What about being able to go out to a pub or club with his mates, having unlimited internet access, having a car and going out for a drive, picking up a new girlfriend, having some privacy or earning some self-respect or any of the other things young men (and women) do?

Nanevon sounds like bravado!

Perhaps that particular young man did have low expectations. I think a lot of young offenders do (apart from the pie-in-the-sky get rich quick schemes that usually got them in prison in the first place).

All those things you list, daphnedill, require a job and money to finance - two things many offenders don't have, or find it hard to keep.