Speech by Baroness Vivien Stern to the Irish Penal Reform Trust Annual General Meeting, Dublin, 22 April 2004
It is an enormous pleasure to be here today. You will be pleased to know that this morning I was in the House of Lords and one of the questions was about the courage and enlightenment of the Irish Government in banning smoking in public places and why could the English Government not do the same.
This is my first visit to this very famous university, although last year I was also in a historic place in Ireland – Maynooth – where I had the privilege of addressing the Catholic Prison Chaplains of the world.
I noted there that choosing to work with prisons and prisoners, choosing that part of social injustice to concentrate on, is a hard choice. They came from all over the world, these prison Chaplains. Some are working in conditions of total poverty, distress and brutalisation, raising small amounts of money to bring in necessities.
I still think of a priest in Zambia who visited the prison near him every week and took to each prisoner ‘a little packet of salt and a piece of Fairy soap, each bar being cut into five pieces.’ I have this picture of someone in his house saying “right, it’s prison visiting day, let’s start cutting up the soap.”
That is penal reform. It may be different from the work of the Irish Penal Reform Trust but at its heart it is the same because it tells the prisoners someone cares about them.
It is an honour to be here again speaking this time today at your AGM. You too in the Irish Penal Reform Trust have chosen this difficult area to work in. You are one of those organisations scattered around the world like bright stars that raise ones spirits.
Every time I get your excellent newsletter I see the quote from Martin Luther King on the top: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
It works. Every time I see it I think ‘have I said enough lately about what is going on around me?’
I have had a very fortunate life. I have met many penal reformers from all parts of the world. Heroic, powerful people. I think of the woman who chaired the local branch of the League of Muslim Women in a town in northern Nigeria. They went once a month to the prison to bring food and clothing to the indigent prisoners. Why do you help prisoners? I asked her. What sort of a question is that? She replied. They need us.
I think of the women in the Dominican Republic who formed a Patronato, a sort of visiting committee, for their local prison. I met them last year on a very hot day in a very overcrowded prison as they stood in the midst of a swirling mass of about 4500 prisoners and their wives and girlfriends who were in for the day. This was a Wednesday. The whole family were allowed in on a Sunday.
I don’t think fear entered their heads. They were with small groups of prisoners collecting little notes from them with their details and a request for help to get a judge to sign their release papers. Those with money can get their release papers signed. Those without need to rely on charity and influence which is what these women had. Without a signature prisoners could stay in prison for months after their due release date.
I think of the man in charge of prisons in a Central Asian republic. He read a chapter of a book, badly translated into Russian, about the international human rights instruments about imprisonment. You know Article 10:
“All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.”
And he suddenly understood what imprisonment was meant to be. Not an expression of society at its cruellest driving people further into the half-world of criminal identity and pariah status which was his experience until then in the gulag of Central Asia, but an expression of a democratic society’s best values: treating well those people who have broken society’s norms and done harm to others and working to get them to rejoin society as full members.
That revelation didn’t do him much good in the end. He lost his job, but not before he had won some huge and heroic battles and transformed forever the nature of imprisonment in his country.
For you, too, here in Ireland and certainly for us in England there are still huge and heroic battles to be fought. Not so basic in terms of needing a fifth of a bar of Fairy soap, getting released on the due date or reforming the gulag, but still deep questions touching the heart of what sort of society we want to live in and what its values should be.
So thank you for inviting me to this famous place. The tradition of former alumni hangs over me. Samuel Beckett was one. He was here in 1923 and wrote a play called Endgame where two characters live in dustbins. I recollect when I hear that the English prison governor who wrote to a national newspaper 20 years ago saying that he didn’t join the prison service to run a ‘penal dustbin’ – a place full of mentally ill, poverty stricken people who needed help not punishment (it is worse now than when he wrote by many thousands).
I think of Bishop Berkeley who was here in 1685 who said (sort of) ‘if you can’t see it it isn’t there.’ That is very relevant to prisons – the idea that once prisoners are locked away behind the walls, out of sight, they no longer exist, the problem’s gone. In fact they do exist; the problem is not gone; and they keep many of their rights of citizenship, as has been shown in the recent judgements of both the Supreme Court of Canada and the European Court of Human Rights saying that prisoners should normally retain the right to vote.
And of course Oscar Wilde whose Ballad of Reading Gaol says it all:
Every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
So here are some themes. Penal dustbins; who is in prison; prisoners as citizens; maiming our brothers. What should be on the minds of penal reformers in our corner of Europe?
Let’s start at the extreme.
I want to tell you about something that I have to read several times to believe. This is Arkansas. It’s about a man called Charles Singleton. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic, 44 years old. 25 years ago he was given a death sentence for murdering a grocery store assistant called Mary Lou York. Since he was mentally ill and the Supreme Court did not permit the execution of mentally ill people he stayed on death row and his condition worsened.
Then they had an idea. He was forcibly given powerful drugs to alleviate the symptoms. His lawyer appealed against the forcible medication. On February 10 2003 the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held that the State of Arkansas could continue to medicate Mr. Singleton – knowing that the idea was that he become sane enough to be executed. In January this year he was given a lethal injection in the state’s death chamber.
You will be glad to know that in December the Ambassadors of both Italy and Ireland urged the Governor to reprieve Mr. Singleton – to no avail.
The US is a society that has decided it wants punishment. A society where the institutions of punishment get the money when other institutions are rationed; where expenditure on punishment rather than on social welfare is an openly made choice, a policy decision. And we all know that in the 90’s in the US prison expenditure boomed, higher education plateaued and nearly 44 million Americans still haven’t got health insurance, which means no access to affordable healthcare. But every American has access to a prison place if a court so decides.
This is a society with the highest imprisonment rate in the world – 701 per 100,000. 10.4% of the country’s entire black male population between the ages of 25 and 29 are in prison in comparison to 1.2 % of white men in the same age group.
Is that what we want? How much punishment do we want in the societies we live in?
Here is another story, this one is a bit closer to home. This is the story of Joseph Scholes. His story does not take long to tell. He had an unhappy childhood. It is said that he was severely sexually abused as a child by a member of his father’s family. As a teenager he suffered depression and began to do injuries to himself.
In November 2001 he tried to kill himself by taking an overdose and jumping to the ground from an upstairs window. Ambulance staff came to take him to hospital. He attacked one of them. After the hospital had dealt with him he was charged and convicted for the attack on the ambulance worker. He became more disturbed and was then put into a children’s home to be looked after by the local authority.
One night he went out from the children’s home with some other children and participated in stealing three mobile phones from people on the street. He was arrested and charged. Whilst waiting for the trial he slashed his face thirty times with a knife. The walls of the room were covered in blood and had to be repainted.
When the case came to trial on 15 March 2002 the court was told that he had serious mental problems. The judge gave him a two-year prison sentence (the severity of the sentence perhaps a response to a Prime Ministerial furore about street crime) and asked the proper authorities to take note of Joseph’s condition.
The Youth Justice Board which allocates convicted children in England were asked to place him in a local authority secure unit with social services. But they did not. They sent him to a youth prison called Stoke Heath. On his ninth day in Stoke Heath prison Joseph, aged 16 years and one month, hanged himself with a sheet from the bars of his cell. Dead aged 16 years. The inquest has just started.
Joseph is a victim of the same philosophy (more punishment in society). In England and Wales we are having a lot more punishment against a background of falling crime rates. Sentencing has become harsher right across the spectrum. The number of women in prison is up from 1500 in 1993 to 4500 in 2003. The number of young people in prison, under 21, is up by 50% since 1992.
The chair of the Youth Justice Board Professor Rod Morgan said in a lecture last December ‘a growing proportion of offenders is becoming mired deeper and deeper within the criminal justice system for doing less and less.’ Our imprisonment rate is 142 per 100,000, as of this week, compared with an EU average of 102. England and Wales has 5,445 life sentence prisoners, more than the rest of the European Union put together, and it seems that we are less reluctant than we used to be to impose those punishing penalties on people whom life has already punished severely in other ways.
There is the treatment of Mrs Amos, a woman who is undertaking methadone treatment for her drug addiction. She is also a mother whose daughter Jackie will not go to school. She was sent to prison because Jackie would not go to school. This was around the time that her mother died and the daughters were very upset. It was trumpeted around the country that this was very successful. Jackie was now going to school and punishment works, it seems. Then last month it emerged that Mrs Amos was in prison again. Jackie would still not go to school. Now Jackie has been thrown out of school – suspended. So that has solved that problem.
I can find no example of a jurisdiction anywhere in the world that convicts mothers of the criminal offence of not sending their children to school and then sends them to prison (the place of most severe denunciation of punishment, our equivalent of the death penalty).
These prison sentences remind me of the case of Adele Price which the UK lost at the European Court of Human Rights. Adele Price was a thalidomide victim with no arms or legs who was sent to prison for seven days for contempt of court in 1995. In spite of the best efforts of prison staff she had a terrible time. In finding against the British Government for subjecting someone to inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment one of the judges in the case said: ‘The applicant’s disabilities are not hidden or easily overlooked. It requires no special qualification, only a minimum amount of ordinary human empathy to appreciate her situation.’
‘Ordinary human empathy’ does not sit easily with the punishing society that we have become. And it will become more so because of a policy that has been set in place in England called ‘closing the justice gap’. Closing the justice gap has a meaning that I doubt anyone who works in public service, thinks about social issues or just lives a normal life and reads the newspapers could divine. Most people would probably imagine that it referred to a situation where some people had more access to something worthwhile than others. You can just about imagine it meaning that rich people have access to lawyers and legal advice and poor people do not and that is a gap that should be closed.
I challenge anyone to say that it is immediately obvious what closing the justice gap means in Government-speak. It actually means more people must be prosecuted. I discovered a document called the National Policing Plan for 2004 – 2007 which sets out the Home Secretary’s key priorities for policing. There is a target. The Government requires that 1.2 million more offences are brought to justice by 2005 – 06. These are not particular offences or serious ones, only offences. They could be shoplifting or dropping litter. Two new prisons are due to open soon – with such policies they will soon be filled and overcrowded.
We have a crisis of prison numbers and overcrowding. The Government set up an inquiry chaired by a very successful businessman. The Inquiry noted that too many people were being sent to prison and recommended a complete and absolute reorganisation of the criminal justice organisations. They were all to be amalgamated; no more prisons; no more probation; just seamless offender management, and all these services are to be thrown open to competition. The consultation on these ideas was very short. The proposals were published at about 12 noon and that afternoon at 3.30 p.m. the Government accepted them.
That is England.
Let’s look at Scotland where the picture is slightly different. Scotland is different from England because there is a Minister for Justice and a department for justice. In England there is no Ministry of Justice and many of these matters are dealt with by the Ministry of the Interior, so prisons and criminal justice are under the same roof as immigration, terrorism prevention and policing.
Also Scotland has stuck firmly to a model of juvenile justice that is in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, that is a system which follows all international human rights law in putting the interests of the child first in measures that deal with delinquent and troubled children. This is unlike in England where a government paper recently suggested that children who have committed crimes could not strictly be considered to be children within the meaning of the Convention.
But some things are similar. There is a high use of imprisonment – 137 per 100,000. There is overcrowding, with prisons 110% occupied and two new prisons about to be built, one at least of which is to be private.
You may have heard that the privatisation of the prison escorts and other privatisations on 1 April have caused the Justice Minister considerable difficulty. On the first day of the new contract the private contractor made a mistake and released a young man who had been convicted of murder and was serving a life sentence. He has not yet been found. The furore should constitute a warning to any politician thinking of privatising escort services.
To deal with the crisis they did not find a millionaire businessman; they decided to ask the people. They issued a consultation pack with lots of facts and figures about criminal justice and the use of prison and the effectiveness or otherwise of punishment. And they organised a host of discussion meetings and they are getting answers, sensible answers about local responses to crime and what people really want.
I do not want to say much about Ireland except to congratulate you on raising the age of criminal responsibility to 12, and on having the lowest percentage of women in prison in the European Union including the new countries. I note that in some way you are experiencing the same problems of having decided to go for more punishment. Your prison population is rising. Maybe you too are planning two new prisons, which seems to be the trend.
I want to end with some reflections. We have become more punishing. All of us. Nearly every country in the EU is showing an increased use of punishment. We have become less forgiving. These are moral questions – questions of values, also questions of practicality and outcomes in that sense. And we have become less wise.