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”
Ed's Talking Balls
Shamik,
You present a classic red herring. Yes, there will be miscarriages of justice in any criminal justice system, because no system is perfect. One man wrongly hanged is indeed one too many. But surely one man imprisoned, for any length of time, is also one too many. That innocent men are found guilty on occasion is not an argument against punishment, by whatever method, albeit the death penalty is the most extreme.
And I have to add that I don’t understand the purpose of your excursus halfway through your article. Tristram Hunt’s musings on the unpleasantness of 19th century life in general don’t seem to have anything to do with what Hitchen said about prisons, unless he also said that he would like society in general to go back in time. Forgive me, but I’ve not heard the interview.
Leon Wolfson
“The concept, involving changing an adult person’s character, is totalitarian.”
Deterrence is just as much social engineering as rehabilitation. Moreover, you’re ensuring that prisons will /remain/ expensive ways of generating crime – limiting even further the ability of criminals sent to prison to recover means more will be *back* in prison.
More, the death penalty has been misapplied to innocent people in America, and the same would happen here. Killing someone innocent is murder, no matter how you dress it up, and that’s what you’re calling for, afaik.
Finally, if you have a good argument, have it published as a peer-reviewed paper, not a book. Anyone can publish books these days.
Ed – You can release someone who has been falsely imprisoned. You can’t raise the dead.
Peter Hitchens
Mr Wolfson’s response verges on the churlish. If it’s so easy to write a book and get it published by a mainstream publisher, let him try for himself and see. Peer-review is in any case no guarantee of repute, as any scientist could tell him, and I suspect the response is mainly a way of saying that, even if I have researched the subject carefully, and know what I’m talking about, the writer will never listen to any conservative argument because he is inacpable of acknowledging that a conservative might be right about anything. This is an admission I should have thought he’d want to keep quiet, at least in respectable company.
The argument about the unjustly executed is dealt with at length in my book, but is only available to persons with open minds. Others will just see a red mist of unreasoning, slef-righteous Guardian-readers’ fury.
Our prisons do not generate or regenerate crime. This ignorant boilerplate is standard left-wing conventional wisdom. But, like most conventional wisdom, it isn’t true. Criminals are usually not sent to prison in this country(with the exception of murderers) unless and until they are already hardened and habitual offenders. Many first-time prisoners already have 15 convictions recorded against them( not to mention the large number of unrecorded brushes with the law which will have preceded their formal record).
Deterrence is unlike (and betetr than) ‘rehabilitation’ in two crucial ways. First, it works and can be shown to work. Second, it does not seek to alter the mind or character of the criminal, merely to make him afraid of committing the crime he wants to commit. This can hardly be called ‘social engineering’, unless the term is widened so far that it has no meaning beyond ‘policy designed to change society which I personally do not like’.
It is perfectly true that the dead cannot be brought back to life. I am not sure in what way it is possible to restore 15 or 20 years of someone’s life, when it has been spent in prison. Personally, I think I’d rather be unjustly executed than unjustly locked up for two decades, even if the last six monthsd of those two decades had been illuminated by the hope of release. People don’t think about this much, and so are given to trite staments).
The main thing is to avoid wrongful conviction as much as possible. But no other policy resulting in the deaths of innocents, from on-demand abortion to ridiculously easy dirving tests, to the early release of convicted murders(who kill again with surprising frequency)is abandoned because of this danger.
Leon Wolfson
Mr. Hitchens, you’re assuming I have not published a book – I have, an educational one in media. (And no, this isn’t my real name – one of my current employers is a Tory who has already fired staff who have expressed labour sympathies). You’re also assuming I have much use for pretty much ANY politician – there are perhaps half a dozen in this country I don’t dislike, and two of those are my relatives (libdems, who can’t understand why I won’t discuss politics with them any more).
Regardless, good arguments in sociology, like any science, are not published in books, they are published in peer-reviewed journals – they are vetted for the kind of junk statistics which you have thrown around in your post, about the way prison does not raise recidivism rates, and about recidivism rates for murderers.
I view – and this is certainly not limited to the sort of blind lashing out against anyone not conservative which you have exhibited again there – any call for “read my book about the one true way” as a money grab.
I also think your argument that deterrence is somehow different in it’s essential nature from rehabilitation is laughable. Deterrence is also social engineering, and it is not targeted on criminals, but often used on the wider population to suppress what would otherwise be perfectly legitimate behaviour (photography, as one example).
Not to mention the fact that the poster-child for “deterrence”, the “war on drugs”, is a massive grinder of people’s lives, well-being and freedoms across the world, but one on which no politicians in this Country are willing to consider changing a spot on: as one example which I strongly advocate: jailing minor drug offenders is NOT effective, compared to treatment.
Oh…and there are no “safeguards” which have been proven to work in stopping the judicial murder of the innocent, even many Republicans in America and American states are turning away from it, as a result.
Peter Hitchens
I didn’t assume that Mr Wolfson hasn’t had a book published, though he doesn’t say if it was by a mainstream publisher. I can’t imagine he found it that easy. Had he been a conservative, he would have found it a good deal harder.
If anyone wishes to challenge any of the statistics published in ‘Brief History’, I should be interested to hear what they have to say. Nobody has, in the 8 years since it was published. It has received hostile reviews, but in the form of personal abuse, of the kind we see on this thread, and which I feel I can safely dismiss as the work of people who do not wish to think and would rather be childishly rude about those who try to make them do so.
This is a common deficiency among the modern left, who know they are right and so despise anyone who doesn’t share their world view. I know this well, having been on the left myself for many years. That’s why I’m not afraid of them, or impressed by them.
Those who abused me somehow failed to tkae the opportunity to challenge the figures with which I backed my arguments. I wonder why?
And they are unlikely to, since they are all carefully culled from official publications, and are correct.
Mr Wolfson’s dismissal (sight unseen) of my statistics as ‘junk’ is again typical of theclosed mind. He may wish to make a fetish out of ‘peer review’, and he’s welcome to do so. But it is not in fact a necessary condition for a factual account (nor, necessarily, a sufficient condition).
Here are some statistics he might wish to ponder (not that anyone in the Criminal Justice business would dream of disputing what I say about how hard it is to get ito a British prison, or indeed to stay there once you’ve arrived , since they all know it’s true.Only people such as Mr Wolfson have to cast doubts on it, because that is much preferable to re-examining their easy, fashionable prejudices. I am sorry for them, in a way. But it is tiresome to debate with people so heavily armoured against fact and logic):
‘96,710 criminals sentenced last year for more serious “indictable” offences had 15 or more previous crimes against their name. They included violent muggers, burglars and drug dealers.
‘Of those, only 36 per cent – around 34,600 offenders – were given immediate custody.’
This account uses figures which were issued a few weeks ago ago by the Ministry of Justice.