Prisons as progressive punishment?

The State of Corrective Services

Prisons, by their nature and the communities they house, suffer more acutely from the factors of social exclusion that characterise the underprivileged sectors of Australian society.

Without the exacerbation of a custodial experience, these characteristics alone militate against the successful reintegration of prisoners back into the community. Any revision of punishment policy, therefore, requires more than retarding spiralling imprisonment rates.

For those who do end up in gaol, and for those employed to manage them, the prison environment requires significant redevelopment if inmates are not to leave prison more maladjusted than when they went in.

Prison staff have either worked to ameliorated the negative influences of social exclusion amongst inmates, or have contributed to the brutality of prison experience.

In New South Wales (as no doubt in other states), for instance, prison education officers have over the years had a significant influence improving prisoner literacy rates.

In so doing, they have addressed one of the simplest and yet most significant factors at work against prisoner reintegration. Prisoner education is recognised as one of the few correctional initiatives which seem to correlate with improved recidivism prospects.

In New South Wales prisons today there has been a move away from basic, egalitarian inmate programs in preference for elite cognitive therapies. This shift has been justified, it is argued, by the misguided belief that prisoners with the greatest risk of serious re-offending can be identified, and on them limited correctional resources should be concentrated.

In addition, this is again incorrectly supported by the conviction that, for these few inmates, their recidivism rates can be radically decreased through psychological intervention in gaol.

Against this, it is proposed that community corrections are cheaper and more efficient than prison rehabilitation. Having said that, for those available for corrections in custody, a more general improvement in the social environment of the prison is a simpler, cheaper and fairer way of dealing with recidivism than elite cognitive therapies.

The important ancillary benefit of this approach is that inmates and prison staff contribute to a more productive prison community. The quality of prison life then becomes as important a performance measure for the prison as recidivism, and recidivism will be improved as the prison addresses the fundamental issues of social exclusion.

The challenge is for prison management, staff and the community at large to accept that more humane rather than harsher prison conditions may be more conducive to lower re-offending and, thereby, improved community safety. This is the future for the prison in progressive punishment, rather than a problematic commitment to the deterrent effect of 'tough gaol time'.

Corrections in prison?

In 1988 I published an article entitled The Demise of Corrections. The central thesis was that penal correctionalism had failed because it was piecemeal and without the support of a well developed commitment of alternative strategies to the prison:

One would be rightly cynical of the relevance of correctionalism for criminal justice, when an examination is made of the limited, unimaginative and few semi-custodial and non-custodial alternatives which have been introduced into NSW since settlement.

The criticism is sharper in the current context of imprisonment in NSW, where correctional expectations continue to disappoint, despite a recent revival of interest in 'what works/offender management programmes.

In these days of post-just-deserts punitive conservatism, such a criticism has almost become and article of faith for punishment practice in NSW.

It is as if the significance of restorative justice and the manifold empirical failures of the prison have simply been swept aside, in favour of a vision of punishment which promotes custodial outcomes as the answer to public dissatisfaction with criminal justice.

All this is politically justified in terms of deterrence and community safety. Politicians, judges and prison administrators are frightened to talk publicly in terms of corrections, rehabilitation and reform and the legislation on sentencing sidelines their significance.

What is the taxpayer getting in return for the punishment dollar? It now costs over $160 per day to keep a prisoner in the state's gaols, half that figure going in capital costs.

Fading hopes for corrections?

Why is it corrections remains a euphemism in the popular culture of punishment in NSW? Do we continue to be bound to the single aim enunciated by Royal Commissioner Justice Nagle that inmates should not leave prison in a worse state than before they were incarcerated?

There is, however, a resonant critique of the motivation behind this new era for rehabilitation in prison. The criticism reflects the long established debate in criminology between psychological and social determinism. Let me pose a simple example.

There appears to be a significant connection between the imprisonment of parents and the eventual incarceration of their children. How can this be explained? Social determinists would propose that the criminogenic structural conditions of family life for the parent and the child remain constant, and the marginalisation they produce leads to crime and prison.

Psychological behaviourists will either blame criminal genealogies, crime as an intergenerational or genetic feature, or learning patterns within families that promote crime.

Psychological determination has taken hold in contemporary prison rehabilitation thinking. A reason for this may be that it holds out a causal connection between programmes and the reduction of recidivism. In a more cynical context, it also allows prison administrators to rationalise programme resources and to restrict programme entry on the basis of risk.

The criminogenic needs model of offender programming in prison argues for psychological intervention which addresses criminogenic thinking, needs and risk on the basis of cognitive behaviour research. Advocates of the model argue that a greater adherence to psychological justifications for rehabilitation will exclude other modes of explanation.

Even the belief that rehabilitation in risk has failed can be overcome by psychological models such as this, which explain criminal behaviour and go onto address offender risks, such as eventual re-offending.

This predictable intervention approach is said to enable targeted programme funding that can significantly reduce re-offending through programming of cognitive skills, promoting behavioural change.

Like the treatments and therapies of the 1960s that left rehabilitation in tatters, this new wave of behavioural prisoner programming may be equally problematic. For instance, when criminogenic needs programs themselves are unpacked they seem to contain little which is different from the teaching methodologies employed by prison teachers in general curricula.

Generally programme assignment is based on the principal that offenders who are at high risk of recidivism should be given priority for treatment. It is assumed that allocations of services to low risk offenders is wasteful because the latter group recidivate at rates which are too low to be affected by interventions.

What seems from the research to lack justification is risk classification based on diagnosis, of the original offending behaviour, rather than more material indicators, such as the offending history of the inmate, age, drug record and current offence.

The reliability of claims that selective allocation of cognitive behavioural programmes, based on individualised criminogenic diagnosis, will reduce recidivism is suspect. The ability to diagnose the cause of the inmates underlying criminal behaviour through psychological determinism is not sufficient to overturn more universal rights to programme access for prisoners.

If this diagnostic capacity was routinely available, and it is not, then such predictive wisdom would be more economically applied to crime prevention than correctional remedies.

Criticising the contemporary penal model for criminal justice

In recent years in NSW, political and public debate about criminal justice has moved from prison reform, through police reform and on to sentencing. Unfortunately, the analysis of sentencing has been constrained by several taken-for-granted public truths: Judges are soft on crime; tough sentencing makes for community safety; sentencing discretion needs to be constrained because it is inconsistent; lenient sentences are evidence of inconsistency; harsh imprisonment sentences are the only appropriate response to all crimes that make the community feel unsafe.

Responding to this pressure, the legislature has restricted sentencing discretion, raised sentencing ranges, introduced more factors of offence aggravation, reduced opportunities for executive release, and downplayed any punishment strategies beyond imprisonment.

This has led to more people going to prison for longer. Remand populations are at record highs. Any court disposition which might be interpreted as soft on crime is now met with the media response that prison is the only appropriate response.

As a consequence, criminal justice policy is skewed towards concerns about penal outcomes. Limited and costly prison resources are being squandered on whole classes of offenders who Justice Nagle declared as unsuited for prison. Suggestions that short-term prison sentences are ineffective now seem novel.

More than this however, everything associated with criminal sanctioning is measured against penal expectations, principal amongst these being community safety. Yet, even in this context, it is not easy to argue that rehabilitation needs to be directed towards cost-effective themes of social restoration, rather than psychological and institutional reprogramming.

With individual responsibility and appropriateness re-emerging in sentencing principles, it is not surprising that the behaviourists are back in the ascendancy when it comes to inmate programming.

By Mark Findlay posted 13 July 05

Mark Findlay is Professor of Criminal Justice at Sydney University

Next week: Custody as the challenge to corrections.

Crime and Punishment

Prisons, by their nature and the communities they house, suffer more acutely from the social exclusion that characterises the underprivileged parts of Australian society. Without the exacerbation of a custodial experience, these characteristics alone militate against the successful reintegration of prisoners back into the community.

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Winning goals: Rethinking Crime and Punishment

Extracts in this feature are adapted from I Would Rethink Crime and Punishment By...published today by the thinktank Rethinking Crime and Punishment.

I would reallocate resources within the prison service budget to give a higher priority to rehabilitation, retraining for future employment, and an improvement in literacy standards. During my own prison journey I was struck by the astoundingly high levels of illiteracy among prisoners. Tests show that about a third of all prisoners read and write at skill levels below those of 11-year-old schoolchildren.

I would pursue the idea of prisoners being able to earn extra remission as a result of achieving NVQ qualifications, computer skills and higher literacy standards.

Lord Adebowale: Chief executive of homelessness charity Turning Point

I would rethink social care and regeneration. This is not a moral argument but an economic one. By tackling poverty and social exclusion effectively we can prevent a great deal of crime. One-third of prisoners have a severe alcohol dependency, two-thirds have mental health problems, and one-third say they were in local authority care as a child. For many, prison merely serves as an example of how little value current welfare services add to their lives.

None of this is meant to excuse the crimes they have committed, but it should spur us to action. Providing the right interventions, earlier in life, will be far more cost-effective than prison, and will do far more for the victims of crime. A US study found that every dollar spent on tackling poverty saved $7 in other costs, such as criminal justice.

In the long term, providing effective social care that meets people's whole needs, including education and employment, will be more effective than any criminal justice programme.

Sir Charles Pollard: Former chief constable of Thames Valley Police, and a member of the Youth Justice Board

Let's integrate restorative justice fully into our criminal justice system. Ninety per cent of crime victims find restorative justice helps them get over what happened. Many offenders stop or reduce their criminal activity after being confronted directly with the impact of their crimes on others. And citizens who have participated become more engaged themselves with upholding standards in their local communities. The facts speak for themselves. Restorative justice is an idea whose time has come.

Eric Allison: Prisons correspondent

Imagine that you are ill. You see your GP, who tells you that you have, say, a stomach disorder and prescribes tablet X. A month later, your condition has worsened and you return to the surgery. The doctor tells you to give the medicine time, increases the dose and sends you on your way. A further month goes by, and now you are in agony. Another appointment. You are in the waiting room talking to another patient, who says he has gout and that the tablets the doctor gave him do not appear to be working. To your astonishment, you find that he too is on tablet X. You take a spot survey of those in the waiting room; they are all on the same medicine and not a soul feels better for it.

Surely, it's a case for the General Medical Council to consider striking this clearly dangerous doctor from the register.

An unlikely scenario? Yes, of course. Except that it's a script that is written hundreds of thousands of times a year within the penal area of our criminal justice system. Everybody who gets sent to prison - man, woman or child - receives basically the same treatment... a treatment that has proved time and time again not to work. There are 75,000 people in prison and 75,000 different reasons why they are there. Yet they are all on tablet X.

Is there a doctor in the house?

Nick Ross: Broadcaster

Let justice be done and revenge be had, but let us stop kidding ourselves that punishment axiomatically cuts crime. Given the vast investment in prisons and other punishments, it is extraordinary how little scientifically credible research has been done on its effectiveness in reducing wrongdoing.

Perhaps - from a purely crime reduction perspective - some people should be locked up longer and others should be told to go home. I want to find out, and this is too important for us to go on relying on convention, gut feeling or political inclination.

Meanwhile, our focus on punishment distracts us from the thousands of more immediate, and often cheaper, steps we can take to redesign products, policies and services to make the prospect of detection more certain and, better still, to make crime less tempting and less easy to commit.

Lord Hurd: Former home secretary

I would make a determined effort to stop the rise in prison sentences. Judges and magistrates send more people to prison for longer, not because there is more crime but because they feel that public opinion demands it. So our prisons are overcrowded as never before.

In these conditions, the chances of reforming a prisoner are slim. More than half reoffend within two years of release. Prison has not "worked" for them or for the community. The two keys to progress are: provide those who pass sentences with convincing alternatives to imprisonment, and do everything possible to help prisoners on release to find a job and a home so that they do not immediately drift back into crime.

Dame Anita Roddick: Founder of The Body Shop

Let's put an end to the myth that prison works. Politicians must stop looking to America for tough ways of dealing with crime.

I'd feel safer knowing that crime prevention measures are in place, alienated communities are socially included, and that mentally ill and drug-dependent offenders are treated, not punished. It's a crime too that so many vulnerable women are in jail. We waste so much human potential if we are unimaginative when responding to crime.

Erwin James: Writes a column, Life Outside, for the Guardian

Let's first of all take the responsibility of punishment, including the prison system, away from the main political arena. The only political involvement in my model would be from an all-party home affairs committee that would engage with and oversee what I would ensure was a fully independent body responsible both for sentencing policy and prison conditions.

This body - let's call it the Prisons and Sentencing Council (made up, perhaps, of teachers, social workers, doctors, beat police officers, probation officers and academics) - would base its policy decisions on information gathered by its dedicated teams of specialist researchers. The courts would carry out sentencing according to these policies, and the court appearance would be the time for the person in the dock to be subjected to public opprobrium and private shame.

The arrival at prison for those sentenced to a period of incarceration would mark the beginning of the rebuilding process. Prisons would be establishments that would encourage personal development and responsibility through therapeutic counselling, academic education and the pursuance of creative activities.

The prison journey, however long it might be, would be constructive and geared to lead to the eventual successful reintegration of the imprisoned person back into the community.

Ann Widdecombe: MP for Maidstone and the Weald, and a former prisons minister

If prison is to work it must be purposeful and prisoners must spend their days in education and work. Offending behaviour courses must be properly linked with post-release supervision.

At the moment, we take people who are poorly educated and come from unstructured lifestyles, lock them up in idleness, and then open up the prison gates expecting them to leadindustrious, law-abiding lives. It is cloud cuckoo land.

I would like to see a government plan for introducing full working days into every prison by 2012.

Juliet Lyon: Director of the Prison Reform Trust

Why not reduce the reach and aspirations of the criminal justice system and put prison back where it belongs - as a place of absolute last resort.

A tragic, unintended consequence of improving prison, before reserving it for serious and violent offenders only, has been to turn it into an under-resourced, capacious social service struggling to dispense drug treatment, low-level mental healthcare and basic education.

I would call on other public services to shoulder their shirked responsibilities and invest more in preventive work and support for vulnerable families. Above all, I would look to an authoritative, confident government to reduce fear of crime and create a justice system based on proportionality and fairness, not on vengeance and populism.

Tony Adams: Former Arsenal and England footballer; founder of the Sporting Chance Clinic

I would do more to help people with drink or drug problems. I spent time in prison through a drink-related incident. The long and short of it was that I was completely out of my head - a simple case of a man having problems with alcohol.

I spent three months in prison and, astonishingly, received no education in the areas of alcohol and drug abuse. Inside prison I was with people with similar problems to mine; they'd been out of their heads on mixtures of alcohol, cocaine, crack or whatever - but ultimately they had committed crimes that, in the clear light of day, they would not have done. If you give people education on the drugs they have been using and also introduce them to a high level of physical and calming exercise there is a dramatic fall in the number that reoffend.

Jonathan Myerson: Writes a Society Guardian column about his experiences as a Labour councillor in Lambeth, south London

What's the problem with youth justice? Young offenders never have to say sorry. Yes, referral panels are a step in the right direction. But after his first offence, the average teenage-on-teenage mugger sits and listens to his brief make tortuous, often legalistic excuses on his behalf, but never has to face up to it and say: "I did it. I'm sorry. It was wrong."

Meanwhile, months pass between crime and trial, and by the time sentence is announced the new offender has usually already reoffended and is lost to any hope of rehabilitation.

So my proposal is simple. Henceforth, the mugging victim will have a choice: he can make a statement and proceed through the courts, or the offender can be brought before him, in a controlled setting, and the offender has to look him in the eye and say sorry. Genuinely. And if he does, that's the end of it. No further action.

Mary Riddell: Columnist

Take children of 14 and under out of a criminal justice process designed for adults. Child courts would address welfare issues and place those found guilty of grave offences, such as killing, in local authority custody, close to home.

Older children, up to 18, would also be removed from the care of the prison service and the young offender institutions that produce a grievous toll of unhappiness and suicide.

Treating children more humanely would send a powerful message to a system inclined, across the board, to focus too much on punishment and too little on rehabilitating the vulnerable of all ages.

· Extracts in this feature are adapted from I Would Rethink Crime and Punishment By... published today by the thinktank Rethinking Crime and Punishment. Copies are available free. Details:

By Johnathan Aitken posted 20 January 2004

Rethinking Crime & Punishment

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Crime and Punishment

Prison education/psych programs - effectiveness

Mark Findlay argues that the present psychological approach to prison programs is increasing the likelihood of re-offending and the threat to community safety.

In the early days of his third term as Premier of NSW, Bob Carr challenged his government to move away from current law and order politics and come up with a more progressive approach to punishment. Central to this would be a reconsideration of the place of the prison in criminal justice.

Prisons, by their nature and the communities they house, suffer more acutely from the social exclusion that characterises the underprivileged parts of Australian society. Without the exacerbation of a custodial experience, these characteristics alone militate against the successful reintegration of prisoners back into the community.

A revised punishment policy therefore requires more than retarding spiralling imprisonment rates. For those who do end up in gaol, and for those employed to manage them, the prison environment requires significant redevelopment, if inmates are not to leave prison more maladjusted than when they went in.

Violent, inhuman, unsafe, confrontational and exploitative prison settings will distort social and moral messages that are consistent with crime prevention.

Prison staff have either worked to ameliorate the negative influences of social exclusion amongst inmates, or in a regrettable minority of instances have contributed to the brutality of prison experience.

In NSW, prison education officers have had a significant influence in improving prisoner literacy rates over the years.

In so doing, they have addressed one of the simplest and yet most significant factors at work against prisoner reintegration.

Prisoner education is recognised as one of the few correctional initiatives which seem to correlate with improved recidivism prospects.

Unfortunately, however, many cost-effective prison programs, like remedial reading, have recently suffered from a deprivation of resources and policy commitment, while expensive and selective cognitive behavioral initiatives have been favored by Australian prison administrations.

Psychological determinism has taken hold in contemporary prison rehabilitation thinking.

A reason for this may be that it holds out a causal connection between prison programs and the reduction of recidivism. More cynically, it also allows prison administrators to rationalise program resources and restrict program entry on the basis of inmate risk.

This psychological - or criminogenic needs model - of offender programming in prison argues for psychological intervention, which addresses criminogenic thinking, needs and risk on the basis of cognitive behaviour research.

Advocates of the model argue that a greater adherence to psychological justifications for rehabilitation will exclude other modes of explanation, such as social exclusion. They hold that, even the belief that rehabilitation in prison has failed can be overcome by psychological models such as this, which explain criminal behaviour and go on to address offender risks such as eventual re-offending.

Like the treatments and therapies of the 1960s that left rehabilitation in prison in taters, this new wave of behaviourist prisoner programming may be equally problematic.

The empirical research tends to suggest that the justification, that criminogenic needs approaches will reduce the re-offending of the most risky and the most dangerous, cannot be substantiated.

The ability to diagnose the cause of the inmates underlying criminal behaviour through psychological determinism is not sufficient to overturn more universal rights to program access for prisoners. And if this diagnostic capacity was routinely available, and it is not, then such predictive wisdom would be more economically applied to crime prevention than correctional remedies..

There are more successful and less discriminating approaches to corrections in prison. Victoria, for instance, is investing substantially in a best practice strategy to reduce re-offending.

Recidivism rates alone, as a performance measure of the effectiveness of offender programs, are too narrow an evaluation of rehabilitation practice in prison.

More realistic is an integrated approach, focusing on the climate of program delivery, program cost effectiveness, program integrity and treatment outcomes. Life quality issues are needed as a vital measure of the relevance of correctional programs in prison.

The Home Office as the administrator of English prisons is now required to meet modest targets in the improvement of prison life and the reduction of re-offending following release.

This has necessitated the development of a new context for corrections; one directed to the improvement in the quality of prison life and an investment in 'what works' with offenders.

A recent study to evaluate the quality of life in five English prisons from the perspective of staff and offenders found staff and prisoners agree on 'what matters' in assessing prison quality.

The study suggested there is a broad consensus about values - which include respect, fairness, decency and order; that prison life quality resembles the expectation for civil society; and that safety is a critical concern.

"To me", said one prisoner respondent, reflecting on his aspirations for prison treatment, "being treated with humanity means being provided adequate, reasonably comfortable and clean accommodation and being acknowledged as a person with individual needs, desires, concerns, strengths and weaknesses."

Prison staff would find it hard to argue against this. It is, however, the bigotry of public opinion about prisoners 'getting it too easy' which tends to endorse further social exclusion in prison. Paradoxically, this is what increases the likelihood of re-offending and the associated threat to community safety.

Mark Findlay is Professor of Criminal Justice at Sydney University. This article has been drawn from his chapter in the Evatt Foundation's new book, The State of the States 2004, launched at Sydney's Vibe Hotel.

By Workers Online posted December 6 04

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Professor of criminology at Victoria University, Philip Stenning, recently visited the Napier Public Library to view the Robson Collection, which is a special collection on criminal, restorative and social justice based on the philosophy of "developing communities not prisons".

NSW Greens lose bid to stop jail boss getting more power
Australia/Cuba?: The greens failed today in a bid to quash the NSW Corrective Services Commissioner's power to classify prison inmates as a "special risk" to national security?

Justice Denied In NSW Corrective Services
There used to be a (VJ) or Visiting Justice who would go into the prison and judge any claim or accusation that was made by any prisoner or prison guard. If it were found that a prisoner had offended then punishment was metered out.

Carr Govt dramatic increases in the NSW prisoner pop...
Following the opening of the 500 bed Kempsey prison, and a new 200-bed prison for women at Windsor the Council of Social Service of NSW (NCOSS) and community organisations specialising in the rehabilitation of prisoners, have expressed concern....

PRISONERS' STRIKE
That the forms of restorative justice and mentoring that are so successful in reducing social unrest be adopted immediately, running parallel to imprisonment until the public feels safe without prisons.

Restorative Justice and the Law
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."-- Marilyn vos Savant.

Restorative Justice Practices
Restorative Justice Practices of Native American, First Nation and Other Indigenous People of North America. This is part one in a series of articles about restorative justice practices of Native American, First Nation and other indigenous people of North America. The series is not intended to be all-inclusive, but rather a broad thematic overview. A related eForum article, "The Wet'suwet'en Unlocking Aboriginal Justice Program: Restorative Practices in British Columbia, Canada," can be read at:

Government justice not personal justice
Mr Brett Collins of Justice Action said, "Victims should be looked after properly by implementing restorative justice measures and victims should be compensated for their pain and suffering. " However prisoners are entitled to serve their sentences in peace and privacy as well."

Sentencing: Violent crime and practical outcomes
In addition introducing restorative justice programs giving the offender a chance to interact with the offended person if they wish and visa-versa. People are not "dogmatic" therefore should be given a second chance opposed to Life means Life!

The Long Trail to Apology
Native America: All manner of unusual things can happen in Washington in an election year, but few seem so refreshing as a proposed official apology from the federal government to American Indians - the first ever - for the "violence, maltreatment and neglect" inflicted upon the tribes for centuries.

A TOTAL ABUSE OF POWER
We the prisoners at the High Risk Management Unit at Goulburn Correctional Centre would like to ask you for help in receiving equal treatment and opportunities as other prisoners throughout the system. As we are told that we are not in a segregation unit but we are treated as though we are in one.

Sentencing reform
Beyond Bars is making a submission (with a focus on alternatives to custody) to the sentencing council. "We should consider the alternatives which take into account victims' interests and involvement. Restorative justice. Also mentoring as a positive form of social support, coupled up to restorative justice (as the punishment) to satisfy those who demand it."