As I write this, our Prime Minister is pledging to teach the rioters a lesson by locking them up. Unfortunately, our prisons are schools of crime. There the rioters will get together and teach one another how to do it better next time and get away with it.

This week, yet another report, this time on Wandsworth clink,  detailed the disgusting state into which it has been allowed to lapse: under-staffed; structural disrepair,; insanitary; pestilential,  violent. And yet the Daily mail will continue to peddle the idea that our prisons are like holiday camps. Prisoners even have televisions!

Wandsworth is not exceptional. It typifies our prison estate and the government is planning to build yet more such abominations.

350 years ago, John Howard visited all the prisons of England and Wales and compared them unfavourably with prisons elsewhere in Europe. Some of his proposals for reform have been  enacted and have led to improvements. Men and women are now housed separately. There is now less incidence of TB and typhus. Prisons are no longer alcohol-ridden but are instead drug-ridden.

But fundamentally there has been no change in 350 years

What is prison for?

Is it simply for punishment, society’s opportunity to exact  cruel retribution for crime committed?

If that is the purpose, then the tougher the regime, the better. Our prisons  certainly offer a horrible experience, from the humiliating strip-search on entry, the over-crowded and noisy and insanitary conditions, the aimless existence, the constant threat of violence from other prisoners, the many indignities

If the purpose is to “to teach’em a lesson”, prison signally fails. Twenty five per cent of prisoners earn another custodial sentence within a year of release.

And yet prison is very costly at £50,000 per prisoner per year, which is much the same as the annual fee for that other residential institution, Eton College.

If prisoners were sent to Eton, rather than Wandsworth, or the Scrubs, at least they would have the opportunity of some education, which is much needed. Fifty-seven per cent of prisoners, on entry, have a literacy level below that of a typical 11-year old.

If prison is not to continue to be an appalling waste of tax-payers  money, its  structure, furnishing, staffing and humane management should be such as to lift the typically ill-educated, coarse-grained individual into a new and markedly different environment: pleasant, humane, orderly, with rich opportunity for education and training and worthwhile remunerated employment.

For this to come about, there would have to be a radical change in the minds of the public and the politicians, a change which has proved impossible in the past 350 years.

The problem is that there are no more votes in advocating prison reform than in proposing the reintroduction of the dog licence. On the contrary, if the likes of Nigel Farage were to propose reintroducing public hangings, He would have plenty of brainless Brits applauding him and queueing up for tickets.

 

A rare Tory with a brain is Kenneth Clarke. If we are bound to have Tory MPs,  then let’s have more of his sort. He is no longer an MP, but sits in the lords.

During his  tenure as Justice Minister, under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, he maintained that prison should not be only a punishment; it should be used as an opportunity to educate and rehabilitate, in order to reduce the scandalous rate of recidivism. At around 85,000, the UK has the biggest prison population in Europe and the highest rate of relapses into crime after release.  This makes our prisons, which are badly maintained, over-crowded, under-staffed,  insanitary, drug-ridden and violent, a grotesque squandering of money.  This was pointed out by Kenneth Clarke and so he was sacked.  Although the most popular Tory MP with the public, he was not liked by his fellow MPs. They resented his superior intellect and found his progressive ideas distasteful.

Many criminals come from a background of poverty, poor housing, families marked by addiction to alcohol, or drugs, or both, lack of qualifications and unemployability. Family pathology is one of the sources of crime that should be examined and targeted for major corrective investment.

Prison should be used to remove offenders from that sort of life and demonstrate  that there is an altogether better life-style and equip them to live it.

Now we have Britain’s Trump clones (Johnson, Farage, Truss, Braverman and  badanoch going for the demagogic, populist line that will go down well with the millions of readers of the daily Mail, Sun  and Express, who readily swallow baloney, proposals that appeal to the un-thinking and ill-informed and are not based on any evidence.

Starmer needs to consider the root-causes of riotous behaviour and the bigoted, ignorant attitudes which accompany it. His prison cure-all is bound to fail.