Charities, prisons and profit
Last night I spoke to the all party parliamentary group on the community and voluntary sector on whether charities should “beware of taking on the coercive role of the state”. This is shorthand for whether charities should be involved in the management of prisons, something which a handful of voluntary organisations are now doing by bidding in consortiums alongside private security companies to run new prisons.
Charities already work in prisons. Charities are subcontracted to provide a host of services such as resettlement support within prison walls, without having to be involved in the management of these institutions. Problems arise, however, when charities seek to involve themselves in the management of prisons alongside private partners.
There are a number of arguments to be made against charities running prisons, some of which are in an academic paper I published last year on the (failed) bid to run prisons by one charity, Nacro, in conjunction with G4S. Market reform in criminal justice has seen large service providers undercut in competition with private companies, which has essentially driven these charities into private consortiums in order to secure their market share. In general, this development of charities moving into prison management opens up very interesting questions for the voluntary sector as a whole and I’m currently exploring this as part of a Masters dissertation I’m due to complete in the autumn.
For now, I just want to briefly raise the argument of principle against involving charities, and indeed private companies, in the delivery of punishment. This is in light of the KPMG report I blogged about at the weekend.
If it is the responsibility of the state to arrest, try and sentence, then it should also be a responsibility of the state to deal directly with the most serious consequence of that process – in other words, punishment. A number of purposes can be claimed for imprisonment but it is first and foremost a punishment. Punishing individuals is something the state should carry out with great care and responsibility. Blurring this responsibility by outsourcing it to the private or voluntary sectors is very dangerous.
The inappropriateness of bringing the market and the profit motive to justice should be as clear to us with prison as it is in the case of the police, or the courts: no one (yet!) talks about wanting to see Serco police constables or G4S judges.
Why is it dangerous? The lesson from the United States is that private sector providers and rapidly expanding prison systems go hand in hand: after all, it is the very nature of for-profit organisations to seek further profits for their shareholders, and this is done by expanding market share. For a prison system that can only mean more prisons, which in turn means more people in prison, more punishment, more suffering, but not necessarily because there is more crime in our wider society.
In other words, charities joining private consortiums risk being fig leaves for an industry that seeks expansion by its very nature.
In California, for example, early attempts by Governor Schwarzenegger to reduce the state’s bloated prison population – where more is spent on the prison system than on higher education – were defeated by the lobbying of an unholy alliance between the private companies running the prisons and the correctional officers’ union which owned shares in those companies. California’s addiction to incarceration has now helped bankrupt the state and the federal courts have ordered it to reduce their prison population on human rights grounds.
In another case in the US, it was found that two Pennsylvanian judges were being bribed by private companies running juvenile jails to fill their prison places. This meant that children as young as 13 were sent to prison for ‘offences’ such as creating a web page to satirise a senior school teacher.
Bidding to run new prisons means expansion of the prison system. Expansion means more people, not less people, in prison. You can count on one hand the number of people working in criminal justice charities who honestly think that is a good idea.
Filed under: prison, probation, the howard league, voluntary sector | 2 Comments
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I’m a relative newcomer to thinking about these issues, so forgive me if I come across as naive: your argument seems to be that prisons are a necessary evil in dealing with social and personal failure and involving the private sector causes this activity to expand.
A sort of systems thinking approach to this might conclude that the public sector should only run those services that are required because of the failure of other sectors. We only need an army because of the failure of foreign policy and trade; we only need social services because of the failure of family and community networks to support the vulnerable; we only need a health service because people get ill. Private sector involvement in these areas is going to increase the very things we want less of – illness, community breakdown, war.
I can’t work out, however, how this transfers to the “third” sector: don’t some third sector organisations want their expansion as well? And those that don’t expand will be swallowed up by those that do? How can we safeguard against that happening?
Martin, I suppose my argument is indeed that prison is a necessary evil. But it can also be an unnecessary evil. The purpose and limits of imprisonment should be clearly defined.
On the third sector, there are indeed organisations that want expansion and which merge to grow (as Catch22, one of the charities involved in prison management, did – being formerly two charities, Rainer and Crime Concern). But I would argue this is because of the exigencies of the market environment they find themselves in. This is fundamentally driven by the presence of the private sector.
The opposing argument to mine would be “what matters is what works”, or “the end justifies the means”. Who cares who delivers imprisonment as long as we see a “reduction in reoffending”.
There are a number of possible objections to this ostensibly pragmatic argument. The reality is that prisons are not and never can be primarily about rehabilitation. The one unarguable purpose of prison is that of punishment. Prison as an environment is fundamentally hostile to rehabilitation. It is why organisations like the Howard League oppose the expansion of imprisonment.
Rehabilitation can happen on the fringes of prison systems but works best in the community, where the pressures that lead to offending lie. It is the fundamental misconception that prison can make people ‘better’ that leads to expanding the prison system in good faith and talk of market reform and ‘payment by results’.
In many other countries this view would be looked on in disbelief. In Norway and Finland, for example, prison is simply seen as punishment. People in the prison system won’t be forgotten about, help will be offered, but there is no pretence that imprisonment can make people ‘better’. Rather, the effort is made to ensure people simply don’t become ‘worse’. This clearsighted view results in the notably low prison populations in these countries.
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