Prison may not work for them, but it works for us

Crooks who are in prison are not burgling your house, says Theodore Dalrymple. They themselves understand that perfectly clearly: it is only sentimental mugs who don’t

When Mr Clarke went recently to Leeds Prison, prior to announcing in a speech that prison wasn’t working and that therefore fewer people ought to be locked up, he was reported to have been much affected by the story of a man he met there who had been imprisoned for six weeks for having failed to pay child support. The man told him that the brief sentence had ruined his life, that he had lost his job because of it and that when he came out of prison he would have to go on the dole.

Whether Mr Clarke asked himself some rather obvious questions about the case is unknown. How many times had the man refused to pay the support before he was imprisoned? How typical of the prison population was he? Is refusal to pay the upkeep of one’s children really a minor matter? (John Stuart Mill, in an infrequently cited passage in On Liberty, thought that such a man could rightly be put to forced labour, a proposal that would turn modern England into a vast gulag if implemented.) Of course it is possible that an injustice had been done this man, because injustices are sometimes done: but there was nothing in the report of the encounter to allow anyone, and certainly not Mr Clarke, to draw such a conclusion.

Whatever his private thoughts, the Justice Secretary was quite obviously appealing to the sentimentality of the British intelligentsia and its long-held wish that the punishment imposed by the criminal justice system should be therapeutic rather than merely protective and deterrent. According to this view, if punishment fails to reform the criminal, then it is not only worthless but primitive and cruel.