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.
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67 Responses to “Peter Hitchens: Bring back 19th-century prisons”
Peter Collins
I think your argument against Mr Hitchens is easily demolished by Johann Hari’s interview with Tony Blair in the Indie on the 3rd May 2007 an excerpt of which is below:
The Prime Minister seemed at once mournful yet resilient. I repeated the question, the question he had skilfully avoided answering for so long “what do you intend to do about prison reform Prime Minister” Tony looked at me in a way which was both familiar yet guarded, and then a half smile crept across his studious face and with the confidence of a man finally at ease with his conviction he looked me straight in the eye and said “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”
links for 2011-07-01 « The NRB
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Peter Hitchens
The above characterisation of my views on prisons is straightforwardly false. I referred, as anyone who listens to the programme can hear, to the period 1890-1950, when the conditions described by Griffith (which my assailant quotes at length, while not troubling to quote me) had long been abolished. And I specifically said that prisons should be austere but not squalid or cruel.
It is, however, perfectly true that I do not ‘believe in ‘ rehabilitation. Why should I? Why should anyone? It is not compulsory, and if you think about it, it is not specially attractive either. The concept , involving changing an adult person’s character, is totalitarian. And in any case there is no evidence that it has ever taken place anywhere. Deterrence, however, is highly effective and can eb shown to be so.
I also support the restoration of the death penalty (in a free society, with presumption of innocence and jury trial). Once again there is a perfectly good case for doing so. You just have to think about it, instead of resorting to knee-jerk reflex and ignorant prejudice.
My arguments on all these subjects , backed with research, are set out in my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’, published by Atlantic Books in 2003. It would be much more interesting and sensible if people would actually discover what I say and think, rather than deluging me with ignorant abuse.
SimonB
Swivel-eyed rightwing loony wants to hurt people he doesn’t like. No surprises there.
Shamik Das
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miscarriage_of_justice_cases – let them all hang, eh, and if they turn out to be innocent, we can say “oooops! terribly sorry, we made a mistake…” One man wrongly hanged is one too many.
And as for your comments on rehabilitation? Beyond belief. And on your desire to bring back the 1890s, tell me, how exactly does treating prisoners like animals, as sub-humans, help? How does it help integrate them back into society? Do you believe none of them can change, ever? That everyone who’s ever been in prison should be written off? That is a very grim view of humanity indeed…