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”
Peter Hitchens
Mr Wolfson is also a victim of mistaken conventional wisdom on the subject of the alleged ‘war on drugs’, awar(if the word is appropriate) which was called off in this country in 1972. It’s certainly not *my* ‘poster-child for deterrence’. I am currently writing another (non-peer-reviewed) book about how there is no such war. He says :’jailing minor drug offenders is NOT effective, compared to treatment’ I have no idea how he would know this, since minor drug offenders are, alas, no longer jailed in this country. In what way is ‘treatment’ which generally consists of maintaining drug addicts with taxpayer-funded supplies of legal versions of their favourite drug, ‘effective?’.
As for his assertion that ‘there are no “safeguards” which have been proven to work in stopping the judicial murder of the innocent’, I should have thought that the use of DNA in forensics has ruled out many possible miscarriages. The presumption of innocence, unanimous juries of mature and experienced citizens, plus a free press andf the possibility of appeal and reprieve also seem to em to be pretty effective. None of these, of course, operate under the form of execution favoured (or rather condoned and unexamined by) by left-wing liberals, the form which has arisen in this country since the abolition of a proper death penalty – namely the shooting of suspects by armed police.
If he really believes that all policies must be perfect before they can be adopted, then I am afraid he will find that he can do nothing. In which case he doesn’t really have any business commenting on practical politics at all. I wonder, incidentally, what his view was of the NATO intervention in Serbia during the Kosovo affair?
I do not recommend and never have recommended the USA, a wholly different society form ours, as an example. I go to this country’s own past for examples of a properly efefctive criminal justice system, as he would know if he troubled to read my book. But he won’t. Like a little child who won’t eat an unfamiliar dish, he already knows he doesn’t like it, without trying it.
Leon Wolfson
No, I am not going to pay up simply to read yet another unfounded treatise on how everything disagreeing with the author is wrong. You’re using the typical argument tactics of “buy my book or you’re lame” which marks the worst kind of those.
Real sociological arguments are not buried away in books, they’re in scientific papers and debated on the public stage. That you can argue that the government’s totally unscientific line on drugs (which New Labour entirely shared) is somehow NOT part of the war on drugs is laughable, and a further example of how you’re simply out to make a profit on books.
I note you didn’t touch on the photography issue, either, and it’s just one of many examples of how prohibitionist policy works. Want to talk about how that’s shaping up for the internet as well, in a “war” which can’t be won, and will do massive amounts of further damage to the younger generation’s respect for copyright, without significant medium/long term effect on unauthorised copying?
Dave Citizen
Peter – “there is a perfectly good case” for restoring the death penalty.
There is a case that seems perfectly good to someone for pretty much anything. However, you also mention “in a free society”, creating something close to an oxymoron. How can you create a free society if a member of that society can take your life ‘legitimately’ in circumstances other than self defence? This seems to me to be fundamentally flawed.
Johann Koehler
Dear Mr. Hitchens,
You make two claims: one is empirical (deterrence is better than rehabilitation) and the other is normative (rehabilitation is totalitarian).
Without having read your book (although I intend to do so imminently), these two claims have in fact been addressed at length in criminological research. Find more here: http://bit.ly/iFZuiN
Ed's Talking Balls
Peter Hitchens,
Having said at the beginning of this thread that I have, in the past, found your articles to be reactionary, I have to say that I have been very impressed by your even-handed responses here.
I find it telling that, thus far, no-one has taken up the challenge of disproving the statistics quoted in your book.
Lastly, Leon, do you really believe that ‘good arguments in sociology, like any science, are not published in books, they are published in peer-reviewed journals’? Good arguments can be found in a variety of places.