When you are bombarded day and night by the plethora of media, it's hard to keep track, let alone make the connections which you need to make sense of the world. A Jane Hutcheon interview this morning of Baroness Jean Corston started to fire synapses in my brain and some random ideas started to come together.
Baroness Jean is a remarkable woman and is best remembered for a report she produced on Women in Prison (in the UK). This made me think of several comments I have heard in the past few weeks, and raised some questions. How come a 77 year old inmate of Long Bay Gaol can murder his 71 year old cell-mate with a Breville sandwich press? What are 70 year olds doing in prison anyway? How come our incarceration rate is rising at the same time as our crime rate is dropping? Is it true that there are more people in prison on remand than have been found guilty of a crime? How come 2.4% of our population provide 25% of the prison population?
And the big question - is our system of controlling crime working or is it time for a re-think?
It terrifies me that we are thinking of going down the US path of handing over the running of more of our prisons to private enterprise. If there is money to be made by locking people up, there is a built-in incentive to throw away the key. Surely a clever society like ours can come up with something better.
It's hard not to see the truth in the old socialist line that prisons are just one more way for the privileged white middle class to keep the plebs in their place.
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