Far-right polemicist Peter Hitchens has said he'd like prisons to return to how they were in the 19th-century, and said he "doesn't believe" in rehabilitation.
With the left turning in on itself in a sea of self-flagellation and soul-searching over the merits of Johann Hari’s journalistic integrity and Ed Miliband’s stance on strikes, many stories will have slipped the net – one such is far-right firebrand Peter Hitchens’s scarcely believable views on crime and punishment, aired during a phone-in on BBC Radio Five Live on Wednesday.
He said he’d like prisons to return to how they were in the 19th-century, and said he “doesn’t believe” in rehabilitation. OK, so maybe it’s not news per se, given that it won’t have come as too big a shock, but its still quite shocking, that in 2011, someone can hold such views.
Needless to say, he’s also in favour of the death penalty.
So what would prison be like were Hitchens to have his way? Arthur George Frederick Griffiths’ “The World’s Famous Prisons: Chronicles of Newgate” notes:
“The life of a prisoner was very different from that of today’s prisons. The prisoners were treated as animals and considered less of a human because of their lawlessness.
“They were made to right the wrongs that they have committed either through ‘physical pain applied in degrading, often ferociously cruel ways, and endured mutilation, or was branded, tortured, put to death; he was mulcted in fines, deprived of liberty, or adjudged as a slave’.”
Even the infants of prisoners were degraded:
“I have lately been twice to Newgate to see after the poor prisoners who had poor little infants without clothing, or with very little and I think if you saw how small a piece of bread they are each allowed a day you would be very sorry.
“I could not help thinking, when there, what sorrow and trouble those who do wrong, and they have not the satisfaction and comfort of feeling among all their trials, that they have endeavoured to do their duty.”
Of course, life all round was grim, especially for the poor in the 19th-century, as Tristram Hunt so graphically illustrated in an article in the Mirror last October:
“Husbands were separated from wives; mothers from children.
“When Elizabeth Wyse on Christmas Day 1840 tried to spend the night with her daughter, the workhouse director dragged her from the room, locked her in the workhouse cage, and left her in solitary confinement with no coat, no bedding-straw, and no chamber pot for 24 hours.
“The following morning, she was served her fellow inmates’ cold gruel before being sent back to her soiled cage to clean it. With her hands…
“To the Victorians, the poor were deserving or unde-some to be helped, most to be condemned. This was the principle behind the workhouse – conditions had to be so appalling that the poor would put themselves through any indignity rather than seek assistance from the state.
“‘Kill me sooner than take me there,’ was what Charles Dickens’s character Betty Higden said of the workhouse. ‘Throw this pretty child under cart-horses feet and a loaded waggon, sooner than take him there. Come to us and find us all a-dying, and set a light to us all where we lie and let us all blaze away with the house into a heap of cinders sooner than move a corpse of us there!'”
Just remember who the real affront to journalism, politics and society is: not Hari, Hitchens.
67 Responses to “Peter Hitchens: Bring back 19th-century prisons”
Johann Koehler
Dear Mr. Wolfson: I agree that the distinction between rehabilitative efforts as social engineering on the one hand and deterrence-based efforts on the other is not something I’ve come across before. That said, I’ll be sure to read Mr. Hitchens’ book when I return from holiday to see if I understand the outlook.
Dear Mr. Hitchens: As regards the scientific evidence, will you respond to the overview of this that I took some time to prepare for you? I certainly hope so, especially given that it seems to form the central gravamen of Mr. Wolfson’s, yours, and my argument. As it happens, I believe it lays out quite definitively that your stance on the effectiveness of deterrence and rehabilitation is not as well-founded as you believe.
Leon Wolfson
Johann;
I’d look carefully at the way deterrence-based effects are being deployed, unsuccessfully, against unauthorised copying. The effects are a neo-prohibitionist campaign which is hindering legitimate use and users, and rapidly eroding respect for IP in general.
It’s most certainly social engineering, of a ham-handed type.
Mr Hitchens – Quite apart from anything else, I don’t buy dead tree books, or use dead tree libraries (There are medical issues involved before you poke fun again).
Peter Hitchens
Mr Wolfson declares that he doesn’t buy books or use libraries. I think in that case we can write him off as a serious participant in this discussion. A man who finds endless excuses not to read a book which he vehemntly condemns is wasting not juts my time, but his own and everyone else’s.
I shan’t engage with him any more. Huge amounts of knowledge and research are available in no other way.
I did follow the link on rehabilitation, but (and this may be due to my admittedly and regrettably poor web skills, which I always seek to improve) it seemed to lead only to a purchase page, which I will follow if necessary but do not think was the contributor’s intent. The summary didn’t give me much pause.
I am baffled as to how one could establish the effectiveness of rehabilitation until one had
a) defined it (which I haven’t seen done so far)
b) conducted a controlled experiment, in which identical groups of convicted criminal prisoners (how does one find these?) are subjected either to rehabilitation(once we have defined it)
or to its absence. And perhaps a third one is subjected to punishment . And from which other possible influences (ageing,for instance, one of the most powerful influences on the propensity to commit crimes)had been excluded.
All this is a burden on those who maintain its effectiveness. They do so not because they have any idea what it is or how it would work, but mainly because their own personal ideology requires them to reject the alternative – the concepts of retribution, punishment, deterrence or indeed full personal responsibility. This full personal responsibility, which most modern thinkers reject, is the core of the argument. They would rather deny the full humanity of the criminal (and indeed subject him to totalitarian procedures, for how could you release him until his ‘rehabilitation’was judged complete by those who defined this thing?) than punish him for wilfully doing wrong( they also, being post-Christian, tend to reject the idea of absolute wrong.
There’s a slightly sinister example of this at work in British prisons today. Persons convicted of murders which they deny are denied parole on the grounds that they are ‘in denial’ ( ghastly psychobabble phrase). Those who admit their guilt are given parole. But what if the person is genuinely innocent, and refuses to lie, which a genuinely innocent person would be likely to do? This gives me the creeps.
Oh, one otehr thing. Deterrence oeprates not only on criminals (where its effect is limited, since some criminals are habitual and cannot be detrred by anything) but on potential criminals. Its operation can be best measured by noting the large increase in criminality which takes place when it is abandoned ( as can be shown in this country in the past 60 years)
As I think the concept of ‘rehabilitation’ is too vague to be of any use, is designed for the purposes of evasion, and has never been tested in a scientific way (and is unlikely ever to be) I watch with interest my opponents’ efforts to conjure its existence out of thin air, and then claim success for it.
So far, they haven’t even done the first.
On the question of a universal and absolute ‘right to life’, from what is this derived? If it is absolute, it presumably manadates absolute non-violence at all times, pacifism, non-resistance to attack and a number of other noble but (on close examination) awkward ideas.
I very much respect absolute pacifists who are prepared to take the full consequences of such a belief. But I find that they are rare in theory and rarer still in practice.
I do not myself know why ‘Human Rights’ of any kind should be valid. I do not know what gives them their force, or why anyone should pay any attention to them. In practice they generally end up as a device for increasing the power of lawyers, as conflicts between differnet group rights are endlessly litigated.
I derive my moral code from elsewhere, from the Christian religion as summarised in the formularies of the Church of England)
But, leaving that aside (my only real point is that anybody citing ‘Human Rights’ is not playing an argument-winning trump card, any more than I am doing by citing the 39 Articles) , if an absolute ‘right to life’ means that one cannot discriminate between a heinous murder and an innocent child, what use is it?
As it happens, the ‘right to life’ has been slyly defined in most Western nations as beginning only at birth, so the massacre of tens of thousands of unborn babies, whose only crime is to be inconvenient to their parents (who knew how babies were made when they conceived them) , can be permitted. I think this is typical of these self-serving ideas. They don’t resolve the argument which is, as I said above, fundamentally about personal responsibility for one’s actions. Social Democracy and its allied thought systems tend to dislike this concept, because they wish to transfer responsibility to the allegedly benevolent state.
Deterrence is of course a social intervention, but one which returns responsibility to the individual. Modern penal policy transfers responsibilty from the individual to the state.
Leon Wolfson
No, I did not. Mr. Hitchens.
It’s clear you didn’t even skim read my post. As I said I read using an ereader since it makes it *considerably* easier for me to read than print books – or you’re being rude about medical issues, simply because you can be.
I’m absolutely serious, you’re just a clear example of what awaits if we can’t throw the Nasty Party out of power.
Johann Koehler
Dear Mr. Hitchens,
Many thanks for the response.
My apologies that you were unable to access the peer-reviewed articles I had provided in my summary for you. There is unfortunately no way around this; academic journals, to my great lament, do not make their material open-access, and I hope that this convention will change soon. Until that point, however, please refrain from claiming that you have perused the scientific literature, if you have yourself just admitted to having been denied access to it. Your argument that Mr. Wolfson lacks the authority to contribute his views on your book is the same as my argument that you lack the authority to claim you have surveyed the research on rehabilitation when you evidently have not done so.
If you had read the scientific references I provided, then you would know that, as regards your two concerns:
A) Rehabilitation has been defined, very well, a long time ago. I eschewed doing so in my overview because I was operating under the assumption that we were all familiar with what was at issue here. If you would like further reading, I refer you to this benchmark text, which should be available at any well-resourced academic library: http://bit.ly/lEy1cU
B) I’m glad you bring up the social science methodology of controlled trials. You are indeed correct that the highest standard of methodological rigour (the randomized, controlled trial) is the most valid means of determining effectiveness, and if you had read the references I provided you would know that not only one, but many such trials have been conducted. The problem of finding identical prisoners is solved by randomisation: once enough prisoners have been randomly allocated into different groups, each of which receives a different intervention (rehabilitation in one, deterrence in another, treatment as usual in another, as an example) any systematic difference between groups is eliminated. Any ensuing differences in criminal behaviour can then be attributed to the intervention alone.
I assure you, many hundreds of such trials have been conducted, evaluating the rehabilitative and deterrent effects of many different types of interventions on many different types of offenders. Yes, important variables such as age are controlled for (in the well-conducted and highly methodologically valid evaluations, which is what I’m limiting my claims to).
You are correct that deterrence operates at two levels: the specific (the criminal) and the general (potential criminals). To evaluate the effectiveness of deterrence, however, why not apply the same level of methodological rigour, namely a controlled evaluation? The data that you cite, that a large increase in criminality took place when deterrence was abandoned in this country is highly scientifically suspect: for starters, it is correlative, and not causative (as randomized, controlled trials are). Using the higher criterion of methodological rigour, deterrent policies are shown to be ineffective, and even in many cases criminogenic.
Hopefully this addresses your concerns: rehabilitation has been defined, it has been tested to the standard you would like to see, and it is proven to be more effective than deterrence-based policies.
Whether or not you still think rehabilitation is totalitarian is your choice: the scientifically established facts, however, are not subject to debate until data is provided that claims to the contrary. I wish you luck finding any.