Almost everyone who ends up in prison does so because somewhere along the line they have been failed – by systems and by people. Some high-risk prisoners will, exceptionally, never be released into the wider community for reasons of public protection. The brutalising effect of prisons isn’t an inevitable argument for their abolition but it is an unanswerable one for reform.
Alternatives to prison have long been articulated in the UK, the US and elsewhere. There are sufficient reasons on grounds of race or sex alone. As many as 95 per cent of children (16,000) affected by maternal imprisonment in England and Wales are forced to leave their homes. Black Britons make up 3 per cent of the general population, but 12 per cent of adult prisoners and more than 25 per cent of children in custody.
The idea of the irredeemable criminal gained ground in the 1860s, intensified by emergent eugenic views and an increased emphasis on punishment. A left that finds itself agreeing, for whatever reasons, with this fundamentally right-wing perspective, even in relation to a right-wing criminal, might think again.
As recently as 2014 the UK government set out to prevent prisoners from receiving books. The judiciary intervened, seeing ‘no good reason’ to restrict access, but personal testimony suggests that the book ban, instigated by Chris Grayling, is still in place. It has a long and transatlantic history. William Joseph Snelling, who wrote The Rat-Trap, Or, Cogitations of a Convict in the House of Correction (1837), declared the prohibition of books in a Boston jail (along with letters and papers) to be ‘abominable’. In 1876, the New York Prison Association published its Catalogue and Rules for Prison Libraries. David Copperfield and Little Dorrit were thought most suitable, along with Trollope and Julia Ward Howe.A recent list of more than ten thousand books banned in Texas jails includes work by Alice Walker, John Updike, George Orwell and Joyce Carol Oates. Officials at an Ohio jail banned a biology textbook. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2010) and Race Matters by Cornel West (1993) are often outlawed.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/october … -sentencesit seems particularly abominable to me that, in the US, where the prison population are overwhelmingly african-american, that prison administrators would purposefully ban any sort of reading material that speaks to 'the black experience', or that might help to elaborate on the prisoner's social and political situation. how weirdly patrician and racist to prescribe dickens novels that speak of doomed victorian orphans-dun-good and to ban books that might bring a prisoner to greater consciousness of their own circumstances. it's almost as if ... reforming them ... isn't the actual point.
The correlation between education in prison and reduced reoffending rates is well established. But as an ideological commitment to hereditarianism, often driven by racism, increased during the second half of the century, so the belief in the value of reading – which forms part of nurture, not nature – declined.
It isn’t difficult to find former criminals who are less cautious about the value of books than academics often are. Erwin James, who served twenty years for murder, observes that ‘reading can change the way you think about life’. Reading groups where, in the words of one prisoner, ‘you don’t always know what you are supposed to think,’ bring particular benefits. What has happened to books in prisons, and to funding for academics to work long-term in prisons, when 50 per cent of prisoners either can’t read, or struggle to? Should schools and universities be doing more to teach – and reach – students such as Ben John, before they become isolated white supremacists?
Looking back from 1885 to the middle of the century, Edmund Du Cane, the chairman of the new Prison Commission, set up to bring prisons in line with a harsh new penal regime, had mockingly observed that hard, heavy labour had been forbidden ‘in order that whole attention might be devoted to literature – the establishment was a criminal university, and acquired the name of the “read-read-Reading Gaol”.’ By 1862 stone breaking had replaced reading, as Oscar Wilde recorded in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, though some learning was retained.
this short piece dovetails into the specific question of 'can reading/literature/the humanities help reform minor criminals', on the back of a recent court ruling in which a teenage white supremacist was given probation and a long reading list of Classics (controversially); but it's a good piece nonetheless.
Last edited by uziq (2021-10-12 01:33:51)
