Crime and Punishment, Part I

The Splenetic Subject of Prisons

Prisons, crime and punishment are the current topics du jour. Firstly, we have the brouhaha over privately run prisons. For some it appears that the profit motive is sufficiently nasty and tacky that the idea that a business could make money from running a prison is distasteful. This criticism reminds one of the attitude amongst the upper classes of the Georgian period where they looked down their noses at people who were earning their keep through business enterprise. Being “in trade” was a snobbish insult. Trade! How disgusting.

Worse is the emotive corollary—that someone could actually make money from someone else's suffering (that is, criminals being punished) is beyond distaste. It gets very close to trafficking in human beings—that is, to a re-emergence of slavery. As soon as the "s" word comes in to play, emotions can run high.

Since criticism such as these are sufficiently extreme to have difficulty in gaining public traction, opponents of privately run prisons are forced to retreat to arguments about the relative cost versus benefits of private prisons compared to state run prisons. So the debate, complete with specious and deceptive use of data masquerading as "facts", has been going on now for some weeks. However, those who take the negative position are being embarrassed almost daily as the failings of the NZ Corrections Department and the shambolic and squalid state of our prisons comes to light. People are starting to think pragmatically on this issue: surely privately run prisons couldn't be worse than our current mess, could they?

Of course there are those who take the high moral ground (philosophically speaking). They want to advance the idea that punishing criminals is a role that ought to be exclusively reserved for the State. No-one else can or should undertake that duty. This neatly skirts the debates over profit or not, good outcomes or not, well run prisons or not. However such philosophical arguments fail dismally in that there is no underlying ground or principle on which they can be founded. In the end, the question is always begged, “Who says punishment of crime belongs exclusively to the State?” The absolute notion of the State solely being entitled to punish criminals has no place in the modern relativistic pagan world where “man is the measure of all things, and nothing human is foreign to me.”

One of the main reasons modern society is so pathetic and fails so dismally in its penology is the fundamental and perpetual confusion over what should be done with criminals. The modern penal system is (at the same time) a regime of punishment, of rehabilitation, of correction, of reconditioning and retraining, of penitence, and of protection for the rest of society. These objectives are so diverse, so disparate and so contradictory that they constantly war against each other. This explains why such confusion exists over prisons and the prison system—and why none are satisfied with it.

No-one thinks that our modern prison system is working well. And given its mutually contradictory objectives, no-one ever will. The “punisher” complains about prisons being too soft, not sufficiently harsh, sentences being too short, and parole too readily granted. The “rehabilitator” complains about high recidivism rates, arguing that people are left in gaol's too long and are unable to re-adjust to life outside—and so on. This is why the prison system and what to “do” with criminals remains a political football—no-one has answers that can hope to meet all the contradictory objectives which our pagan society regards as equally important.

What is needed is a solid, overwhelmingly believed, principal objective of imprisonment, grounded in essential principles of justice—which must be pursued and achieved above all else. Other benefits which might accrue or result would then be collateral outcomes, but not objectives and not the point of prison. Only then will we be able to have a coherent prison system.

So, what might Jerusalem contribute to this issue? In the first place, we are going to lay aside the question of whether there ought to be prisons at all. There are Christian philosophers or thinkers who question the rectitude and wisdom of the prison system or model per se. We are going to assume that we will have prisons for some time, and that, for better or worse, they are here to stay at least for the foreseeable future.

But we do wish to insist on one point which it turns out will be crucial to any coherent approach. We must acknowledge—all parties must acknowledge—that prisons are slave camps. No, seriously. Quell the rising bile for a moment. Whatever else they are, whatever else they might be or do, prisons are inescapably and indisputably institutions of slavery. “Official” slavery to be sure, but slavery nonetheless.

Now this principle is repugnant to the modern world. Never use the “s” word. Whatever name we might give to prisons (penitentiary, correctional institution, custodial block, maximum security facilities) no-one can bring themselves to call them by their proper name. All of the names above are euphemisms. All the current names avoid the reality. Prisons remain inescapably places of enslavement—to which people are committed against their will, in which they lose their freedom, and to which they are bound. Yup, sounds pretty much like slavery.

A slave is a person who has had control over his own life and body taken away, by force. We use the term “body” deliberately, for no-one on earth can finally control the mind and spirit of another human being without chemicals. But involuntary control of one's body—how one spends one's time, uses one's labour—is what it means to be enslaved. This is what it means to be owned by another.

After all, the prison is not a voluntary institution. The State takes the criminal by force and commits him to prison against his will and for the time of his sentence controls the physical behaviour of the inmate. He is told when to rise, when to sleep, how to spend his time, what to eat, with whom to associate, etc. He is owned by the State. In principle there is no difference whatsoever with prisoners in former times being committed to slave galleys, being chained to oars, and required to row on command.

But, having said that, there is one outstanding difference: modern prisons consist of slaves who do not work. That's right. Never in the history of human race have we ever seen such a bizarre version of slavery as what the stupidity of man has brought forth in the institution of the modern prison. Convicted criminals are enslaved in every aspect, except being required to work.

To summarise, the prison system is the institution thought up by modern humanist ideology to deal with (or to) criminals. But there is no consensus or agreement on what being "dealt" with means; therefore, there is no settled societal view on what prisons are to achieve or accomplish. There is only a pot pourri of conflicting objectives--so conflicting in fact that each undermines the other. The result is confusion and mess.

The bottom line is, however, that the prison system represents the modern manifestation of slavery, which has always been part of human societies. In our modern world, criminals are enslaved, yet with a bizarre variant: for the first time in human history we have seen a civilisation embrace legally sanctioned slavery, yet not require the slaves to work. Go figure.

Of course the modern prison system did not used to be that way. For over a century, to be imprisoned in many cases meant being sentenced to hard labour. This was much more consistent with being enslaved. However, it became very clear over time that the system was failing. Firstly, there was the school of thought which argued that hard prison labour should be a form of punishment. Thus, conditions were deliberately kept very difficult. Prisoners were brutalised. Work was largely meaningless (for example, carrying large stones from one end of a yard to the other, repeatedly, day after day). Society could not sustain policies of deliberate cruelty and inhumanity to other human beings. Moreover as time passed it became very clear that such such "hard labour" brutalized and dehumanised people: they started to act according to the way they were treated.

Then, secondly, the work approach changed to one of seeking to give prisoners meaningful employment, teaching them trades and skills which they could learn on the outside. This turned the prison into more of a reformatory, less a penitentiary. The focus was less on punishment, more on rehabilitation. But this, too, could not be sustained. The economics of the model were deeply flawed. Prison work failed to keep pace with industrial and technological development. But even in its heydey, prison commerce undermined competitor private sector businesses; inefficiency became rife; feather bedding and poor quality, the norm. The model devolved fairly quickly back into meaningless labour.

So, prison slaves were no longer required to work, which is where we are today.
So, the question becomes, what is the appropriate activity for modern society's incarcerated slaves? In order to answer that question we need to return to the issue of what the principal objective of the imprisonment or enslavement of a criminal ought to be.

At this juncture Jerusalem parts ways with Athens. Jerusalem is fundamentally concerned with justice. Athens is far more concerned with retribution, at one extreme, and rehabilitation, on the other. Neither pole is intrinsically connected to or related to justice itself. This is why in New Zealand the Department of Justice is responsible for the court system; the prisons are run by the Department of Corrections. The institution of the prison and prison policies are not grounded in, nor related to justice.

We can well understand why modern pagan society has a problem with the concept of justice. In the humanist frame, where man is the ultimate reality and nothing human is foreign, that which is seen as evil can have no higher or deeper warrant than current public prejudice or preference. Moreover, distinguishing coherently between what is evil and what should be regarded as a crime is impossible. While all crimes are by definition evil, not all evils are crimes. Pagan man has no reference point to make the distinction. Modern society can rise no higher than "it is bad because we say so." Therefore, it is completely understandable that modern pagan society would downplay or ignore justice as a fundamental driver of the prison institution and prison policy. In the modern world, justice is a completely relative and plastic notion. It is only a connotation, a feeling, a hunch, a popular opinion.

But Jerusalem is different. For Jerusalem, justice is meaningful and has definitive denotation because the Living God alone is the Judge. Judgement belongs to Him. Vengeance against evil belongs to Him. Not all evils are punished in this life. Justice in this life is very important, but is limited, prescribed, and proscribed. Justice within Jerusalem is focused far more upon the victim than the criminal, because vengeance and just retribution belong to God and His jealous actions, not to man. God's justice will not be finally revealed or executed until that final Day--but none will escape His assizes. Every thought, word, and deed of every human being will be judged with infallible knowledge and terrible retribution against evil on that Day.

Therefore, in this life and prior to that Day, ensuring that the criminal gets his just desserts is not a fundamental driver of the administration of justice. But ensuring that the criminal is made to restitute those he has harmed is a proper and approriate focus and emphasis of justice in this life. If the victim is not restituted, justice has not been done. This is justice within Jerusalem.

So, now we come to the most important and fundamental question with respect to the prison system: how does the modern prison system facilitate and achieve criminals restituting victims of their crime? It simply does not. Therefore, we conclude that the modern humanist prison system is not just fundamentally flawed in a pragmatic sense, but it is prfoundly unjust. To that extent it is a wicked and evil system.

Might it be reformed into a system of justice? Yes, we believe so. Our next post will endeavour to describe how just prisons would work in a more Christian world.