Many years ago, for my Great Lives BBC radio programme, we recorded Jeremy Paxman’s championing of the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was an excellent choice and Mr Paxman persuasively laid out that great campaigner’s achievements in the reform of child-labour legislation and the lunacy laws. ‘As we look back baffled,’ I asked him, ‘by how civilised Victorians could even contemplate chaining the mentally ill to walls, or sending small boys up chimneys, what do you think future ages will lay, with comparable perplexity and horror, to our own age’s account?’ Paxman said he’d need notice of the question.
I don’t. With no shadow of doubt it will be our prisons. We’re committing too many people for too long to too brutal confinement in too crowded prisons. Our descendants will be aghast at the blind eye we turn to the abuse, the numbers and the futility. Nor can it be claimed we knew no better and must be judged by the prevailing attitudes of our day. For years Norway has run small prisons with an emphasis on treatment and training, proximity to the prisoner’s family and day release for many. It costs much more per prisoner but they have far fewer prisoners – 54 per 100,000 of the population – and one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world. England and Wales has one of the highest rates of re-offending and three times as many inmates per 100,000 as Norway: the largest prison population in western Europe. It’s shaming.
Our descendants will be aghast at the blind eye we turn to the abuse, the numbers and the futility
I rehearse these facts now – and not for the first time in The Spectator – because at least for the next few months we have a Justice Secretary keen to make small start in edging us towards a more humane approach.
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