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”
Leon Wolfson
Ed;
Bluntly? Yes. There are a LOT of books by out and out crackpots, hard-sold by the very tactics Hitchens uses here. Peer-reviewed science is a wonderful filter. Alternatively, open discussion and debate – but NOT hiding the secrets of the universe away in a book.
I had an identical come on – “he already knows he doesn’t like it, without trying it” for a Birther book today from an American friend. That’s the impression I’m getting.
Peter Hitchens
Mr Wolfson has now proved definitively that he does not know how to conduct a civilised argument with an opponent (and is apparently unaware of the existence of libraries where books can be obtained without charge, or for a small reservation fee which I will happily reimburse for him if he is really so short of money). The reasons for declining to read ‘Birther’ books are quite plain. Their main contention has been shown to be false, beyond reasonable doubt. Mr Wolfson, by contrast, has nothing but his acquired prejudices, received opinions and off-the-peg Guardian-reader’s opinions to sustain his certianty that I am wrong and he has no need to read my book. he is also, I would guess, afraid of finding out that his world-view is based on falsehoods. Many intelligent people are, and that is why they get angry with those who point it out to them.
Peter Hitchens
Mr ‘Citizen’ asks :’How can you create a free society if a member of that society can take your life ‘legitimately’ in circumstances other than self defence?
I see no contradiction. A free society is (amongst other things) one in which the individual is free from interference imn his life unless he violates a known and freely-agreed code of laws, enforced by a limited government through known and limited punishments.
If officers of that state’s government, acting under laws freely arrived at, fine offenders, that does not show want of respect for private property. If they imprison offenders, that does not show want of respect for liberty. And if they execute heinous murderers, that does not show want of respect for life. And in no case does the appliaction of known laws, freely arrived it, threaten liberty in itself.
Or if it does, I do not know how, and perhaps Mr ‘Citizen’ can explain it to me?
On the contrary, I should have thought that a society in which life is sternly protected by law is much more likely to be orderly( a major prerequisite for freedom) than one in which life is cheap, a matter of a few years in prison, sometimes less than might be served for a theft.
I should have thought that any serious criminal code (Montesquieu provides good arguments for this in ‘The Spirit of the Laws’, which are practical, leaving aside the moral ones) needs to reserve a special penalty for murder.
As for self-defence, the demonstrable deterrent effects of an effective death penalty (no such thing, by the way, exists in the USA, where convicted murderers are far more likely to die of old age than be executed, while the courts argue about rndless appeals, and where many ‘death penalty’ states seldom if ever actually execute anyone) are a form of self-defence. They are comparable to the existence of standing armed forces, which deter an attack but which, if challeged, will lawfully kill and destroy the enemy. The actual hanging of a murderer is comparable to the actual use of armed forces in self defence.
Peter Hitchens
Oh, and I note Mr Wolfson has yet to share with us his view on the NATO bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis. I should very much like to know. It is important.
Johann Koehler
“I find it telling that, thus far, no-one has taken up the challenge of disproving the statistics quoted in your book.”
Although the statistics in the *book* are not addressed, the scientific claims made in the BBC Radio 5 interview, and the comments section above, are addressed in Comment 22.
Please, Ed’s Talking Balls, and Mr. Hitchens, I recommend you both take a look. As a scholar of rehabilitation myself, it would be remiss of me not to bring the scientific literature on this issue to your attention. It would also be remiss of you to make the claims you do without seeing it yourself.