The State of Prisons
The State of Prisons
The State of Prisons
PRISONS—200 YEARS ON
THE STATE OF THE
PRISONS—200 YEARS ON
vi
FIGURES AND TABLES
FIGURE
5.1 The Breda Remand Prison 106
TABLES
1.1 Average daily prison population, England and Wales 15
1.2 Prisoners per 100,000 population on 1 September 1988 16
2.1 Selected characteristics of convicted persons in Indian
prisons on 31 December 1980 35
5.1 Number of prisoners per 100,000 population on
1 February 1988 91
5.2 Complaints made by prisoners at Breda Remand Prison 115
7.1 Use of various sanctions 1857–1988 131
7.2 Numbers of sentenced prisoners received and average
prison population 1970–88 131
vii
THE CONTRIBUTORS
ix
THE CONTRIBUTORS
x
INTRODUCTION
Penal reform and prison realities
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
Between 1773 and his death at Kherson in the Ukraine in 1790, John
Howard travelled, mostly on horseback, at least eighty thousand
kilometres, and probably a great deal further, as a self-appointed
inspector of prisons. While much of the journeying was in Britain
and Ireland, his half-dozen ventures abroad took him across much of
continental Europe. His method was simple and direct. He visited, at
considerable risk to his health, prisoners at their place of
confinement. Not for Howard the prison tour which, avoiding the
darker recesses, steered clear of the conditions endured by all those
confined. Howard’s accounts received such widespread attention at
the time and are still read two hundred years after his death because
he so precisely ‘set down matter of fact’. His general purpose was to
humanize prison conditions and to provide prisoners with
opportunities for personal reformation. He became keenly aware that
there was much to be learned from practice overseas but his method
remained essentially descriptive, allowing his meticulously detailed
reports to speak for themselves. This volume is published as a tribute
to the genius and humanity (borrowing Edmund Burke’s words) of
what remains the most exhaustive enquiry into prison conditions in
1
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
2
PENAL REFORM AND PRISON REALITIES
3
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
justice process as a whole. The need for a wider focus had been
signalled five years earlier when the merger of the Howard
Association and the Prison Reform League resulted in the
establishment of the Howard League for Penal Reform. Prisons, it
was being insisted, should not be regarded in isolation from the
wider picture. To do so was to invite disappointment if not disaster.
Before pursuing this theme, attention should be directed at the other
issue arising from Brockway’s declaration, the abolitionist stance,
which eschews efforts to improve life within prisons in favour of
seeking to be entirely rid of the prison system. Later abolitionists,
most notably Thomas Mathiesen, have argued that only ‘negative’
reforms (changes that may reduce the debit side of the prison’s
legitimacy but add nothing to the credit side) be encouraged. By
contrast, ‘positive’ reforms (changes that improve the system so that
it works more effectively) should be resisted (Mathiesen 1984). The
abolitionist stand does provide a warning beacon against which penal
policies, such as prison building programmes, might be assessed. Less
radical than the abolitionist, but perhaps more realistic, the
reductionist seeks a minimalist prison system (which it might be
argued England, with a rate of 28 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants,
was not far from at the time of Brockway’s article) within which
reasonably decent standards might be maintained.
4
PENAL REFORM AND PRISON REALITIES
In September 1988, for the first time, Britain led the Council of Europe
table with rates for England and Wales and for Scotland of 97 and 99
per 100,000 respectively (Council of Europe 1988). The profound
consequences of escalating numbers of this kind reach across the
country; an ever-widening circle of people is touched by, if not directly
caught up within, the prison system. No predictable relationship exists
between prison population and the level of recorded crime, and
disproportionately large prison populations scar the landscape of any
state with pretensions to liberal values. Furthermore, expanding prison
populations have crippling consequences for prison regimes. Pressure
of numbers impinges on every facet of the prison system, and in some
institutions has resulted in overcrowded conditions that would not
have been tolerated a century earlier. Not least has been the impact
upon staff, often reduced to a ware-housing role in conditions of acute
stress.
Building new prisons is often presented in terms of reform. John
Howard’s proposals for a national penitentiary, R.A.Butler’s building
programme announced in his 1959 white paper, Penal Practice in a
Changing Society, and the contemporary notion of the ‘new
generation prison’ have each, in their own time, promised a new
dawn. In England and Wales, France and the United States huge
prison building programmes were underway during the 1980s. A
fairly modest plan in England, announced in 1980, had by 1989 been
expanded to 25,000 new places, an increase, at a cost of £1,000 m.,
of almost 60 per cent in total capacity by the mid-1990s. At first
there was support for this construction from some liberal quarters,
encouraged by the government’s commitment to ‘eliminate’
overcrowding. However, the vehement opposition to prison building
by penal reform groups appears to have been vindicated in the light
of a worsening of overcrowding and the further deterioration of
regimes. While in France there were signs of a reassessment of the
building programme (which was reduced in the late 1980s from
15,000 to 13,000 new places) the expansion in the United States has
continued unabated. Between 1978 and 1985 some 165,000 new
prison places were created and extensive additions are planned for
the remainder of the century. There is the danger that new prison
space may prompt additions to the prison population. While such
Parkinsonian notion has an attractive simplicity it has so far eluded
empirical verification (see Blumstein, Cohen and Gooding, 1983, for
the refutation of one such claim), it is clear that under certain
5
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
6
PENAL REFORM AND PRISON REALITIES
7
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
8
PENAL REFORM AND PRISON REALITIES
9
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
10
PENAL REFORM AND PRISON REALITIES
NOTES
1 Personal communication from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States
Department of Justice, September 1989.
2 Curiously, two recent accounts of the Barlinnie Special Unit make no
mention of Murray. See Coyle (1987) and Whatmore (1987) in A.E.
Bottoms and R.Light (eds) Problems of Long-Term Imprisonment,
Aldershot: Gower, but see also Jimmy Boyle (1977) A Sense of Freedom,
London: Pan.
REFERENCES
Blumstein, A., Cohen, J. and Gooding, W. (1983) ‘The influence of capacity on
prison population: a critical review of some recent evidence’, Crime and
Delinquency 29: 1–51.
Council of Europe (1988) Prison Information Bulletin 12, Strasbourg: Council
of Europe.
Downes, D. (1988) Contrasts in Tolerancet Post-war Penal Policy in The
Netherlands and England and Wales, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Feest, J. (1988) Reducing the Prison Population: Lessons from the West
German Experience?, London: National Association for the Care and
Resettlement of Offenders.
Gottfredson, D. (1987) ‘The problem of crowding: a system out of control’, in
S.D.Gottfredson and S.McConville, America’s Correctional Crisis, New
York: Greenwood Press.
Home Office (1989) H.M.Young Offenders Institution and Remand Centre,
Feltham, Report by H.M. Chief Inspector of Prisons, London: HMSO.
House of Commons (1910) Debates: 5th Series, Vol. 19, London, columns
1353–4.
Howard, J. (1929) The State of the Prisons, London: J.M.Dent.
Jenkins, M. (1987) ‘Control problems in dispersals’, in A.E.Bottoms and
R.Light (eds) Problems of Long-Term Imprisonment, Aldershot: Gower,
261–80.
King, R.D. and McDermott, K. (1989) ‘British prisons 1970–1987, the ever-
deepening crisis’, British Journal of Criminology 29: 107–28.
Marin, B. (1983) Inside Justice: A Comparative Analysis of Practices and
Procedures for the Determination of Offences Against Discipline, London:
Associated University Press.
Mathiesen, T. (1984) The Politics of Abolition, Oxford: Martin Robertson.
Parent, D. (1988) Structuring Criminal Sentences, The Evolution of Minnesota’s
Sentencing Guidelines, Stoneham, Massachusetts: Butterworths Legal
Publishers.
Priestley, P. (1988) Jail Journeys, London: Routledge: 175.
11
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
12
Chapter One
I
John Howard visited Maidstone Prison twice. By the time of his first
visit in 1779, there had been a county gaol in the town for over two
centuries but although the building he visited was only thirty-three years
old he was very critical of the facilities it provided. The original prison,
inconveniently situated in the High Street, was small, overcrowded,
without an exercise yard and incapable of expansion. Yet the ‘new’
prison which Howard visited was equally poor. The small, mean
courtyards meant a lack of light or air and despite the use of a sail
ventilator to remedy the poor air circulation, Howard foresaw further
problems.
Without great attention to cleanliness and the separation of the sick,
he warned, there was a great danger of gaol fever. The ‘awful,
contagious disorder’ struck in 1783 and killed twenty prisoners and a
carpenter who was working in the gaol. Despite remedial work, which
Howard acknowledged on a second visit in 1786, the prison was clearly
still inadequate.
Finally, in 1806, the West Kent justices conceded that the prison
would have to be completely rebuilt. Daniel Alexander, the architect of
Dartmoor Prison, was appointed and it was decided that the new
building should be constructed on the lines recommended by Howard:
individual sleeping cells for prisoners, with day-rooms, courtyards and
offices: a strict separation of different classes of prisoner and careful
attention to problems of water supply, sewerage and ventilation. The
architect, having toured a number of prisons, reported to the justices: ‘In
the gaol I have endeavoured to adopt, after much pains and meditation,
the good parts of every gaol I have visited, preferring, I own, the
13
DICK WHITFIELD
II
Probably the most overworked word in any description of the British
prison system over the last decade or more has been ‘crisis’. A crisis
of inmate unrest, with recurrent rooftop protests or rioting; a staff
crisis, with the Prison Officers’ Union forcing thousands of prisoners
to be held in police cells; above all, a numbers crisis, with successive
Home Secretaries announcing, at various times, that the breaking
point of the system would be reached when the prison population
passed the 40,000, or the 44,000, or the 50,000 mark. Throughout
this time, prison staff and managers passed the various ‘crisis’ totals,
got on with the task, absorbed everyone sent to them by the courts
and, somehow, despite a crumbling prison estate, avoided total
chaos.
The reason for this inexorable rise in numbers lies in the use of
imprisonment by British courts both before and after trial. In simple
numbers the annual average prison population has grown as shown in
Table 1.1. Within these figures there have been peaks as high as 51,000,
necessitating the short-term use of military camps to contain the new
army of prisoners. The proportion of those on remand, that is, being
held prior to trial or sentence, was 14.5 per cent in 1979 but in 1988
had grown to 23 per cent, with the average waiting time for trial at the
Crown Court also increasing.
Some of those held on remand will be found not guilty and a
significant proportion do not receive custodial sentences when their
case is finally heard—points not lost on the government, which is
investing in additional bail hostels, special bail information schemes
run by the probation service and, more controversially, pilot schemes
making use of electronic ‘tagging’ equipment; these are all ways, it is
14
MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
Sources: Home Office (1987) Prison Statistics, England and Wales, London: HMSO
Home Office (1990) Statistical Bulletin 12/90, London: HMSO
15
DICK WHITFIELD
For over a hundred years, penal policy in this country has appeared
to focus on custody. If a fine is not enough, custody is said to be the
only adequate penalty. Other orders are described as non-custodial
penalties and assessed as alternatives to custody. All this reinforces
custody in a central position. Why do we do this? I hope one of the
outcomes of the debate will be to move the focus of penal policy
away from custody. Let us think rather of a twin track approach, in
which custody is reserved for those who commit serious offences. It
should not be the final sanction to which all persistent criminals
progress, however minor their offences. It will be a long haul, but we
want to make out of date the notion that the only punishment that
works is behind bars.
(The Home Secretary, quoted in NACRO Annual Report,
November 1988)
16
MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
The cost, in both human and financial terms, has been high. The
prisons budget of £775 million in 1988 was set to rise by 42 per cent
to £1,140 million in 1989, to cover the cost of expanding the prison
building programme, emergency measures on overcrowding and the
costs of keeping prisoners in police cells. It is a rate of growth no other
public service could match. In human terms, the results of Britain’s
reliance on custody are soberly recorded in the annual reports of the
Chief Inspector of Prisons. His report for 1988 concluded that ‘in
prison after prison men were still having to exist in conditions which
offend against any standard of decency’, and he remarked, ‘Properly
fitting clean clothes and regular baths or showers are not luxuries but
they remained out of reach for many inmates in 1988’ (Home Office
1989b).
On training prisons such as Maidstone he found, generally, that most
establishments were struggling to provide a basic level of regime
activities. He thought the quality of life for such prisoners was generally
reasonable in that there was ‘no deliberate neglect, no conscious
inhumanity and no wilful omissions. The defects that existed in regimes
resulted generally from staff shortages, concentration on other
priorities, lack of good management or, at worst, lack of concern’
(Home Office 1989b).
The response by government has—primarily—been to embark on a
massive prison building programme, despite hopes of making the Home
Secretary’s ‘twin-track’ approach more of a reality. The building
programme, the largest undertaken this century, provides for the
construction of 26 new prisons between 1983 and 1995, at a total cost
of £870 million at current prices. Together with a programme of
expansion and refurbishment at existing prisons there will be an
additional capacity of 21,000 places. In terms of relieving over-
crowding and dealing with the decay of older prisons, new and
refurbished buildings clearly have something to offer but the sheer scale
and cost of the proposals (an average capital cost per place of £69,000
and thereafter £13,000 per prisoner per year to run) has drawn much
critical comment.
This, then, is the backcloth against which Maidstone prison needs to
be considered. Within the broad overall picture, built up from the 129
Prison Department establishments in England and Wales, Maidstone
occupies a distinctive and significant place. Adult prisons (for those
aged 21 or over) are divided into ‘local’ prisons, which receive people
from the courts, whether on remand or at the start of a sentence (and
17
DICK WHITFIELD
III
The first impression of any visitor to Maidstone prison must surely
be one of confusion. The five and a half hectare site contains an
astonishing jumble of over fifty separate buildings, ranging from the
solid stonework of the 1819 prison to Victorian brickwork and a
bewildering variety of modern additions, including the kitchens.
There are four main residential blocks, or ‘wings’ with single cell
accommodation; Medway, which takes 171 men, Kent (166), Weald
(99) and Thanet (102). There is also a Segregation Unit, used both
for punishment and to isolate men for their own protection or for
other reasons; a hospital unit, and a hostel from which eleven men
can work in the town during the day, returning to the prison each
night. The prison’s capacity, or certified normal accommodation
(CNA), is 550.
In some ways, however, Maidstone is several small prisons within
one perimeter, for in addition to being a training prison it has two
special functions. The first, in Thanet wing, is to act as one of three
Vulnerable Prisoner Units in the country. This is a national resource
and prisoners are sent here who staff believe would be at risk of
violence (because of their offence) in a normal prison setting, or whose
fear of violence has led them, themselves, to request such a transfer.
Many will have committed sexual offences that other prisoners find
abhorrent; some will have been informers who helped the police in the
hope of obtaining a shorter sentence and still others may have built up
debts inside prison that they cannot repay. It means Thanet wing has
to be a ‘sterile’ area, with staff at Maidstone always conscious of the
need to keep its occupants separate from the rest of the prison or—
when contact is inevitable— well controlled. At the time of my visit
about half the men had been convicted of heterosexual offences,
18
MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
mostly rape; about a quarter for offences against children and about
a quarter were the ‘grasses’ or informers. Thanet wing attracts
additional staff to Maidstone Prison, especially for the Psychology
Department, of which more will be said later. It ought to be able to
offer more psychological and psychiatric help to the men who inhabit
its strange, grey world; more group work as well as individual help is
acknowledged as being required by the staff, including the Probation
Officer, who have a special responsibility for it, for these are men for
whom the risk of reconviction is often very high. Thanet wing,
however, has as its primary purpose to keep its inmates from physical
harm; the good work that is undoubtedly done there with individuals
is almost a bonus.
All men at Maidstone are long sentence prisoners, serving more
than four years, and it is at the top end of the scale, with life sentence
prisoners, that Maidstone performs its second specialist task.
Maidstone is one of a number of designated prisons able to take ‘lifers’
and it can provide up to 100 places for them, although there were only
80 at the time of my visit. Most are concentrated on Medway wing,
but not all, and there is no sense of a special regime so far as they are
concerned. The growing number of life sentence prisoners has been a
considerable problem for the prison service for some years now. Life
imprisonment is the mandatory sentence for murder but it is also the
maximum sentence for a number of other offences, including
manslaughter, armed robbery, wounding with intent, arson, rape,
kidnapping, and causing an explosion. In 1957 there were just 140
lifers in prison; thirty years later, in 1987 the number had grown to
over 2,200, of whom about one in five had received their life sentence
for an offence other than murder.
The life sentence is indeterminate and although the average length
of time served is just over ten years, many men stay in prison for
much longer periods. Maidstone Prison contains one man who has
already served 33 years and staff seemed torn between two beliefs;
one, that the risk he posed (of further offences against children)
meant that further incarceration was inevitable, the other that his
extraordinarily long period in custody meant he would be unable to
survive outside the prison walls, anyway. Not all life sentence
prisoners follow the same ‘career path’ through prison but most
spend three to four years in two initial centres, then progress to
training prisons and—possibly—open prisons before a final release
date is in sight. By the time they arrive at Maidstone, therefore, most
19
DICK WHITFIELD
The weekend routine varies, with no work to occupy the day and
with extended exercise periods available to those who wish to use
them. Exercise is, in fact, well provided for, with an indoor
swimming pool, a gymnasium, a sports area for football (with teams
from outside the prison involved in both football and weightlifting),
and like most long-term prisons, Maidstone has its share of those
who keep fanatically fit.
Work plays a large part as the centrepiece of the daily regime and
both its opportunities and its shortcomings were made clear to me. The
prison offers a mixture of straight employment and trade training
courses, together with the many jobs which are essential to the daily
running of an institution: cleaners, cooks, maintenance parties for both
the buildings and the grounds. The work opportunities are primarily in
the tailors’ shop, a laundry (which services a number of other prisons),
a printing shop and an assembly shop. The last is not fully operational
20
MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
21
DICK WHITFIELD
walls) took pride in recalling that the prison ‘pupils’ often outshone
their free counterparts.
The major frustration for prisoners is that these courses are so much
in demand. Waiting lists of 80 or 100 men, many from outside
Maidstone Prison, are commonplace. Prisoners made it clear that, from
their point of view, ready access to such courses is one of the major
improvements they would seek. The Governor and his staff have long
recognized this and plans for two new courses, one in arts and crafts,
the other on computers, are planned to start in 1990. They will go at
least some way to removing the bottleneck.
For their work, prisoners receive minimal sums—between £2.20
and £4.60 per week, depending on the work and the hours involved.
At the bottom end of the scale are the cleaners and those in full-time
education; the printing shop pays £3.60 per week and the kitchen
staff earn most, in recognition of the seven-day working week
required.
Food, of course, remains a topic of passionate concern—the focus
of minor complaints and disagreements which rumble on for long
periods—and outbursts of contentment which are extremely short-
lived. Most men seemed to find both the quantity and the variety
quite acceptable and to recognize that, with a large institution and
central kitchens, the variable quality was only to be expected. The
very substantial meat pie, with vegetables (followed by sponge
pudding and custard) that I saw served on Weald wing drew
generally favourable comment. ‘Well, perhaps the presentation could
be improved’ was the wry comment of one prisoner. Discontent seems
to be centred more on those on special diets and, with vegetarians,
vegans, Hindus, Muslims and Jews to cater for there is clearly scope
for problems. To some extent this has been ameliorated by providing
cookers on each of the wings. This enables men either to buy small
stocks of supplies from the canteen with their earnings in order to
cook for themselves, or to re-cook prison food in new and exciting
ways. This has become something of an art form, with some
prisoners acquiring an enviable reputation for transforming prison
fare into spicy and original ethnic dishes. With up to 30 per cent of
prisoners coming from minority backgrounds (mostly black and
Asian, but with Polish, Irish and other groups also represented) this
is one way of allowing for—and even valuing— cultural diversity and
may be one reason why racial tensions do not seem to be as evident
as one might expect. There is a much higher concentration of
22
MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
23
DICK WHITFIELD
alone outside shops. Men feel exploited (‘We earn less and pay
more’) and their inability to change things exacerbates the
position they are in.
4 Better education opportunities: There was a general sense of
dissatisfaction with education provision which seemed to relate
more to whether it met people’s needs than the actual range of
classes provided. There were also acknowledged strengths, of which
the Social Skills course was one. This took the place of a pre-release
course (which would be impossible to plan in an institution where
some men were so far away from release and others might be
released on parole licence at very short notice) but it covered many
of the same topics. Overseen by two prison officers with help from
the Psychology Department, it runs for two weeks, full time on
perhaps ten or twelve occasions per year. It uses outside speakers
from the Social Security office, the Job Centre, and the Citizens’
Advice Bureau and covers a wide range of current affairs and other
topics in a relaxed and friendly way. Men use video cameras and
produce and film ‘news bulletins’ as a useful way of learning to
work in small groups, to see how they present themselves and to
gain confidence generally. A similar special course, known as the
‘Summer School’, runs for life sentence prisoners and also tries to
stimulate interest and enjoyment in equal measure.
All these are part of what might be termed the ‘quality of life’ and
the prisoners’ preoccupation with this vital but ill-defined subject is
shared by the Governor, Graham Gregory-Smith.
Rehabilitation is not a real term for staff [he said], especially when
men are serving such long sentences. Keeping them alive in mind and
body is a much more accurate description of what we do. Prisoners
have a genuine fear of becoming cabbages. Sustaining men through a
long sentence is much more than providing work or classes,
important though they are. Prisoners have to start getting used to
talking to staff here, to making some of their own decisions and to
finding out how Maidstone is different.
24
MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
25
DICK WHITFIELD
26
MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
IV
How can a complex institution like a prison be judged? My task was to
record it as objectively as possible and leave the reader to judge, yet not
to provide some indication of the effect it had on me would be to paint
a very incomplete picture. Maidstone has the kind of problems which
beset most prisons; illegal brewing remains a constant problem in which
the ingenuity of prisoners is constantly pitted against the watchfulness
of staff and the balance shifts constantly. Over 1,300 litres of highly
alcoholic brew had been seized from one wing alone, in nine months.
Drugs are equally problematic and with ‘open’ visits are almost
impossible to contain. (Most prisoners come from the Greater London
27
DICK WHITFIELD
area, so family visits are relatively easy; a liberal visiting policy also
means that up to three visits can be made during a month.) The attitude
of wing prison officers to drugs was interesting. ‘It’s almost always
cannabis’, I was told, ‘and I suppose if the Governor really wanted it
stopped, he could—or near enough. But at what cost? It would mean
searches on every visit, more restrictions, more repression and it would
work against everything else we are trying to do. If it’s manageable and
doesn’t get out of hand I reckon we accept it’
There are problems, too, in the way in which different prisons have
come to deal with long-term prisoners. This means some men transfer
from Category ‘A’ prisons and find new rules at Maidstone which they
believe are petty and restrictive, and facilities which seem less than those
they enjoyed elsewhere, in supposedly stricter regimes. (Some were used
to having freezers and food storage facilities as well as cookers on the
wing and this restriction on individual choice, in a system where it is
precious, hit hard.) Yet others, especially from the London prisons,
found it relaxed, humane and positive. It all depends on their starting-
point.
I suppose my starting-point was a phrase in a national newspaper,
the Sunday Times, some years ago. Reviewing Britain’s prisons, the
paper summed them up as ‘a decent sort of warehouse, doing its best
not to let the stock deteriorate’. Given the pressures of numbers,
limited resources for positive work in education and trade training,
limited work opportunities and staff and prisoner unrest, even that
modest aim has often seemed unattainable. Staff and prisoners at
Maidstone were acutely aware that, in a training prison, they were
relatively well off compared to the overcrowded local prisons, whose
barren regimes often mean prisoners being locked in their cells twenty-
three hours each day. Both groups seemed equally aware that they had
a joint investment in making it work, for all its faults, as well as
possible. In my view they do so with commitment and humanity. Who
and how many people we imprison, for how long and in what
conditions are questions that politicians and sentencers must answer;
those in the prisons must make it work as well as they can. In
Maidstone, they do.
28
MAIDSTONE PRISON, ENGLAND
NOTE
1 Quoted in Melling, E. (ed.) (1969) Crime and Punishment, Kentish Sources,
published by Kent County Council. For a fuller description of Howard’s
visits and proposals, see The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, 4th
edn 1792, reprinted 1973, Montclair, NJ: Patterson, Smith.
REFERENCES
Home Office (1989a) Home Office Statistical Bulletin 11/89, Croydon: Home
Office Statistical Department.
Home Office (1989b) Report of HM Chief Inspector of Prisons 1988, London:
HMSO.
Theroux, P. (1984) The Kingdom by the Sea, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
29
Chapter Two
30
THE INDIAN PRISON
I
The convicted prison population in India is remarkably small. In a
country of around 800 million, with over one and a half million police
officers and nearly 1,200 gaols (not to mention a Draconian penal
code drafted by the British in 1860), only about 60,000 people are
serving sentences of imprisonment at any one time. In relation to
population, this is five to ten times fewer prisoners than in European
countries.
Sadly, though, the gaols do not stand half-empty. Convicted prisoners
are outnumbered by the euphemistically named ‘undertrials’ —
remanded prisoners for most of whom trial is months (if not years)
away and many of whom, detained pending police investigations, have
not yet been charged with an offence (Diaz 1977). In recent years, the
officially recorded—and probably under-recorded —number of
undertrials has frequently exceeded 90,000.
There are other categories of prisoner, too, smaller in number but
whose presence raises serious questions about human rights.
‘Detenus’ —people held without trial under various Acts sanctioning
preventive detention 1 —have sometimes attracted international
concern, particularly during periods of internal tension when
allegations of torture have accompanied protests about the detention
of political prisoners. 2 But when the number of detenus returns to a
more ‘normal’ level of 400–500, consisting mainly of suspected drug
smugglers and ‘dacoits’ 3 rather than political activists, interest tends
to fade.
‘Non-criminal lunatics’ and ‘criminal lunatics’ (the continued use of
archaic terminology betraying attitudes towards them 4 ) officially
numbered 2,077 and 318, respectively, at the end of 1980, according
to figures collected for the All-India Committee on Jail Reforms
(1983). However, only half the states produced any statistics, it not
being standard practice to record lunatics as part of the prison
31
MIKE MAGUIRE
Even more shocking than the corruption was the ingenious ‘slave
system’ we found in the jail. The slaves were boys between ten
and eighteen employed as ‘helpers’, and there were scores of
them… They would be woken up before 6 a.m. to prepare the
morning tea and would be allowed to sleep around 10 p.m.…
They were herded into a ward which had no fan and no proper
sanitary facilities…
These boys were undertrial prisoners; many had been there
for eight months and at least one had been there for two years.
They were taken from one court to another to be tried under
one charge or another and kept in jail all the while. The aim
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THE INDIAN PRISON
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34
THE INDIAN PRISON
Sources: Adapted from Report of All-Indian Committee on Jail Reform 1980–3 and
Chadha 1983: Appendices
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For example, one Lambodar Gorain has been held in Ranchi Jail
since 18th June 1970, for an offence under Section 25 of the Arms
Act…with the result that he has been in prison for eight and a half
years for an offence for which even if convicted, he could not have
been awarded more than two years imprisonment…. What faith
would these people have in our system of administration of justice?
(Supreme Court: H.Khatoon v. Home Secretary SCC 1980(1))
It should be noted that there is a legal limit of ninety days, which can
be extended only in exceptional circumstances, for suspects to be
remanded in judicial custody pending police investigations and the
presentation of a charge-sheet. However, despite this law and despite the
publicity following the Hussainara case, many magistrates continue to
authorize long extensions at the request of the police. Consequently, a
large proportion, perhaps the majority, of undertrials have yet to be
charged.
There is not space here to delve deeper into the reasons for the
unusual profile of the Indian prison population as described above.
However, most informed commentators agree that the key factors
include the inefficiency, and sometimes corruption, of an out-moded
police force, in combination with the failures of a court system clogged
up with cases and handicapped by immensely complex procedures.7 Not
only are victims, particularly of personal theft or burglary, usually
reluctant to become entangled with the bureaucratic nightmare that can
follow the reporting of a crime to the police, but it is extremely difficult
to convict anyone who possesses either a good lawyer or ‘influence’.8
Many cases are mysteriously dropped, the vast majority of accused
persons, in all but the most minor cases, plead not guilty, and the
36
THE INDIAN PRISON
majority are found not guilty. Broadly speaking, the only people likely
to become convicts are the very poor: either sentenced summarily in
magistrates’ courts for minor offences, or, after long delays, convicted of
serious crimes. The undertrial population, too, mainly consists of the
most disadvantaged sections of society, who cannot pay the sureties
demanded for bail. The more resourceful tend to escape charges through
influence over the police, to escape custodial remand through bail, and
to escape conviction through employing good lawyers.
Before discussing prison conditions in more depth, an important
preliminary point must be considered. It should not be forgotten that
although India has made remarkable economic progress over the last
thirty years, it is still a Third World country in which enormous
numbers of people live in conditions of severe poverty. This means first
of all that prisons compete with other government responsibilities for
extremely precious resources and secondly that the question of ‘less-
eligibility’ inevitably raises its head. Can prison diets and living
conditions reasonably be judged by the same criteria as those in western
countries, when the quality of life for the ‘honest poor’ outside is so
much lower? The realistic answer must be ‘no’, although this does not
defeat the argument of Richardson (1985) among others, that the
drastic loss of civic rights suffered by prisoners puts a duty upon the
state to compensate by giving them ‘special rights’ when incarcerated. In
other words, the less-eligibility argument should never be used to justify
deliberate neglect or harsh treatment of prisoners. Thus, for example,
while many inmates may sleep in worse conditions outside, this is no
argument for making them sleep on concrete if it is not excessively
expensive to provide them with cots or hammocks.
Even when making full allowance for the cultural context and
resource limitations, nearly all independent commentators agree that, at
least until very recently, conditions in Indian prisons have been
appalling. The 1983 report of the All-India Committee on Jail Reforms,
headed by Justice A.N.Mulla, makes this clear. Every chapter of this
carefully researched document, itself a tribute to the democratic
institutions and traditions which make India so special among
developing countries, reveals further horrors of a harsh and neglected
prison system. A few sentences from chapter III, headed ‘Realities in
Indian Prisons’, will give the flavour of the report:
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MIKE MAGUIRE
38
THE INDIAN PRISON
wearisome and uninteresting tasks’. This had set the tone later
reflected in the harsh rules of the Indian Penal Code 1860
(prescribing long sentences of ‘rigorous imprisonment’), in the
Prisons Act 1894, in gaol manuals allowing cruel punishments for the
smallest breach of discipline, and in a lasting policy of spending as
little as possible on the gaols. The 1919 report introduced an era of
lip-service to ‘reform and rehabilitation’, but neither the British,
preoccupied with ‘law and order’ as the independence movement
gained strength, nor any Indian government after 1947, found the
time or the resolve necessary for dismantling the old Draconian
system. Even today, most convicts are sentenced to ‘rigorous’
imprisonment, 9 and, although some revisions are currently being
made, the gaols in most states are run according to manuals dating
from the nineteenth century.
Critics of Indian prisons have continued for years to point out the
incongruity of attempting to run an avowedly ‘correctional’ prison
system with structures, rules and physical conditions created for quite
different purposes. Among the most frequently condemned aspects have
been the following:
1 Unsuitable buildings, half of them now over fifty years old and 18
per cent over a hundred years;
2 Poor water supply, sanitation, drainage and electrical supply. In
1979, only 15 per cent of gaols had tap water, 33 per cent had septic
latrines and 25 per cent were electrified. (However, these are areas
currently being improved with central government grants—see
below);
3 Poorly funded and poorly organized state management and
administration, often in neglected branches of larger departments,
employing ignorant, inefficient, and sometimes corrupt staff.
Inspector-Generals of Prisons drafted in from other fields with little
knowledge of, or interest in, prisons, while ‘high flying’ young
administrators see the prison department as one to be avoided
(Sharma 1985);
4 Virtually untrained and sometimes brutal warders, without the
influence of a fully-trained national ‘cadre’ of officers (as in the
police) to encourage higher standards and to disseminate new ideas.
Assisted often by ‘convict warders’, who add to an atmosphere of
fear and connive in the corruption which is endemic in many
institutions. Occasional allegations of torture;
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THE INDIAN PRISON
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42
THE INDIAN PRISON
like all in the prison, drained into septic tanks. The latrines were
generally clean.
The other two sections of the prison also contained barracks,
but many of the long-term prisoners lived in blocks of single cells.
These were quite large, and some prisoners chose to share with
two others rather than face solitude. The cells were generally bare
with stone ‘beds’, but were clean and had integral toilets and
water taps.
The prison kitchen was located in the short-termers’ compound.
Later in the afternoon I saw a meal for all 600 prisoners being cooked
in one gigantic iron pot over a blazing fire. The pot was taller than a
man, and a prisoner had to climb up on a table in order to extract a
sample with a huge ladle. It looked and tasted exactly the same as the
previous day’s meal which I had sampled in the Superintendent’s
office—a medium-hot vegetable curry containing a mixture of root and
leafy vegetables. There was also a bitter tamarind soup. A group of
prisoners was carefully picking foreign bodies from a mound of rice
before cooking.
The diet in this, as in all Indian prisons, was laid down in very precise
terms. The entitlements per prisoner were printed in English and in the
local language on a large notice outside the kitchen. The following was
the diet laid down for working prisoners (those not working received
100 grams less rice per day):
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Coriander 4
Chillies to be issued on Sundays
(extra besides the quantity of 10 grams) 5
Milk (to be converted into buttermilk
or curd) 70 ml.
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THE INDIAN PRISON
45
MIKE MAGUIRE
work, which entitled them to wages and to a better diet (the same as
convicted prisoners).
There were five main types of ‘vocational’ work in the prison:
weaving, carpentry, printing, bookbinding and textile work. However,
not all of these were ‘going concerns’ at any particular time. At the end
of 1987, the distribution of jobs among convicts was recorded as
follows:
Maintenance
Convict overseers 4
Cleaners, sweepers 39
Repairs 1
Cooks 8
Other 19
Vocational
Agriculture/gardening 15
Weaving 23
Tailoring 2
Blacksmithy 1
Carpentry 39
Printing/bookbinding 1
Oil expelling 2
Jute work 14
Total 168
46
THE INDIAN PRISON
the prison wage with the typical wage of an agricultural labourer in the
area. The latter would receive around fourteen rupees per day.
The allocation of work was in some cases based upon people’s skills
outside; for example, prisoners who had been barbers, washer-men,
gardeners or ‘sweepers’ (refuse collectors and cleaners from the lower
castes) were given similar jobs if available, but, generally speaking,
new inmates were assigned a task without much deliberation or
consultation. Thereafter, it was difficult for them to change. As the
Superintendent put it, ‘Rehabilitation means learning to work’, which
included work which they did not like or to which they were not
suited. This reflects a common tendency in India to think of rigorous
imprisonment and vocational work as meaning the same thing: little
distinction is made between punishment and rehabilitation in the
prison context.
There was one teacher employed in the prison, who undertook
education at all levels from basic literacy to assisting with open
university degrees. He also distributed library books to those who
asked for them—although I saw few books in the cells or barracks
and it was stated that few prisoners were interested in reading.
Prisoners were not normally allowed to visit the library to choose
their own books. But although the educational services were supplied
to only a few inmates, several of these were undertaking advanced
work: three had completed BAs over the past few years, another an
MA, and nine were embarking upon university degrees by
correspondence.
Welfare provision, apart from that provided by the prison staff
themselves, was non-existent. There were two posts allocated for
social workers, but these had not been filled for a long time. The
only recourse for prisoners with social or practical problems,
including those involving families outside, was to make an
application to see the Superintendent or another senior officer. There
was a prison hospital with twelve beds, but this had little equipment
and only basic drugs. Seriously ill prisoners were transferred to
outside hospitals. In 1987, 233 had been admitted at some time into
the prison hospital.
The main recreational activities in the prison were volley-ball, ring
tennis, chess, kabaddi and other board games, but limited numbers of
prisoners actually engaged in them. There was also an outdoor stage on
which occasional concerts, plays, or other entertainment or religious
functions were held.
47
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THE INDIAN PRISON
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THE INDIAN PRISON
51
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NOTES
1 For example, the National Security Act and the Conservation of Foreign
Exchange and the Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act.
2 This occurred most dramatically during the ‘Emergency’ of 1975–7, when
thousands of the government’s political opponents, including academics
and journalists, were arrested and detained. More recently, both Amnesty
International and the US State Department have accused India of violating
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53
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REFERENCES
All-India Committee on Jail Reforms (1983) Report of All-India Committee on
Jail Reforms 1980–3 (Justice A.N.Mulla, Chairman), New Delhi:
Government of India.
Baxi, U. (1982) The Crisis of the Indian Legal System, Delhi: Bikas Publishing
House.
Bhatacharya, S.K. (1985) ‘An assessment of the institutional treatment
programmes for adults and juveniles’, Indian Journal of Criminology and
Criminalistics 3, 4, pp. 136–41.
Bronstein, A. and Morgan, R. (1985) ‘Prisoners and the courts: the United
States experience’, in M.Maguire, J.Vagg and R.Morgan (eds) Accountability
and Prisons, London: Tavistock.
Chadha, K. (1983) The Indian Jail, Delhi: Vikas.
Chhrabra, K.S. (1970) Quantum of Punishment in Criminal Law in India,
Chandigarh: Punjab University Publication Bureau.
Crime in India 1983 (1988), New Delhi: Government of India.
Datir, R.N. (1978) Prison as a Social System, Bombay: Popular Press.
Dhagamwar, V. (1987) ‘The disadvantaged and the law’, paper to workshop
Poverty in India: Research and Policy, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, 1–
6 October 1987.
Diaz (1977) ‘The forgotten man of the criminal justice system’, Journal of
Correctional Work.
Gokhale, S.D. and Sohoni, N.K. (1988) ‘Whither correction?’, in S.V.Rao (ed.)
Perspectives in Criminology, New Delhi: Vikas.
Gupta, A.S. (1988) ‘Law and order in a democratic society’, in S.V.Rao (ed.)
Perspectives in Criminology, New Delhi: Vikas.
Khan, M.Z. and Chilad, B.S. (1982) ‘Policy shifts in institutional correction in
India’, Indian Journal of Social Work 43, no. 1, pp. 39–51.
Krishna, Iyer, Justice V.R. (1988) ‘From Macauley to Mahatma: an Indian
criminological odyssey’, Indian Journal of Criminology 16, no. 2.
Kumar, S. (1979) A Chief Minister’s Prison Diary, Delhi: Vikas.
Kynch, J. (1989) ‘Scarcities, distress and crime in British India’, paper to 7th
World Congress on Rural Sociology, Bologna, July 1988.
54
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55
Chapter Three
INTRODUCTION
A statement that prisons can be found all over the world would be a
truism were it not for a certain reflection related to it. Wherever they
are, prisons serve the purpose of restricting their inmates’ freedom; but
the interpretations of the functions and aims officially attributed to
them vary according to each state’s institutional and legal system. Also,
the tasks prisons actually fulfil behind their external, officially specified,
aims vary greatly from state to state.
Prisons have certain features in common:
56
SLUZEWIEC PRISON, POLAND
57
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SLUZEWIEC PRISON, POLAND
prisoners through work. This slogan has been bandied about and the
term ‘resocialization’ abused, until it is void of any meaning in Polish
penitentiary practice; the authorities have exploited prisoners,
sometimes quite openly, as a cheap or free workforce. It was, and often
still is, a thoughtless and wasteful exploitation, one that ruins health,
deprives the prisoners of any motivation to work, prejudices them
against society, fails to add to their development or, usually, to their
qualifications.
The Polish prison system is a big industrial tycoon, owner of 61 self-
dependent production units. Of these, 48 are industrial units (26
factories and 22 auxiliary industrial farms); there are also four
agricultural and nine building enterprises. All of them together can
employ about 26,000 prisoners. A very large group of about 30,000
prisoners work outside prison, building harbours, steelworks and
houses, or are employed in mines, ironworks and various factories.
There is also a broad category of jobs performed ‘quite free’ (that is, the
state does not pass on the cost) because the work is not concerned
directly with ‘production’. This group is given the euphemistic name of
‘public works’; it includes building roads, laying railway tracks, land
reclamation, installation of high-voltage line supports, work at
distribution depots. Leaving the details aside, it could be said without
exaggeration that the persistence of the very large prison population
was due to its existence as an inexhaustible source of labour, to be freely
disposed of by the authorities.6 The crisis of the Polish economy and the
resulting need to change production methods and the style of
management also helped to make possible the long-demanded prison
reform.
That reform is above all manifest in the trend towards reducing
the prison population. A provision was introduced in 1986 that was
truly revolutionary for the Polish conditions: the living space per
prisoner should be at least 2.5 sq.m. The main effect of this during
the first eighteen months of its operation was a reduction of the
prison population by about half; this was achieved first of all
through the use of various forms of release. The population went
down to about 60,000. In addition there was a retreat from the
assertion, as emphatic as it was preposterous, that a prisoner is
treated as a normal employee. The problem has at last been
acknowledged of paying prisoners less or not paying them at all just
because they are prisoners. Employment in prison is not added to the
prisoner’s qualifications for entitlement to benefits; consequently, his
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SLUZEWIEC PRISON, POLAND
I believe prisons could and should function normally. But during the
35 years of my work there, I have never witnessed normal
functioning. Things go on from one operation or amnesty act to
another…. I do not want to be misunderstood. I do not intend to
criticise the penal policy as it is a result of a definite situation. It
follows from the prison staff’s experience, however, that policy
should be more stable…. If we send a man with six years still to
serve to a penal labour centre and take him to work outside—and
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Despite this view, however, for many years the prison staff in
general backed this highly repressive penal policy, stating emphatically
that despite the difficult conditions the prisons would certainly
accommodate and employ all newcomers. This was achieved, however,
at the expense of prisoners’ rights and their conditions of
imprisonment.
It was only in recent years that the prison staff realized that although
they had no hand in sentencing, they were responsible for the
atmosphere inside the prison. Two years ago, the Sluzewiec Prison, with
its then capacity of 1,540, had 2,500 inmates crammed into it. In its
eight barracks, which many years ago were found not worth repairing,
and were now ready to be pulled down, men were kept crowded in cells
which opened only to let them go to work, and to accept on return.
Unsurprisingly, it was very difficult to maintain order in such
conditions. The proliferating and irregular penalties, far from bringing
improvement, made matters worse. Tensions and deep mutual animosity
between guards and inmates could be sensed immediately on entering
the prison.
Now, the new attitude to the role of prisons is an example of the
changes everywhere in Polish society. The Sluzewiec Prison is a good
example of those changes.
I visited the Sluzewiec Prison often over a period of three months,
and saw it become a new institution practically every month. Neither
the staff nor the management were changed; what changed
completely, however, was the atmosphere. It was enough in the Polish
conditions to let the staff behave more humanely and most used this
opportunity.
Though it is isolated from the world with double walls, the
Sluzewiec Prison bears the title of half-open institution. This is
because of the categories of its inmates and the fact that they work
outside the prison. Today, the half-open character also finds its
expression in the relaxation of rules. Such relaxation had already
been possible before, but it only occurred with the changed attitude
overall towards prisons.
Apart from the above-mentioned category of prisoners (intentional
offenders with up to six years still to serve), the prison
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SLUZEWIEC PRISON, POLAND
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MONIKA PLATEK
civilian clothes and not uniforms; the demand that inmates stand to
attention should be abandoned in the case of addicts; they should be
permitted to sit or lie down on the bed during the day; in some cases,
they should also be permitted to telephone their mothers, and their
family and friends should also have the opportunity to telephone
them. These are just a few of the long list of demands; the battle for
them lasted for months. On the one hand, this demonstrates the
extent of restrictions and rules imposed on a Polish prisoner; on the
other hand, the fact that they were achieved is an indication of the
avalanche of change that has been possible. Recently, only a part of
wards beside the special one was open during the day in the
Sluzewiec Prison. Today, cells all over the prison remain open daily,
and in three wards where the inmates go to work unsupervised by the
staff, the cells are also never locked at night This makes the
prisoners’ life easier indeed, considering the lack of WCs in the cells.
Moreover, contacts with the outside world have been greatly
extended. The visit, drastically restricted before to one hour a month
and strictly supervised, now lasts up to ten hours outside the prison,
at least once a month, such leaves being granted quite often. The
family reports at the prison, signs the prisoner out, and undertakes
to bring him back after a specified time, but always before 7 p.m.,
the time of the evening roll-call. What still grates on such occasions
is the verbal routine that accompanies these visits, making the
families feel they are collecting or registering a parcel rather than a
human being. It seems, however, that the staff have also started to
realize it little by little. Also, passes of up to five days, granted as
privileges, have become widespread. Before, only the selected, ‘tested’
prisoners could hope to get one; in practice, this applied to those
who collaborated with the staff and informed against their fellow
inmates.
The special ward for drug addicts seems also to deserve some
credit for the general trend to using privileges rather than
punishments in maintaining discipline. The value of maintaining the
prisoner’s contacts with the outside world, through passes and
additional visits, has been recognized. When visits outside prison and
passes are kept to the minimum, the problems of homosexuality,
homosexual rapes, self-mutilations, and other drastic symptoms of
prison subculture are present. These phenomena still plague many
Polish closed prisons. The staff are still patronizing towards the
inmates and treat them contemptuously; it seems, however, that the
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SLUZEWIEC PRISON, POLAND
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MONIKA PLATEK
by way of cash is the remainder left of their wages after the deduction
of 70 to 75 per cent for the public purse.9 What the prison offers are
papers such as Trybuna Ludu or Rzeczpospolita, the official
government and party dailies; but the ruling party arouses no
particular interest or liking among prisoners. Despite these elements,
however, the everyday life in the Sluzewiec Prison has shaken off a lot
that was artificial or simply farcical. Admittedly, on noticing a
member of the staff, the prisoner still has to spring to his feet, stand
to attention and report. However, the titles of talks the staff prepare
for the inmates have ceased to feature those strictly ideological
subjects whose contents were equally alien to the audience and to the
compulsory lecturers.
Meals are still meagre, and hunger remains a serious problem for
prisoners. Nowadays, however, the family is at least permitted to
treat the inmate to an extra meal during a visit to the prison; this
was previously forbidden. Food parcels are allowed more frequently,
too.
Gastric ulcers, diseases of the nervous system, and bad teeth are
common among prisoners, and cases of lung diseases and mental
disorders are growing in number. But health provision is still highly
unsatisfactory, though with a much smaller number of prisoners, the
inmates now have at least a greater chance of receiving treatment. The
Sluzewiec Prison should have fourteen medical officers but this is not
the case. Permanently employed are: one general practitioner, one
dentist, and one nurse. Specialists, including a dermatologist, a
laryngologist, a phthisiologist and a neurologist, are employed part
time. According to the Governor, there is no need at present to employ
the entire staff of specialists full time.
The Sluzewiec Prison has a total of 200 established posts, the
changing size of its population exerting no influence on the number of
staff. A half of those posts are taken by the security department, and
20 by education staff. The rest are employed in managing and
financial departments, on records, the health service and the
administration. The immediate educational needs of inmates should be
met by the education staff but it is in their department that the
greatest number of vacant posts can be found. The Sluzewiec Prison
was not spared the general trend: those who left were the young, well-
educated tutors who refused to put up with the omnipotence of the
security department and the bad conditions of work. Hence the present
solution is to remodel the tasks of the security staff: instead of just
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MONIKA PLATEK
NOTES
1 In 1956, Polish society protested for the first time against the authorities.
As a result, considerable changes were introduced, including the first
suspension ever, or at least for some time, of the Stalinist totalitarian
methods of government. Further protests took place in 1968, 1970, 1976,
1980–1, 1986 and 1988.
2 See: System penitencjarny, Stan i wnioski (The Penitentiary System: State
and Conclusions), a report published for the Minister of Justice, compiled
by a team of functionaries of the Central Prison Management and accepted
by the Minister of Justice, Warsaw, January 1989.
3 On the use of amnesty in Polish penal policy see: M.Platek (1986) The
Amnesty and Polish Practice, Vienna.
4 For statistical data on the activities of administration of justice in 1988,
see: Statystyka sadowa i penitencjarna (Court and Penitentiary Statistics),
January 1989, Warsaw.
5 See: Biuletyn Sejmu z Komisji Administracji, Spraw Wewnetrznych i
Wymiaru Sprawiedliwosci (Seym Bulletin: Proceedings of the Commission
of Administration, Internal Affairs and Administration of Justice), 21
January 1987, Warsaw. For the statement of the then Director-General of
the Prison System see p. 5.
6 See: M.Platek (1987) ‘Economic aspects of imprisonment in Poland’,
unpublished typescript, Oslo-Warsaw; M.Platek, ‘Warunkowe zwolnienie a
praca skazanych w swietle ustawy i praktyki’ (‘Conditional release and
prisoners’ work in the light of law and practice’), in Z. Holda et al. (eds)
(1985) Praca skazanych odbywajacych kare pozbawienia wolnosci (The
Work of Prisoners), Lublin, pp. 90–103.
7 As a result of strikes which the working classes organized in 1980, the first
independent trade union of Polish employees, ‘Solidarity’, was established
in August 1980.
8 Seym Bulletin, op.cit., pp. 6–7.
9 If the prisoner is obliged to pay maintenance, the reduction is limited to 25
per cent, and the bulk of his salary paid in as maintenance.
68
Chapter Four
HELDERSTROOM PRISON,
SOUTH AFRICA
DIRK VAN ZYL SMIT
The writer begs his reader to excuse the frequent egotisms which he
does not know how to avoid, without using circumlocutions that
might have been more disgusting. (Howard 1929:xxii)
69
DIRK VAN ZYL SMIT
II
Imprisonment is a key element in the system of social control in
South Africa. This is true in the general sense that a very high
proportion of the total population of the Republic of South Africa is
incarcerated, either awaiting trial or as sentenced prisoners. Thus,
the most recent Report of the Department of Justice reveals that
there were 110,481 prisoners on 30 June 1988 (Department of Justice
1988:142–3). Of these, 90,485 were sentenced prisoners. A further
unknown number of prisoners awaiting trial are detained in police
cells and thus fall outside the ambit, and the statistics, of the Prisons
Service. On 30 June 1988 there were, according to the figures
provided by the service, 306 persons per 100,000 of the officially
estimated population of the Republic of South Africa in custody as
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HELDERSTROOM PRISON, SOUTH AFRICA
sentenced prisoners. The ratio for all persons in prison on the same
date was 373 per 100,000. 4
The sentence of imprisonment appears to be imposed fairly readily.
There are no precise statistics but the Report of the Central Statistical
Services for 1 July 1986 to 30 June 1987 reveals that 380,094 people
were convicted by South African courts. According to the Report of
the Department of Justice for the same period 180,453 persons were
admitted to prison as sentenced offenders. From these figures it can be
deduced that 47 per cent of offenders sentenced by the courts spent
some time in prison. Whether they were sentenced without an option,
or went to prison because they could not afford to pay fines, is not
clear.
In South Africa prisoners are classified as ‘White’ (people of
European origin), ‘Asian’ (people from the Indian subcontinent),
‘Black’ (people of pure African descent) or ‘Coloured’ (people of
mixed race). These classifications, which are refined beyond what is
indicated in the parentheses, are offensive to many South Africans,
because they provide the basis for racial discrimination. In particular,
it is more acceptable to use the term ‘Black’ for any South African not
classified as ‘White’. However, as will become apparent, official
classification continues to play an important part in the operation of
the prison system. These figures reveal remarkable differences in the
proportion of prisoners from each racial category. On 30 June 1988
the figure per 100,000 for ‘Whites’ was 92 and for ‘Asians’ 78. In
contrast, the ratio for ‘Blacks’ (Africans) was 381 and for ‘Coloureds’,
851 per 100,000.5
In South Africa imprisonment also plays a vital part in what has
been called ‘regime maintenance’ (Potts 1984). A variety of
‘extraordinary provisions’ 6 allows for detention without trial. These
range from preventive detention, 7 detention for interrogation 8 and
the detention of witnesses 9 under the permanent security legislation,
and to the detention of reluctant informers under the legislation
relating to prohibited drugs. 10 Such detention may be for
indeterminate periods and is only subject to very restricted controls
on the abuse of state power. In addition, a State of Emergency was
declared in some parts of South Africa on 21 July 1985. 11 Since 12
June 1986 a State of Emergency has been in force throughout South
Africa. 12 Under the extraordinary Emergency powers any member of
the police force, the military or even the Prisons Service has the
power to arrest and detain. 13 Detention, which may be either
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DIRK VAN ZYL SMIT
72
HELDERSTROOM PRISON, SOUTH AFRICA
III
The Helderstroom prison complex is one of the sixteen prison farms in
the South African prison system. It was established in 1971 and is
situated on 1,000 hectares of prime agricultural land, about 120 km
from Cape Town. The prison farm is relatively isolated, at the end of a
5 km stretch of unsurfaced road and about 30 km from the two nearest
towns of Caledon and Villiersdorp.
The first impression is of a neat modern village built on a hill and
clustered around two larger structures. Closer inspection reveals two
separate, virtually identical prisons a few hundred metres apart. These
are Helderstroom Maximum Security Prison and Helderstroom Medium
Security Prison (referred to as ‘maximum’ and ‘medium’ respectively).
On both the south and the north side of the hill are rows of staff
housing. On the northern side live the 182 ‘White’ members of staff and
the southern side houses most of the 150 ‘Coloured’ staff members. All
except ten of the 332 members of the Prisons Service live permanently
on the prison farm.
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Apart from the racial criteria and the length of sentence there did
not appear to be any reason why particular prisoners were being kept
at Helderstroom. No prisoners convicted of crimes against the security
of the state (sentenced political prisoners) were at Helderstroom,
although prison officers recalled that some years previously a group of
75 such ‘Black’ (African) prisoners had been held there. Nor were
there any emergency or security detainees. However, the State of
Emergency had not left Helderstroom unscathed. Some time before, a
maximum security section of a prison in a neighbouring command had
been cleared entirely to make room for Emergency detainees and some
of these prisoners had been transferred to Helderstroom. Since then
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HELDERSTROOM PRISON, SOUTH AFRICA
Outside these communal cells there was little about the physical
surroundings to inspire comment. The sick bays in both prisons
appeared clean and well equipped. The same applied to the kitchens,
the library and to the classroom that I saw. A noticeable feature of the
dining areas was that they were entirely bare. The prisoners have to
squat on the concrete and eat their food with spoons from single
bowls.
A prime feature of the prison buildings was the two large
quadrangles in each prison. They are surrounded on all sides by the
double-storey buildings of the prison. They measure approximately 50
m by 45 m and have concrete surfaces. A tennis court was the only
visible recreational feature in the quadrangle which I observed most
closely.
Outside the two prison buildings there is little at Helderstroom to
distinguish it physically from an efficient mixed farm. There are
several hectares of planted pasturage, grazed by sheep and cows. There
are workshops for the maintenance of farming and prison equipment.
There are small building operations. There are batteries of chickens
and sheds filled with pigsties, which make up the factory-farming
aspects of the whole enterprise. Along the banks of the picturesquely
named Riviersonderend (river without end), below the hill on which
the prison buildings and staff housing are situated, there are
intensively cultivated fields where several varieties of vegetables are
grown.
IV
A typical routine on a weekday at Helderstroom would be as follows:
Prisoners are woken at 5.30 a.m. and the cells are unlocked at 7.00
a.m. (In the summer the medium prison is unlocked at 6.30 a.m.)
Firearms are issued to the warders who take prisoners to work outside
the prison buildings. The warders inside are all unarmed. The
prisoners are mustered in the quadrangle for scripture reading and
prayers. Breakfast is taken at 7.10 a.m. The work teams are then
marched out at 7.30 a.m. Those who remain behind take part in
educational programmes, attend confirmation classes, go to the
library, meet social workers or the doctor, or participate in
‘recreational activities’ in the quadrangle. Those who work outside the
prison take lunch at their stations. Inside, lunch is eaten between
11.00 and 11.30 a.m. and the prisoners are then locked in their cells
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until 2.00 p.m. After that they may resume the activities of the
morning. At 4.00 p.m. the prisoners who have been working outside
return and are all searched as a matter of routine. Supper is taken
between 4.00 and 4.20 p.m. At 5.00 p.m. prisoners are locked in their
cells until the next morning. At 5.15 p.m. most of the prison staff go
off duty. Lights in the cells are put off in the medium prison at 8.30
p.m. In maximum they remain on all night. That, simply, is the
structure of the day but almost every aspect of this routine has to be
detailed and qualified if one is to understand what it means in
practice.
A careful analysis of the numbers of prisoners marched out to work
on 9 August shows that relatively few were involved in farming
activities. Thus in the medium prison, 836, or 64 per cent, of the
prisoners were employed but only 321 of them worked on tasks which
could be identified with the farming activities of the prison. In the
maximum prison the picture was even less rosy. The number employed
was 341, 31 per cent of the total. However, none of them were
employed in agriculture. (More than two-thirds of those employed from
maximum were working on the construction of a new soccer field.) If
the total population of prisoners at Helderstroom is taken together it
can be seen that only 13 per cent of all the prisoners were actually
employed in agriculture.
From the perspective of rehabilitative ‘treatment’ and ‘training (of
prisoners) in habits of industry and labour’, 17 which together form an
important part of the statutory functions of the Prisons Service,
doubts can be raised about the efficacy of farm labour. Most of the
prisoners were used to perform the most menial tasks. Only a few
were involved in activities such as sheep-shearing, which require
more than a modicum of skill. The same was true of the maintenance
workshops where, at best, thirty prisoners were involved in activities
which required some knowledge of a trade. Indeed, broader questions
could be asked about the whole agricultural thrust of the prison, for
it seemed as if many, perhaps a majority of the prisoners, were from
the greater Cape Town urban area and were unlikely ever to find, or
wish to find, employment in agriculture. What the Helderstroom
farm does effectively, according to official accounts, is produce
enough meat, vegetables and dairy products to make the
Helderstroom prisons and also the smaller local prison in Caledon
self-sufficient in these respects. (Prison farm produce is not sold on
the open market.)
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HELDERSTROOM PRISON, SOUTH AFRICA
their time in the open is in effect only 50 per cent of that of other
prisoners.
The routine of prisoners sentenced to solitary confinement in
punishment cells (to which they may be sentenced by an officer’s
court) is also severely restricted. They are allowed only the two
statutory half-hour exercise periods per day in a separate, smaller
quadrangle of 10 m by 20 m. The regime in the punishment cell may
include periods of ‘reduced diet’ (half the daily intake) and ‘spare diet’
which consists of only 200 gm of maize meal twice daily, boiled in
water without salt and 15 gm of soup powder boiled in 530 ml of
water once daily. 18 I was told that this spare diet is weighed
meticulously. Apart from isolation and dietary punishments an
officer’s court may sentence male prisoners under the age of 40 years
to corporal punishment. I did not investigate this aspect thoroughly,
but was told that at Helderstroom corporal punishment was imposed
about twice a month, in the prison as a whole.
V
The dangers of total estrangement from the outside world are
particularly severe in as isolated a prison as Helderstroom. They
exist not only for the prisoners but also for the staff who live in a
separate community away from the influence of towns and villages.
However, staff members assured me that they had adequate contact
with the surrounding farmers and with the townspeople of Caledon,
to which the children are bused to school each day. Many of the staff
had grown up in villages and on farms and professed a preference for
a quiet life.
From the prisoners’ point of view the privilege system is an important
determinant of how much contact they are allowed with the outside
world. All the prisoners at Helderstroom are in the privilege-categories
2, 3 and 4 of the four possible ‘notches’ in the system. (Category 1, the
lowest category, is apparently only used for recently admitted prisoners.)
This means that they are entitled to receive and send 20, 30 or 40 letters
per year depending on their privilege category. Category 4 prisoners
may also receive a daily newspaper. All this communication is strictly
censored and prisoners are specifically prohibited from expressing
complaints about prison conditions in their correspondence. In practice
the prisoners at Helderstroom do not subscribe to newspapers. (I was
told that only the sentenced ‘political’ prisoners who had been held
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DIRK VAN ZYL SMIT
there earlier, had done so.) Prisoners are allowed to hear uncensored
news bulletins on the state-controlled radio. Category 4 prisoners are
also allowed, once in a few days, to watch videos on television sets
brought to their cells. All prisoners at Helderstroom are allowed access
to the library. In practice utilization of the library is relatively low. Less
than one book per prisoner per month is borrowed in maximum and
two per prisoner in medium. An unknown percentage of the prisoners
is illiterate.
Visits are also allowed. A category 2 prisoner may receive twenty
30-minute visits a year while a category 4 prisoner may be visited 30
times annually for up to 40 minutes. Such visits are tightly controlled.
Only category 4 prisoners are allowed contact visits and a warder is
always present. There is no provision for conjugal visits. The distance
of Helderstroom from the metropolitan area of Cape Town inhibits
visiting severely. However, NICRO (the charity concerned with the
welfare of offenders) has organized a bus service which runs from
Cape Town to Helderstroom on two Sundays a month. Isolation
remains a problem. I spoke to a prisoner serving a consecutive
sentence of 48 years in total for multiple armed robberies (an
exceptional sentence by South African standards), who had not been
visited for a year and whose family, he said, ignored all his
correspondence.
Nothing concrete could be established about the reconviction rates of
the prisoners at Helderstroom. This must handicap the Institutional
Committee which serves both prisons and which is responsible for
calculating projected dates on which prisoners can be released either
unconditionally (that is, if they do not forfeit the remission which they
are provisionally allocated on admission), or conditionally on parole.
The Institutional Committee makes recommendations about release to a
higher authority and also attends to the reclassification of prisoners.
The impression with which I was left was that, in the absence of
information on likely reconviction rates or other statistical projections,
the Institutional Committee followed bureaucratic guide-lines very
closely.
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VI
The attitudes of staff and prisoners to each other and to themselves
reflect in many ways the social and even linguistic structures of the
society as a whole. Prison life in South Africa throughout most of this
century has been dominated by prison gangs which exist in virtually all
prisons. Helderstroom is no exception and the prisoners confirmed
that they either were or had been members of prison gangs. In
particular, those with whom I spoke (not necessarily a representative
sample) claimed membership of the ‘28’ gang, a gang whose activities
were focused on the procurement of catamites in prison. (Sodomy is a
major problem for both the authorities and the prisoners at
Helderstroom. Several of the prisoners in the single cells at
Helderstroom asked to be put there for protection from homosexual
assaults. Prisoners are warned against AIDS, but not issued with
condoms.) Both prisoners and staff emphasized, though, that gang
activity had decreased and that, particularly in the medium prison, the
gangs did not hold sway to the same extent as they had done in the
past. This was supported by the fact that, unlike several other prisons
in the region, there had not been a gang murder at Helderstroom in
recent years.
The attitudes of the staff as a group are also interesting. In many
ways the staff facilities and the inter-personal relationships reflect the
apartheid structures of a small South African town. The separate
residential areas which I have described are mirrored in separate
messes and clubs and even in the separate buses that take the children
to their segregated schools in the nearest town. The only mixing
between racial groups at a social level appears to be a joint Rugby
team. Yet, at the official level, there have been changes. The chief
social worker and the full-time chairman of the Institutional
Committee are both ‘Coloured’ and both hold the rank of captain. As
far as I could observe, they are accorded the formal respect due to
their rank. (They outranked most other prison staff members. In the
military hierarchy of the Prisons Service the officer in charge of the
whole Helderstroom complex has the rank of lieutenant-colonel and
the heads of the medium and maximum prisons are both majors.) The
prisoners did not perceive a great difference between the attitudes of
‘White’ and ‘Coloured’ staff.
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VII
What, one wonders, would John Howard have made of
Helderstroom? He might well have been impressed by the cleanliness,
by the situation of the prison, by the prison garb and, perhaps, by the
food. Yet he would have found much to criticize. Foremost would
undoubtedly have been the accommodation. There is simply not
enough space at Helderstroom to accommodate all the inmates
adequately, let alone to meet Howard’s ideal of ‘so many small
rooms or cabins that each criminal may sleep alone’ (Howard 1929:
21). A space of 1.67 sq. m to lay down a thin mat amongst forty-five
others is not acceptable by any standards. The lack of privacy in
general is extreme. The meals, even if sufficiently nourishing, are
taken in the most congested and undignified circumstances
imaginable: six hundred prisoners are crouched tightly together back
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NOTES
1 Section 44 (1) (f) of the Prisons Act 8 of 1959.
2 Section 44 (1) of the Prisons Act 8 of 1959.
3 Hugh Lewin’s Bandiet (1976), Harmondsworth: Penguin, is now available
in South Africa after having been prohibited for many years. Breyten
Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984),
Johannesburg: Taurus, has been freely available in South Africa since its
publication.
Some attempt was made to restrict the distribution of the doctoral
thesis of J.Mihalik (Gevangenisstraf: Die Noodsaaklikheid vir
Alternatiewe Strawwe (1986) (unpublished LLD thesis, Pretoria:
University of South Africa), because of the inaccuracies which it is alleged
to contain, but Mihalik has subsequently published on aspects of his
work in the respected South African Law Journal: J.Mihalik (1988)
‘Executive manipulation of prison sentences: has the sentencing authority
moved to the executive?’ SALJ 105:494–518, and J.Mihalik (1989) ‘“The
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HELDERSTROOM PRISON, SOUTH AFRICA
REFERENCES
Department of Justice (1988) Report of the Department of Justice for the
Republic of South Africa for the period 1 July 1987 to 30 June 1988
(referred to as the Annual Report).
Hansard (1989) House of Assembly Debates, Questions and Replies col. 856,
26 April.
Howard, J. (1929) The State of the Prisons, Everyman’s Library, London: J.M.
Dent .
Potts, L.W. (1984) ‘Custodial detention and regime maintenance in the Republic
of South Africa’, New England Journal of Civil and Criminal Confinement
10: 301–52.
Stuart, K. (1986) The Newspaperman’s Guide to the Law, Durban:
Butterworth.
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enabled the house of detention to be run without financial aid from the
city government. Second, it was reasoned, the prisoners, who were
recruited from the ranks of vagabonds and other socially useless and
dangerous idlers, through hard labour (sometimes fourteen hours a day)
could be reformed into hard-working members of society who, after
their release, would be able to earn an honest living.
In the seventeenth century the countless visitors to the rasping house
from England, France, Scandinavia, Hungary, Italy and Germany took
home enthusiastic reports. This enthusiasm was not always based on the
humanitarian starting-points of Coornhert and Spieghel. In his study,
The Embarrassment of Riches, an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the
Golden Age, Simon Schama relates that many of these foreign visitors
actually ‘were struck by the formidable system of disciplinary
punishments that backed up the house regime’ (Schama 1987:23). This
was another factor to which the Dutch prison system owed its fame.
The system varied from deprivation of meat rations to floggings at the
post with a ‘bull’s pistle’.
The reputation of the Dutch prison system was also partly based on
fiction and hearsay. The most persistent fiction is that of the water cell,
mentioned in many reports. Inmates of the rasping house who refused
to work were said to be moved to more industry by a treatment in this
cell. The earliest description of this dates from 1612:
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with the economic crisis of the same period, and which ultimately led
to a complete deadlock in the penal system. The police could no longer
carry out their responsibilities in the desired manner. The Public
Prosecution Office and the judiciary were seriously overtaxed and the
prison system had to contend with a shortage of cells. This shortage was
largely due to a lack of good alternatives for short-term imprisonment
on the one hand and the imposition of more and longer prison sentences
on the other, mostly in connection with illegal drug trafficking. The
concomitant increase in pre-trial detention, for which no adequate
alternative exists, has also contributed to a continuing crisis in the
prison system. These factors combined have led the government to
publish a detailed policy plan, Samenleving en Criminaliteit (Society and
Criminality) proposing a long-term solution to these problems by
combating crime. The most important pillars upon which this plan rests
are:
To bring this about, it has been suggested that the threat of punishment
for a number of crimes be heightened, that new penal provisions be
created, and that, together with an intensified tracing and prosecuting
policy, prison capacity be considerably expanded. Realization of the
latter is being pursued with such industry that in less than ten years
prison capacity will be tripled.
The favourable reputation of the Dutch penal system is largely due
to its starting-points and aims. While these—its tradition—have not
been affected by the new policy plan, the same cannot be said of the
process of implementation. There has been a tightening of the regime
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and the security measures within the prison (for example, mandatory
urine tests for drugs and frisking), economizing on social, medical
and psychological assistance, decreased facilities for sports and
recreation, forced carrying out of prison sentences in institutions not
meant for that purpose and the re-use of buildings which had earlier
been written off—creating a discrepancy between reputation and
reality. For a Dutch prisoner today, confinement in a container is not,
in Schama’s words, a ‘bizarre fable or a sadistic fantasy’ but an
everyday reality, in spite of all the idealistic aims of the prison
system.
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for students during the same period, except for the omnipresent
electronic surveillance. Other institutions, in particular the open and
semi-open ones, are housed in rebuilt barracks, in a former boarding
house for migrant workers, in former monasteries and in an old
mansion. The newest architectural design is a stack of containers, or
prefabricated sections, placed in the yard of a prison or house of
detention.
The average ratio of staff members to inmates in these institutions is
0.9:1; this includes everyone from the prison director to the organist and
from the prison officers to the librarian and the psychologist. Together,
the prison officers and workshop supervisors form about 60 per cent of
the total staff.
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In certain cases the prisoner may be awarded money or some other form
of compensation. Both the plaintiff-prisoner and the director of the
institution can appeal to a higher body in The Hague.
Apart from the fact that the complaint is not handled in public, the
complaint procedure is in all aspects covered by legal guarantees. It is
a contestable procedure in which both sides are heard, with the
possibility of conducting a defence and hearing witnesses. The prisoner-
plaintiff has a right to free legal assistance and the decision must be
communicated in writing and accounted for to the party involved. 13
Together with this advanced elaboration of the prisoner’s right of
complaint—a development which according to Kelk is unique in the
world (Kelk 1983:8)—the 1977 law involved a number of alterations in
the disciplinary punishments to be applied within the institution. Among
others, the following were abolished: confinement in a punishment cell;
putting in chains; provision of only bread and water rations;
withholding of visitation, of the right of correspondence, of reading
material, of canteen articles, etc. In their place, new disciplinary
measures were instituted: isolation in the cell for a maximum of two
weeks, a fine and a reprimand. Partly in connection with these far-
reaching revisions of the Prison Principles Act, the Prison Decree-Law
was also improved in many of its aspects. These include: allowing more
extensive contacts outside the institution (correspondence, telephone
conversations, improvement in the way information is provided,
including to non-Dutch-speaking prisoners, abolition of mandatory
prison uniforms and broadening of the regulations for leave). The 1977
complaints and appeal legislation has given rise to an extensive
jurisprudence which, in Kelk’s words, can be characterized by
‘refinement of justice, further elaboration of norms and rules and filling
gaps in the regulations, in regard to both material and procedural norms
in the detention situation’ (Kelk 1983:8).
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his return to society’ (Prison Principles Act 1977, article 57). It has come
under pressure in recent years because of economy measures and the
filling of penitentiary institutions beyond their capacity. Nevertheless,
preparation for return to society is still the main principle determining
what happens inside the institution. It is realized in many ways, not so
much in the sense of granting favours, but rather by offering facilities
to which every prisoner is entitled.
Thus, every institution provides the opportunity for education
and training, for social and religious counselling differentiated as
much as possible according to the various beliefs, for courses in
creative and social skills, for taking part in discussion groups and
for the use of the library facilities. Specialized officials have been
appointed to fulfil all these tasks. Together with the provision of
these internal facilities, the attempt is made to hinder as little as
possible contact with the outside world. In practice, this means that
the prisoner has visiting rights (a minimum of one hour every
fourteen days), the right to free correspondence with anyone (in a
number of institutions without supervision of the director) and,
depending on the regime, the right to make and receive telephone
calls and to go out on leave. Although still considered a favour,
various forms of leave have in recent years increasingly been
granted.
In addition, prisoners are allowed to have radio and television in their
cells. This is done not only to improve knowledge of the outside world
but also to save on personnel costs. Video programmes are increasingly
replacing active recreational facilities. The communal execution of the
prison sentence, and the differentiation and selection to be discussed
below, are also ways of putting into effect the resocialization principle.
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Centralized management
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, prison management
has become more and more centralized. This is true of the relations
within the institution as well as the relations between the institution
and the Department of Justice. Final authority over all prisons is in
the hands of the Minister of Justice. He determines the domestic
regulations of the various institutions as well as the limits within
which the prison director must remain in carrying out his duties. The
authority of the department over the individual institutions is further
emphasized in a number of regulations. For instance, permission to
interrupt a sentence or to leave an institution must be granted by the
minister; he also regulates the diet of the prisoners. However, the all-
powerful minister can sometimes be forced by law to make
concessions. Moreover, the legal provisions in which certain powers
of the minister are set down are rather ‘openly’ formulated. The
minister can do almost anything, but does not have to do everything.
In practice this means more autonomy for the prison director. This
tendency has been quite noticeable in the last few years. Recently,
directors have been able to establish their own personnel policy and
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Detention in practice
The organization of the Dutch prison system broadly outlined above can
be seen as well thought-out, advanced and consistent. But it is not just
the theoretical concept which is important here, but rather
implementation in daily practice. In this respect the picture is less
optimistic. This is not so much due to shortcomings of the concept itself,
but rather to the cell shortage, the far-reaching economy measures and
the concomitant hardening of the penitentiary and criminal law climate.
This has increasingly led to the overshadowing of penitentiary practice
by a return to repressive measures.
An important factor is also the change in prison population. We have
already mentioned the sharp increase in unconditional, long prison
sentences. While up till now the majority of prisoners were those serving
short prison terms, there is now a tendency—in itself praiseworthy—to
replace the short prison term of up to six months with alternatives not
involving deprivation of liberty, in order that the existing and still to be
realized prison capacity can be reserved for long prison sentences. This
means that the composition of the prison population is subject to
considerable change. Drug addicts, foreigners, mentally disturbed
individuals and hardcore criminals now form its nucleus. Problems
resulting from this are: the danger of contamination by AIDS,
deterioration of relations among the prisoners (drug dealing, corruption,
threats, use of violence), racial conflicts, anxiety among personnel and
prisoners. Add to this the buildings, which very often are out of date,
or the emergency facilities which have hastily been put together, the
personnel shortage (not only quantitative but also qualitative), and the
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relative decrease in funds, and here is a fact of life for which the
theoretical concept has no answer.
In this state of affairs the differentiation and resocialization principles
are losing their meaning. The penitentiary authorities, headed by the
Ministry of Justice, are looking for an answer to this problem, but
increasingly less in accordance with the principles described above, and
more in measures for supervision, security and repression. The
atmosphere from day to day is determined by compulsory urine tests,
increased supervision of visiting, body searches, diminishing recreational
possibilities and restrictions in granting leave. All this leads to tension
not only among the prisoners but also among the personnel, not to
mention the tension between personnel and prisoners. Such a climate is
not conducive to a humane and resocialization-oriented treatment.
Under these circumstances the danger exists that even good prison rules
and regulations, still one of the most important pillars on which the
penitentiary concept is based, may not work or may even be counter-
productive.
Introduction
In the following section we describe one of the sixty-seven Dutch
penitentiary institutions. For several reasons, we have chosen a
remand prison. Most prisons are of this type and most prisoners are
detained in such an institution. Pre-trial custody alone accounts for
almost 40 per cent of the entire Dutch prison population. 15 Despite
what the name suggests, a remand prison is not only used for pre-
trial detention, but also, because of the cell shortage, for short and
medium sentences. The remand prison also functions as a prison for
fine-defaulters, as a temporary holding place for deported foreigners
and as an intermediate station for long-term prisoners and mentally
disturbed delinquents waiting to be placed in a long-term prison or
psychiatric institution. The remand prison therefore has a more
heterogeneous population and presents a more representative picture
than a specialized prison. In addition, the Breda Remand Prison is
one well known to one of the authors, a member of the supervisory
board.
The Breda Remand Prison is intended mainly for male prisoners. It
has a capacity of 107 places, 8 of which are intended for temporary
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Later we will see what these objectives actually mean with regard to
how things work in the institution. But, in the next two sections we
will first take a closer look at the Breda Remand Prison’s building
and the security measures. Some years after completion of the dome-
prison, or panopticon, in Breda, work was begun at the rear on a
new court-house and a house of detention. This came into use in
1892. The Prison Principles Act of 1951 designated it both as a house
of detention for men and women and as a government workhouse for
women. This last designation was short-lived, as less than a year
later its function was taken over by the house of detention in
Middelburg. Since the women’s section was closed in 1960 it had one
function, as a house of detention for men. This changed again on 1
January 1990, when it reverted to offering facilities for both men and
women.
Because of the increasing need for special prisons for women the
house of detention was then reserved for women. The men’s house of
detention was moved to the container cells (k) and to the adjacent
panopticon (j). The building has been modernized several times over the
years. In the 1970s, a new three-storey administration building was
built, with room on the ground floor for the reception, administration
and management (c). On the second storey there are a room for staff
members, a library, an education centre and a recreation hall, while on
the top floor the staff members’ rooms and a hall for religious services
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Security
Security has been considerably improved as a result of the above
mentioned renovation. There has been an effort at eliminating the flaws
in the security system and, among other things, the following have been
put into use:
1 A new, protected entrance area (a), with a waiting room for visitors;
it is equipped with a detection-gate;
2 A new visiting hall for visitors and new consulting rooms for legal
counsel, rehabilitation, etc., the use of which prevents much of the
movement of prisoners and visitors in and through the entire
institution;
3 Observation by camera along the wall of the yard where prisoners
take exercise, a measure which further improves security;
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The regime
A humane treatment, aimed at limiting the damaging effects of
detention and emphasizing individual assistance alongside security, is
the basis for the regime. We will now take a close look at how this ideal
is realized.
In the first place the prisoners at Breda should be suitably received,
cared for and counselled. At first sight, the arrangement of the building
does not lend itself to such an individually-oriented approach. The
prisoners are housed in a cell building of three storeys. There is an open
connection between the upper floors, allowing open and direct
communication between them, and there are short walkways. The
choice of an identical regime for all prisoners was partly due to this
building arrangement and partly in order to maximize capacity. The
disadvantages are that the prisoner may very quickly feel lost in the
totality of the institution and that there is little room for personal
contact between guards and prisoners.
Another objection is that no special facilities can be provided for the
large group of alcohol and drug addicts, or for the mentally disturbed.
The latter are being found more often in remand prisons as a result of
capacity shortages in specialized mental institutions. The possibility for
treatment for them within the remand prison is practically nil. The
absence of a differentiated regime causes much tension in connection
with the drug-related power structure, corruption of prisoners and
supervisory measures on the part of the prison management (urine tests,
cell inspection, visitation) which do not only affect addicted prisoners.
The fear of the spreading of the AIDS virus among prisoners and
personnel has recently arisen as a new problem. It is handled
pragmatically, among other things by giving direct information within
the institution and by handing out condoms to prisoners who request
them. Since there has been no final decision on the national level about
this problem, the prison management does not make syringes available
to addicts. A compulsory AIDS test has been rejected in The
Netherlands for ethical reasons.
In order to keep the negative effects of the uniform regime to a
minimum, the prisoners have been divided among six living sectors. The
prisoners in each are exercised together, participate jointly in the various
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ANTON M.VAN KALMTHOUT AND DIRK VAN DER LANDEN
Personnel
Approximately sixty prison officers have a central role in the treatment
of prisoners. Since 1977, the majority of prison personnel are no longer
guards in the traditional sense, but officers who in addition to a security
function also have the job of caring for and counselling the prisoners.
At present prison officers share the responsibility for the treatment and
counselling of prisoners and are very much involved in making
recommendations about them. They are also expected to run activity
programmes in the areas of recreation, sport, education and social and
personal development completely on their own. This has had far-
reaching effects on the quality of people sought for the position of
officer.
While earlier a secondary school education was considered sufficient,
supplemented by a short period of internal training, an increasingly
specialized professional training is now required. Much attention is
given to work counselling and in-service training. Nevertheless, many
prison officers find the combination of security and counselling difficult.
It is thus not surprising that the rate of absence due to illness is very
high among prison officers; in 1987 it amounted to 14 per cent of the
total work time. However, the character of most officers shows that
resocialization is no empty promise.
In addition to the 60 prison officers there are 45 functionaries
associated with the institution, 10 on a part-time basis. Besides
management, administration and the 5 guards in the traditional sense (a
total of 21 persons), we find among the functionaries: 3 religious
counsellors, a doctor, a psychologist, a work counsellor, a social worker,
2 nurses, 2 organists, a teacher, a sports instructor, a librarian, 7 work
superintendents, a bath superintendent, a canteen manager and a
seamstress. Outside experts are also involved, such as: the district
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BREDA PRISON, HOLLAND
psychiatrist, the Islamic imam, the consultation bureau for alcohol and
drugs, rehabilitation services, and the bureau of legal assistance. This
last bureau holds a legal counselling hour for prisoners once a week in
the prison.
The staff to prisoner ratio of 1:1 coincides with the national average.
It is the most important expenditure in the prison system. The total cost
of operating one prison cell per day, excluding personnel costs, is about
170 florins (about $80); including personnel costs, it comes to about
400 florins (about $190).
Activities
The prisoners in Breda are able to take part in a broad range of
activities. On the one hand this lessens the problem of idleness and
boredom, and on the other the prisoner has to a certain extent the
opportunity to plan his own day and thereby increase his self-
sufficiency. This is also an attempt to check the process of
depersonalization which is common in a total institution. For this reason
too, the prisoners do not wear prison clothes, but are allowed to wear
their own clothing. These are not to be considered favours, but rights
to which the prisoner is entitled. This is especially true of activities that
can be considered to be derived from their constitutional rights, such as
the right to education, freedom of religion and freedom of association
and assembly. At the same time, however, the prisoner who has chosen
a certain activity is expected fully to participate in it and to do so with
motivation.
The prescribed planning of the day enables as many prisoners as
possible to take part in the programmes on offer. The day is divided into
blocks, each with its own available facilities of which certain living-
groups may make use. Some living-groups work during the morning
block and have their recreational activities in the afternoon, while other
groups have the reverse schedule. The activities in question can be
divided into: labour or work, sports and fitness, education and library,
arts and crafts, and group work led by the probation service. The idea
that work has an important function in the resocialization process has
remained unchanged since the days of the rasping and spinning houses.
It is compulsory for prisoners. Non-prisoners, those on remand, also
have a right to work.
In practice, more than 90 per cent of all inmates in Breda take part
in work. Those who do not remain locked in their cells during work
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ANTON M.VAN KALMTHOUT AND DIRK VAN DER LANDEN
time. With the exception of weekends, the prisoners work a little over
three hours a day. The work is done in five work-rooms and consists of
the manufacture of fish boxes, packing and assembly work, metal work
and textile work. It allows the prisoners to earn a maximum of 27.25
florins (about $13) a week.
Forty-five to 60 per cent of prisoners regularly take part in physical
exercise and fitness-training lessons. At a fixed time the prisoners are
called up in large or small groups to take part in various forms of
exercise which are organized in a completely furnished sports hall, a
fitness area and in the outside accommodation. There is an ample
selection of sport activities: games such as football, hockey, volley-ball,
basketball, badminton, and also fitness training, gymnastics and
athletics. The prisoner may participate in these activities a minimum of
twice and a maximum of four times a week.
Much attention is given to education. The teaching staff give courses
in remedial education, literacy and social training. There are one Dutch
and three foreign language courses, courses in secondary school subjects
and in traffic education. In the education annex of the library, which
was completely renovated in 1987, there is also a language laboratory.
Efforts in education, however, are frustrated by the relatively short stay
of prisoners in the institution and the resultant lack of continuity. In
1984 two small rooms were designated for arts and crafts, one for
drawing and painting and the other for woodworking. The prisoners
can participate once or twice a week in these activities; a maximum of
six prisoners may at the same time be in one room. The probation
service in the court district of Breda conducts group work with the
purpose of helping people to meet one another, to exchange experiences
and to help both one another and themselves. The groups are centred
around a certain theme, such as addiction, justice and detention and the
relationships of prisoners.
Daily routine
As an example of an average day in the prisoner’s life in the Breda
Remand Prison, we have chosen a Monday schedule:
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BREDA PRISON, HOLLAND
We have given a schedule for a group that works in the morning. The
schedule for prisoners who work in the afternoon (from 13.30) is
reversed.
Some facilities are available on other days than Mondays. The
dentist has his consultation hours on Tuesdays from 8.30 to 14.00,
discussion groups led by the probation service take place on Tuesdays,
Wednesdays and Thursdays from 16.00 to 16.45, and the canteen is
open on Thursdays from 8.00 to 12.00 and from 13.00 to 17.00. This
is run by an outside grocer. The prisoners may spend up to 60 florins
(about $25) a week on consumer goods. Payment is made via a current
account system within the prison. Prisoners are not allowed to handle
cash.
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ANTON M.VAN KALMTHOUT AND DIRK VAN DER LANDEN
Conclusion
Although the Remand Prison at Breda has not remained untouched by
economy measures, shortage of capacity and the changing nature of the
prison population, the climate has remained fairly moderate and
individually-oriented. There is seldom serious tension among the
prisoners themselves or between prisoners and guards. Many problems
are solved informally. This relative stability is also evident from the
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BREDA PRISON, HOLLAND
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ANTON M.VAN KALMTHOUT AND DIRK VAN DER LANDEN
NOTES
1 For an overview of the history of the Dutch prison system and penal theory
see: Hallema, A. (1958) Geschiedenis van het Gevangeniswezen,
hoofdzakelijk in Nederland, The Hague, and de Monte-Verloren, J. Ph.
(1937) Geschiedenis der Nederlandse Strafrechtswetenschap, Amsterdam.
2 A rasp was a coarse kind of file, used for scraping, rubbing down or
finishing wood.
3 Historie van de Wonderlijcke Mirakelen, die in menichte ghebeurt zijn, en
de noch dagelijk ghebeuren, binnen de vermaerde Coop-stad Aemstelredam:
In een plaats ghenaempt het Tucht-huys, gheleghen op de Heylighewegh
(1612), Amsterdam. The English translation of this fragment is by Simon
Schama, in The Embarrassment of Riches (op.cit.), p.23.
4 `Automatic early release, however, does not apply to those sentenced to life
imprisonment. Such a prisoner can, via an appeal, ask that his sentence be
commuted to a determinate one. He may then be released after serving two-
thirds of his time.
5 See especially the departmental note Samenleving en Criminaliteit, een
beleidsplan voor de komende jaren (Society and Criminality, a policy for
the coming year) (1985), in which this issue is dealt with.
6 See Centraal Bureau voor do Statistiek (Dutch Central Statistical Office)
(1987) Criminaliteit en Strafrechtspleging (Criminality and Criminal Law
Procedure) and Interdepartementale Stuurgroep Alcohol-en Drugbeleid
(ISAD) (Interdepartmental Steering Committee for Policy on Alcohol and
Drugs) (1986) Heroverweging 1986 Drug-en alcoholbeleid
(Reconsideration 1986 of policy on drugs and alcohol), annex 6, pp. 5–6.
7 See Interdepartementale Stuurgroep Alcohol-en Drugbeleid (ISAD) (1985)
Drugbeleid in beweging (Drug policy in motion), p. 11; Erkelens, L.H.
(1986) Drugvrije detentie (Drugless detention), The Hague: Government
Advisory Group, p. 13; and the report (1985) Drugvrije detentie (Drugless
detention), The Hague: Government Advisory Group.
8 See Structuurplan Penitentiare Capaciteit (Master Plan Penitentiary
Capacity) (1985), The Hague: Justice Department.
9 These figures are based on the recent report Voorzieningenbeleid
delinquentenzorg en jeugdinrichtingen: 1990–1994 (Policy for facilities for
delinquents and institutions for youth: 1990–1994) (1989), The Hague:
Justice Department, and on two reports De capaciteitsprobelm bij het
gevangeniswezen (Capacity problems in the prison system) (June 1981),
The Hague: Justice Department, and De capaciteitsbenhoefte van het
gevangeniswezen (Capacity needs of the prison system) (January 1984), The
Hague: Justice Department.
10 See among others Peters, A.A.G. (1972) Het rechtskarakter van het
strafrecht (The legal character of criminal law), Deventer; Kelk, C. (1976)
Rapport rechtspositie gedetineerden (Report on the Legal Status of
Prisoners), Utrecht; The Kempe-bundle: Recht-Macht-Manipulatie (Law-
Power-Manipulation) (1976) published by the Utrecht school, Utrecht;
Kelk, C. (1978) Recht voor gedetineerden (Justice for Prisoners), Alphen
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BREDA PRISON, HOLLAND
aan de Rijn; and Kort begrip van het detentierecht (A short explanation of
the detention law) (1983), Nijmergen.
11 This commission was established by the Department of Justice on 5
November 1964. In 1967 the commission issued a final report which also
contained a bill. A summary of the events that led to the change in the law
and its further history was given by A.C.Guerts in his valedictory speech:
‘De rechtspositie van de gevangene of hoe het was, is en zou kunnen zijn’
(‘The legal status of the prisoner: how it was, is and might be’) Deventer,
1981.
12 Article 57, Beginselenwet Gevangeniswezen (Prison Principles Act).
13 For further information on the complaints and appeals law, see: Kelk, C.
(1978) Recht foor gedetineerden, op.cit.; Balkema, J.P. (1979) Klachtrecht
voor gevangenen (Complaints law for prisoners), Alphen aan de Rijn;
Jonkers, W.H.A., et al. (1979) Het penitentiar recht (Penitentiary law),
Arnhem; Van Ratingen, P. (1983) Recht en gevangenschap (Law and
imprisonment), Deventer.
14 Report of the Commissie voor de verdere uitbouw van het
Gevangeniswezen (Commission for the further development and extension
of the prison system) (1947), Staatsdrukkerij, The Hague, p. 9.
15 On 1 February 1989 in The Netherlands there were 5,291 persons
imprisoned. The percentage of unconvicted prisoners, which are almost
always kept in houses of detention, was at that time 38.5 per cent. See
Prison Bulletin 10, December 1988, p. 20.
REFERENCES
Coornhert, D.V. (1587) Boeven-tucht ofte Middelen tot mindering der
schadelyke ledighghanghers (Scoundrel reform, or the means of reducing
dangerous idlers), first published in Amsterdam.
Geurts, A.C. (1962) De rechtspositie van de gevangene (The legal status of the
prisoner), Assen.
Howard, J. (1977) The State of the Prisons (bicentennial edn, facsimile reprint
of first edn of 1777), Abingdon.
Jonkers, W.H.A., et al. (1979) Het penitentiar recht (Penitentiary Law),
Arnhem: Gouda Quent .
Kelk, C. (1983) Recht voor Geinstitutionaliseerden (Justice for the
Institutionalised), Arnhem.
Ministry of Justice (1988) Beleidsplan huis van bewaring Breda (Policy plan,
Breda Remand Prison), Breda, supplement 3.
Schama, S. (1987) The Embarrassment of Riches, an Interpretation of Dutch
Culture in the Golden Age, London: Collins.
Staatscourant, government newspaper, 28 August 1989.
Teldersstichting, B.M. (1988) Strafecht en rechtshandhaving (Criminal law and
law and order), The Hague: Liberal Party Working Group Report.
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ANTON M.VAN KALMTHOUT AND DIRK VAN DER LANDEN
van Veen, Th.W. (1986) ‘Wat beneemt de vrijheidsstraf?’ (‘What does prison
take away?’), in 100 jaar vrijheidsstraf (100 years of imprisonment),
Groningen.
118
Chapter Six
INTRODUCTION
Nicaragua is a nation in transition, and its prison system reflects the
remarkable and sweeping changes in life and government since the end
of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. These changes, such as the transfer
of land to co-operatives and poorer peasants, the literacy campaign and
the present drive to clean up the country’s water sources, all
demonstrate a thrust of government policy very different from the
regime which ended in 1979. In many ways the Nicaraguan prison
system is an exemplar of this shift in political philosophy and policy.
Many of the current members and officials of the Nicaraguan
government were held in the nation’s prisons prior to the revolution. A
government with such a high proportion of its members having first-
hand and intimate knowledge of prison life is rare, and explains, in part,
the equally rare views of the Nicaraguan government on the nature of
imprisonment. On the continuum of penal philosophy which stretches
from the punitive to the reformative, the Nicaraguan penal system has
placed itself on the far edge of reform.
The pursuit of these principles by the Nicaraguan penal system occurs
within strict shortages of basic resources. Two political situations have
detracted from the physical improvement of the prison system. The first
of these and the most immediate was the war which was fought along
the Honduran border and elsewhere between the Nicaraguan forces and
the ‘Contras’, who were armed and supported by direct grants from the
US Congress. Government resources have been constantly diminished by
the need to prioritize defence.
In addition to the consumption of resources by the Contra war, it
might well be expected that military invasion would harden government
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MATAGALPA PRISON, NICARAGUA
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122
MATAGALPA PRISON, NICARAGUA
MATAGALPA PRISON
The prison in Matagalpa had been built to hold a maximum of 600,
and in January 1989 there were 530 occupants. Food consisted of a
relentless but sufficient diet of rice and beans (typical of the
population in general). Most of the prison seemed to be laid out in
large open ‘wards’ with bunk beds rather than individual cells. There
was a high standard of cleanliness throughout the prison. By the
standards of some prisons in economically developed countries,
Matagalpa prison was spartan and comfortless, but conditions seemed
no worse than those faced by most of the rural population in
Nicaragua.
Underlying the programme at Matagalpa is the belief that people
are able to change in fundamental ways. The analysis of crime put
forward by the present Nicaraguan leadership is one based mainly on
social deprivation, lack of opportunities and corruption by values of
greed and individualism. The Education Officer of Matagalpa Prison
went as far as to say that when systems of exploitation can be brought
to an end, crime as a major social phenomenon will disappear. This
philosophy is matched by the general willingness of the Nicaraguan
people to accept ex-offenders back into the community. It may be
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GINNY BAUMANN AND KEVIN BALES
concluded that without the experience of events since 1979, this ‘faith
in the possibility of change’ could not have become the guiding
principle of the prisons.
If the aim of the prison system is to reform the individual, the
method is education. This understanding of the role of education can
partly be explained by the experience of the literacy campaign which
was carried out throughout Nicaragua shortly after the revolution.
This massive mobilization against illiteracy, mainly put into effect by
older schoolchildren, brought basic reading and writing skills to all
but 12 per cent of the population. Only months before this campaign,
over half of the population were illiterate. The Nicaraguan
government explains that this immediate involvement of the rural
population and the huge changes and challenges which literacy
brought to their lives is one of the main reasons that the revolution
has been sustained.
In the prisons, formal education is available in the subjects taught in
Nicaraguan schools, so that prisoners can complete the six grades of
elementary schooling. It is worth stressing that all of this teaching is
done by the prisoners themselves rather than by prison officers.
Likewise any prisoner with skills in a basic trade will be encouraged to
share them with other inmates. In the prison at Matagalpa, prisoners
spoken with there seemed proud of the responsibilities they held as
teachers and trainers in the prison. Prisoners being trained in woodwork
explained that their major frustration was with the shortage of tools and
materials.
Prisoners’ education is enhanced by a wide range of cultural
activities. The performance of dance and drama attended during the
inspection of Matagalpa Prison was a good testimony to the efforts
being made to draw out the creativity and self-expression of the
prisoner. Inmates had the chance to join special groups for music,
drama, dance and art. Complaints were of insufficient guitar strings,
paints and brushes. Until the United States sanctions on Nicaragua and
its backing for the Contra war come to an end, these limitations on
living standards will continue to affect prisoners as much as they affect
the rest of the population.
The education programme is an essential part of the five-stage
progression through the prison system. The prisoners’ willingness to
participate in cultural, training and education activities is partly what
determines the speed with which they move through the system and the
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MATAGALPA PRISON, NICARAGUA
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GINNY BAUMANN AND KEVIN BALES
126
MATAGALPA PRISON, NICARAGUA
PRE-TRIAL DETENTION
While there is sufficient evidence of protection of prisoners within the
prison system itself, questions must be raised about the use of pre-trial
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MATAGALPA PRISON, NICARAGUA
REFERENCES
Americas Watch (1984) Human Rights in Nicaragua, New York.
Amnesty International (1982) Report of the Amnesty International Missions to
the Republic of Nicaragua—August 1979, January 1980, and August 1980,
London.
Catholic Institute for International Relations (1987) Right to Survive— Human
Rights in Nicaragua, London.
IACHR , Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (1983) Report on the
situation of human rights in the Republic of Nicaragua, Washington, DC.
Independent, 14 March 1989, ‘Nicaraguans Told Price of Peace’.
McCabe, B. (1986) Report on recidivism quoted in Central American Historical
Institute Update, vol . 5, no. 31, 24 July.
129
Chapter Seven
NYKÖPING CLOSED
NEIGHBOURHOOD PRISON,
SWEDEN
NORMAN BISHOP
INTRODUCTION
The Howard League’s request was for a description of the general
characteristics of the Swedish prison system and a more detailed account
of a typical Swedish prison taking adult male prisoners. But what is
typical? Typical of what? What criteria shall be used to determine
typicality? And in what sense can one prison be typical of an entire
system?
Let us leave these questions for the moment. In fact, the prison I have
chosen to describe is a medium security neighbourhood prison.
Explaining why I have chosen such a prison as ‘typical’ and describing
it more closely will make more sense after a general description of
imprisonment in Sweden.
IMPRISONMENT IN SWEDEN
Frequency of use
When compared with the frequency of use of all sanctions, it is apparent
from Table 7.1 that imprisonment has been and still is used sparingly.
Of course, the table shows only the relative and proportional use of
imprisonment. How many sentenced prisoners are received each year?
What is the size of the prison population on average throughout the
year?
As Table 7.2 shows, there has been an increase in the number
received over the last twenty years but the size of the average prison
population has remained fairly stable.
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Offences
What are the offences that have been committed by those that the courts
send to prison?
In 1987, 24 per cent of nearly 15,000 receptions had been found
guilty of drunken driving, 23 per cent were guilty of some kind of
theft, 16 per cent were guilty of crimes of violence, 7 per cent were
guilty of serious drug offences, 6 per cent had committed fraud, 3
per cent had been sentenced for offending against military
regulations; the remaining 21 per cent had been sentenced for
various offences under special legislation, for instance, the Aliens
Act. About 11 per cent of prisoners were sentenced in the same
judgement for two or more offences carrying similar scales of
punishment (KVS 1988).
A sentence to imprisonment for serious drug offences usually means
that the offence was trafficking in drugs. Personal drug misuse per se
does not lead to imprisonment. Of course, those who traffic in drugs
may or may not be drug misusers.
The day-fine system as it is used in Sweden means that for many
years now no prisoners have been received for non-payment of fines.
Under this system, which is also used in Germany and which, in an
adapted form, is now being proposed in England and Wales, the amount
of the fine is linked to disposable income and the ability to pay. Thus
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a particular offence may merit a fine of 30 day units, in the court’s view.
The actual amount of cash to be paid is determined by calculating the
defendant’s disposable income after certain essential deductions have
been made. The balance, reduced to a daily sum, is then multiplied by
the number of days so that the court knows it is within the capacity of
the defendant to pay. A defendant on state benefit might finish with a
fairly nominal daily sum; a prosperous businessman very much more.
The aim is to equalize the impact of the penalty as well as to avoid
imprisonment for fine default.
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NYKÖPING PRISON, SWEDEN
Introduction
It is not difficult to come into Nyköping1 Prison as a visitor if one has
some serious purpose in mind. I telephoned the governor, explained why
I wanted to visit and was invited to come at once. Of course, I have
worked in the prison administration and am known to the governor but
earlier this year Newsweek had been there and during my visit a San
Francisco lawyer telephoned and asked to visit. Permission was given
immediately.
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Staff
In addition to the governor and a social work assistant, there are 17
basic grade prison officers, 3 principal officers, a chief officer, a
workshop chief and 3 workshop instructors, a senior nurse as well as
clerical and kitchen staff—35 persons in all.
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The prisoners
When I visited the prison in September 1989 there were 31 prisoners
there. Only one of them was a woman and she was leaving the same
day. (I shall later discuss the problems arising when there is a minority
of women prisoners in a predominantly male prisoner environment.)
About three-quarters of the prisoners come from the town and its
environs whilst about one-quarter come from more distant towns in the
county or, in some cases, even further afield.
During the budgetary year 1988–9, at least 57 per cent of prisoners
received were known to have been using drugs during the two months
immediately prior to coming into prison. Three-quarters of these drug
misusers were either injecting or taking drugs in some other way daily
(Krantz and Nilsson 1989). A minority of prisoners were in prison for
the first time; most had either been in prison before or at least been on
probation, often three or four times.
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NYKÖPING PRISON, SWEDEN
engaged for half of the day in a home economics course run by the
prison authorities in the well-appointed double kitchen mentioned
above. The course lasts five weeks and is apparently much appreciated
as a source of home cooking.
Prisoners are paid for both work and study. Average work and study
wages are around 350–400 Swedish crowns per week (approximately
$55–65).
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NORMAN BISHOP
a suitable time for visiting once a week, with an extra visit possible on
the weekend if space allows. Weekday visits are allowed from 17.15 to
19.15 and at two-hour intervals on the weekend beginning at 9.45.
Inmates change clothes under supervision before and after a visit and
may be searched.
Drugs
Inmates are routinely urine tested for the presence of cannabis,
amphetamines and opiates on arrival and thereafter as necessary to
prevent drugs from being smuggled into, or used at, the prison. The
analysis of urine samples is an expensive business. Routine analyses
make use of an automated process which has a 95 per cent probability
of being correct. A higher level of certainty requires a verification by an
independent method, which adds to the cost. An analysis for cannabis,
the opiates and the amphetamines costs 75 Swedish crowns or about
$11. The national bill for urine analyses during the budgetary year
1988–9 was just over 4.3 million Swedish crowns or a little over
$650,000. At Nyköping Prison the Governor prefers to make regular use
of verification even if this means that, for cost reasons, the number of
urine tests must be limited.
During the budgetary year 1988–9, a total of 383 urine tests,
including those done on reception, were conducted at Nyköping Prison.
Of these, 107 were positive for cannabis, 30 for amphetamines and 7 for
opiates. (An inmate can be positive for more than one type of drug.) No
conclusions can be drawn from these or similar figures about the extent
to which drugs are available or used at the prison. Drugs can and do
come into the prison—it would be impossible to prevent this without
sealing the prison off completely from society. The Governor believes
however that the generous programme of extramural activities and
prison leaves, for which freedom from drugs is an essential condition,
together with good staff-inmate relations, keeps illicit drugs down to an
acceptably low level.
Tests for HIV infection are often conducted at the remand
prisons but, during 1988–9, were supplemented by 41 tests at the
Nyköping Prison. None was positive but two prisoners were
received who had been tested elsewhere and were known to be HIV-
positive on arrival.
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Staff-inmate relations
The governor considers that the level of disciplinary infractions and
punishments is acceptably low and attributes this mainly to good staff-
inmate relations. As a visitor one gets a general impression of a relaxed
but businesslike atmosphere. Prison officers for the most part wear a
uniform of blue shirt and blue trousers, sometimes with a tunic. Three
or four keys of Yale size open all doors so there is no obvious display
of keys. All staff wear a small plastic label showing rank or function
and name. Relations between prisoners and staff seemed to be quite
informal. In most of the direct conversations that I overheard, first
names were used on both sides and I was subsequently told by an
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inmate that this was very common. Five of the prison’s seventeen prison
officers are women who perform the same tasks as their male
colleagues.
I interviewed one of these women prison officers who, at the time
of my visit, was in charge of the ground floor living units. She gave
an immediate impression of friendly capability. Her earlier work
experience had been in the health service but, on the advice of a
friend, she had decided to try the prison service. She told me that
a woman prison officer among mostly male inmates is subjected to
a good deal of testing-out. Prisoners want to see if they can ‘get
away’ with behaviour which would not be tolerated by a man. Some
of the testing-out takes the form of trying to find out about the
private life of a woman prison officer. It was absolutely necessary
to find ways of setting limits, she considered. Once this had been
achieved she thought that she had no more difficulty in handling
inmates or dealing with difficult situations than male officers.
Sensitivity enters into this, however, as the following example
shows.
Like her male colleagues she is required from time to time to
supervise the taking of urine samples. To avoid faked samples the
inmate must be naked when urinating and under close observation.
Women prison officers are not excused from taking their turn at this
duty, one which even many male prison officers find unpleasant. ‘I
know,’ she said, ‘that for many foreign prisoners it is shameful to be
observed by a woman in this situation. And it would be hard for them
to tell me so. I may have to do it anyway, but there are times when I
try to arrange for a male colleague to do it instead to spare a foreign
prisoner’s feelings.’
She is convinced that women prison officers can make a unique
contribution. One prisoner took no interest in his personal hygiene
and was resistant to the attempts of male prison officers and other
inmates to get him to wash and shower more often. But when my
interviewee told him that he must do so he complied willingly. She
also said, ‘Prisoners come very often to us women to talk about
worries and difficulties with wives, girl-friends, children and other
very personal problems. It seems that they do not find it so easy to
talk with men about such matters.’ But some male prison officers
have reservations about the usefulness of women prison officers, ‘so,
if you are a woman, you have to prove that you can do the job one
hundred and twenty per cent!’ This means that she and her female
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colleagues talk a good deal with each other about the job and its
difficulties.
This woman prison officer is active in a working group which is
drawing up plans to present to the Governor about creating completely
drug-free living units. Prisoners would apply to enter these units and
agree to intensive urine testing. Being drug free would entitle them to a
range of extra privileges and benefits.
In describing this project she said, ‘It would be better for the
prisoners and better for us on the staff. After all, the prison is our
working environment as well as the place where prisoners work and
live. I think we all have a right to be free from this pest.’ (The
Governor approves of this planning, which he also sees as an
important way of increasing staff involvement in the work of the
prison.)
I asked if she liked the work. Did it offer job satisfaction? She said
that she had been two years at the prison and despite all the
difficulties found the work deeply satisfying. In fact, this was obvious
from her whole attitude and manner; my question was really
superfluous.
A prisoner’s views
I also interviewed a prisoner (the one who had been lecturing to new
inmates in the introduction wing). He was 55 years old and had at one
time been sentenced to the now-abolished indeterminate sentence of
internment, which was intended for seriously recidivist offenders. He
had seen the inside of a good many prisons since his career began in
the 1950s. He thought the Nyköping Prison offered decent living
conditions and that prisoners were treated by the staff as human
beings. There were good opportunities for work, education and leisure.
He had seen over the years how drugs had come to influence the lives
of prisoners whilst they were in prison. He told me what has been well
documented in research (Åkerström 1985, 1986)—that even in the
Nyköping Prison it was often necessary for new prisoners to be able
to prove to others on arrival that they had not been informers to the
police, prosecutor or the court about others involved in drug
trafficking. There was, in his view, not much wrong with the prison or
its staff; it was the involvement of inmates with drugs that was the
problem. Threats and debts because of drugs were what he deplored
most They might not be common but even limited blackmailing
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pressures were bad for the inmate community. The five-man living
units could be bad from this point of view ‘though after the
introduction week everyone usually gets some choice of living unit and
can find others he gets along with’.
Criticisms
There is a danger that my picture of this prison makes it look too
good. Perhaps so—but, in my view, there is little doubt that a
prison of this kind does make a serious and by no means
unsuccessful attempt to remove some of the negative effects of
imprisonment. This is not to say that there is no room for criticism.
And a number of features of the prison which look good at first
sight reveal themselves on closer examination to have disadvantages
or to present problems.
The criticisms of the workshop instructors have been mentioned
above. In short, they consider that with modern computer-regulated
machinery and improved support from central or regional management
they could secure better orders and achieve better selling. In their view
this would heighten prisoner interest in work and enhance the training
effect of work. Present legislation makes it obligatory for prisoners to
work or study if fit. The workshop staff would like to see this
obligation abolished. Instead they would like to see a minimum wage
paid to all prisoners regardless of whether they worked and studied.
But for those who did work and study there would be substantially
increased wages.
The interview with the prisoner suggested that it is by no means
certain that the five-man living units are wholly beneficial in character.
The Governor concurred with this view. The staff on duty must keep
an eye on all the activities in the prison and cannot give so much time
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NYKÖPING PRISON, SWEDEN
to the living units. They visit the units but do not work in close and
continuous contact with the prisoners in them. Then, too, the living
units are locked up at 19.45 and the prisoners are left in contact with
each other. There are positive aspects to this— prisoners need not
experience ‘cell terror’ by being locked in. If they cannot sleep they
can get up and make a sandwich or a drink in the pantry or talk to
a mate. On the other hand, though, it is easy for the group to talk
crime, plan escapes or drug deals and put pressure on weaker members
of the group.
One consequence of the 1974 re-organization was a reduction of
the earlier procedures and possibilities for prisoner differentiation.
The advantages of neighbourhood prisons were thought to out-weigh
the possible disadvantages of grouping different kinds of prisoner
together. In the light of fifteen years’ experience, which includes an
increasing awareness of the part played by drugs and drug trafficking
in the life of the prison community, there is reason to ask if a greater
measure of differentiation now needs to be provided. This would
mean making it possible to differentiate so that, for example, women
prisoners were not a small minority in a neighbourhood prison where
young and old, experienced and in-experienced offenders, drug
misusers and non-drug misusers tend to be mixed together. There are
current plans to reduce the number of regions and to incorporate the
national prisons in the new regions. These plans are part of a scheme
for reducing the decision-making powers of the central
administration in favour of a far-reaching decentralization of the
prison system. But another aim is to improve possibilities for
differentiation of prisoners.
At Nyköping Prison the Governor thinks that this is especially
necessary for women prisoners. It is undoubtedly positive that the much
smaller number of women prisoners can have access to families and
local social services, etc., in the same way as men. Before 1974 all
women prisoners served their sentences in the only women’s prison that
existed in Sweden and many were therefore great distances from their
homes. On the other hand there may be only one or two women
prisoners and thirty or more men prisoners in a neighbourhood prison.
The women prisoners under these circumstances can be unhealthily
dominated by some of the men and relationships which are damaging to
both partners grow up.
At Nyköping Prison the staff have seen an 18-year-old girl become
attracted to an older drug misuser and marry him despite all efforts to
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NORMAN BISHOP
ensure waiting until after release from prison to test the relationship.
The history of the pair after their release has been one of wife-beating,
separation and the taking into care of the couple’s child. They have seen
a number of similar unhappy examples. A neighbourhood prison for
women prisoners only has recently been started in the Stockholm region
and is attempting to deal with the special problems of women prisoners.
The experiment is being evaluated.
Another point is of general nature, but was also mentioned at the
Nyköping Prison. The 1974 re-organization emphasized the
importance of the responsibility of the probation services in planning
for the release of prisoners. The probation services were also intended
to initiate co-ordinated action by other relevant social services as part
of this preparation. So the probation services had to be in close
contact with prisoners in the neighbourhood prisons and with a
network of social services. In practice, it has proved difficult to
achieve what was originally hoped. Effective co-operation has been
hampered by the fact that each organization is governed by its own
rules and regulations (and these are not always understood outside
that organization), conflicts can occur and, within the probation
services, there have been many staff changes and resignations. If there
is no fully efficient collaboration with and between local probation
and social services the work of a neighbourhood prison is seriously
jeopardized. The government’s attention has been drawn to this
problem by the National Prison and Probation Administration in its
budgetary request for 1990–1. Whatever the outcome of that initiative
the Governor of Nyköping Prison is urging that joint treatment
planning meetings should be held between representatives of the
probation service, the labour exchange, the social services, etc. He
considers joint treatment planning to be especially necessary for
prisoners with particularly difficult social circumstances or personal
handicaps.
As a final note on criticisms I should like to add the following. It
seemed to me that there was a good deal of healthy self-criticism
among the staff I met at the Nyköping Prison. The critical views that
they expressed were often well reasoned and followed by ideas on
improvements. Much of the criticism brought forward and described
briefly above has also often been documented in two lengthy research
reports on the functioning of neighbourhood prisons published by the
National Prison and Probation Administration itself (Krantz,
Pettersson and Bishop 1981, Krantz and Pettersson 1984). Why,
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NYKÖPING PRISON, SWEDEN
asked the staff I spoke with, does no one listen to us? Why do we
have to adjust to a number of changes conceived at the central
administration which seem to us to take no account of the reality we
see and deal with? And when everyone can see that there is an
obvious weakness in something we are doing, why does it take so
long to effect change? Why, for example, have twenty new prisons
been built, every one with its five-man living units when everyone
can see that there are problems around the idea? Why, they asked,
have we not experimented to keep what is good in the idea and get
over some of the difficulties?
These are not only good questions which demand answers. They are
also an indication of a potential among the staff for growth and
change in an effort to reduce still further the damaging effects of
imprisonment. As such they deserve to be taken seriously. Not to do
so is to create cynicism and apathy. In the world generally there are
disturbing pressures which make for ever larger prison populations,
more and more prisons and harsher prison conditions. There have been
real attempts in Sweden, I believe, to resist these pressures. The prison
1 have described is a part of that attempt. The future, as always, is an
open question. But choice plays a part in the future that becomes the
present. Will we go on or go back? The only certain thing is that we
cannot stand still.
NOTE
1 Nyköping is pronounced as ‘noo-sherp-ing’, with even accentuation of the
three syllables.
REFERENCES
Åkerström, M. (1985) Violence and threats among prison inmates. Report no.
1 985: 2 (Swedish only), Research and Development Group, KVS , S-601 80
Norrköping.
—— (1986) ‘Outcasts in prison: the case of informers and sex offenders’, in
Deviant Behaviour 7: 1–12, Hemisphere Publishing Corporation.
Bishop, N. (1987) ‘A present-day prison system: structural and functional
requirements’, in symposium report, The Centenary of Deprivation of
Liberty in The Netherlands, The Hague: Ministry of Justice. Also published
in Council of Europe Prison Information Bulletin 7, July 1986.
147
NORMAN BISHOP
Hofer, H.von (1983) Brott och straff 1 Sverige 1750–1982 (Crime and
punishment in Sweden 1750–1982), Statistics Sweden (a Swedish government
publication) 115 81 Stockholm.
Krantz, L. and Nilsson, M. (1989) Drug misusing prisoners during the financial
year 1988–9, forthcoming report (Swedish and English), Norrköping:
Research and Development Group, KVS, S-601 80.
Krantz, L. and Pettersson, T. (1984) New neighbourhood prisons: follow-up
interviews four years later, Report no. 1 984: 1 (Swedish only), Norrköping:
Research and Development Group, KVS, S-601 80.
Krantz, L., Pettersson, P. and Bishop, N. (1981) New neighbourhood prisons:
the initial phase at Orretorp, Tygelsjö, Helsingborg and Luleå prisons,
Report no. 35, (Swedish only), Norrköping: Research and Development
Group, KVS, S-601 80.
KVS (1988) Annual Report of the National Prison and Probation
Administration (abbreviated to KVS in Swedish) for the budgetary year
1987–8 (English summary), S-601 80 Norrköping.
KVS (forthcoming) Annual Report for the budgetary year 1988–9 of the
National Prison and Probation Administration (abbreviated to KVS in
Swedish) (English summary), S-601 80 Norrköping.
Statistics Sweden (1988) Yearbook of Judicial Statistics (a Swedish government
publication), Stockholm.
148
Chapter Eight
149
BRIAN SMITH
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GEURRERO CENTRE FOR REHABILITATION, MEXICO
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BRIAN SMITH
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GEURRERO CENTRE FOR REHABILITATION, MEXICO
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BRIAN SMITH
every effort to ensure that all the inmates received at least some form
of educational tuition during the period of their sentence. Those inmates
classed as illiterate were obliged to take a compulsory form of basic
education, with the aim that they would at least be able to read and
write by the time they were released. Those offenders taking part in this
more intense form of education were also expected to work, not
towards a reduction in their sentence, but in order to support the
education they were receiving. This was apparently reasonably well
received by the offenders involved, as even this basic standard of
education would be sufficient to improve considerably their potential
for employment and thus for higher earnings after their release. I was
told that the incidence of re-offending was very low but I was not given
any actual figures in support of this.
Cell accommodation is divided into single or two-storey blocks, each
comprising 60 to 80 cells of approximately 2m in width and 3 to 4m
long, with a barred, ‘gate-type’ door at each end. This allows at least
a reasonable throughput of air; the mid-day temperatures are usually
around 80 to 100°F, sometimes more. Each cell housed two or, in some
cases, three people. There was little or no evidence of ‘home comforts’
in the cells, the walls of which were plain concrete, with cot-type beds
and what really amounted to a hole in the wall to house each occupant’s
personal effects. The only forms of decoration were photographs of
family, children and, in a majority of cells, some form of religious
symbol, usually a picture or statue of ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe’.
The cells did not have any form of integral sanitation and each block
had a central toilet and shower unit. At the time of my visit virtually all
the cells were open and those prisoners in them were free to move
around, certainly in the area of their own cells and blocks.
Virtually all the inmates I saw and spoke to were friendly, smiling and
quite pleased to show me the work they were doing. I certainly felt
much more at ease moving around this institution by myself than I did
when visiting some English prisons and institutions. There was certainly
not the constant locking, unlocking and clanging of doors nor was there
the feeling of oppression that is so often felt when moving around most
prisons.
The oppressive regime I had anticipated was not apparent and the
whole complex seemed clean, active and designed as far as possible to
provide reasonable conditions and amenities for its inmates. There were,
however, no signs of television, a cinema or the usual indoor recreations.
Visitors are allowed on Thursdays and Sundays for just thirty minutes.
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I was assured, though, that this time is seldom adhered to, with most
visitors remaining for most of the afternoon.
After this visit to the Geurrero Centre, I discussed the prison and its
regime with people both inside and outside the criminal justice process.
Geurrero cannot be described as ‘typical’ in that it does not include the
most serious offenders, including those convicted of serious violence or
large-scale drug offences. But it does illustrate the trend towards the
rehabilitation of offenders which the Mexican authorities seem to be
making, and the increasing efforts which are being put in towards
improving accommodation and educational facilities.
155
Chapter Nine
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GELDERN PRISON, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
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CHRISTIAN KUHN
available. The prisoner has the right to discuss his wishes personally
with the warden, or Governor. There are good educational
opportunities, at an advanced level, but these are not compulsory. There
are other work options, too.
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CHRISTIAN KUHN
Electricity remains on in the cells after 22.00 for the radio, lamp and
water heater.
On weekends and holidays reveille is one hour later and the day may
be spent in leisure activities or as free time.
Leisure time
One hour a day is allowed for exercise. There are four courtyards,
partly grassed. Besides this there is a soccer ground, some smaller
sporting facilities, a large gymnasium and other training facilities. About
ten prisoners, at the time of my visit, were excluded from recreational
activities for reasons of security.
About 80 per cent of the inmates are active in sport. Soccer, volley-
ball, table tennis and basketball are played. Every year twelve prisoners
are trained to become soccer referees, and they then take charge of
matches within the prison. This referee training is conducted at a
professional level, so the inmate is able to continue it after release; it
provides practical help in social integration and may also help with
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GELDERN PRISON, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
161
CHRISTIAN KUHN
They have a special entrance, separated from the entrance used by other
visitors. Since such facilities are for conjugal visits, they need to be
sympathetically and sensitively arranged and from what I saw, that will
be achieved very well.
The plan to develop such facilities came after a delegation of
parliamentarians of Nordrhein-Westfalen had paid a visit to the prison
of Barcelona. They were impressed with what they saw and instructed
their own Minister of State to create similar facilities in some of the
prisons for which they are responsible.
Three times a year each prisoner is allowed to receive a parcel with
food and tobacco from outside: at Christmas and Easter (weighing 3 kg
each) and once at a time of his choice (of 5 kg). HIV-positive prisoners
can receive a monthly food parcel. These prisoners are integrated into
the ordinary life of the prison, not separated from the other prisoners,
but only work where there is a minimum risk of injury. If any develop
AIDS, they are transferred to hospital.
Hard drugs are not of particular importance in the prison, but
cannabis, or hashish, plays a significant role. About 30 per cent of the
inmates are reported to have used it. Prison staff are constantly trying
to control drug abuse, with urine sampling, regular cell changes (to
minimize concealment) and surprise searches. That they have had some
success is demonstrated by the price of a gramme of cannabis, which has
risen to DM 40 ($20) from between DM 20 and DM 30. The latter price
is the one which obtains in most other prisons, according to information
provided by an inmate, and is not very different from the ordinary street
price. The relatively high price in Geldern indicates that cannabis is not
easily and everywhere available. Alcohol is strictly prohibited
throughout the prison.
Disciplinary measures, strictly regulated by law, range from
restrictions on leisure time, shopping and visits, to solitary
confinement for a maximum of four weeks. During solitary
confinement, the exercise period for the prisoner can be cancelled and
this often happens. Solitary confinement is imposed about 40 times a
year, restrictions on shopping in about 70 cases, restrictions on leisure
in about 250 cases. In an emergency the inmate can be physically
secured to a bed (Fesselbrett), but this is, for all practical purposes, not
in use. If used, the Governor has to report the fact after three days to
a higher authority.
Self-inflicted injury is rare and does not seem to be used to put
pressure on staff to achieve a prisoner’s particular demands. The
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statistics for 1988 record two cases of self-injury and five of refusal of
food. Since the opening of the prison in 1979 there has been one case
of suicide.
According to law the prisoner can have up to 21 days a year on
‘Urlaub’ (home leave). He can leave the prison providing that the
balance of his sentence is less than 18 months. In Geldern up to a third
of the inmates are entitled to this benefit. In 1988 there were 2,200
requests for ‘Urlaub’; 1,250 were granted. The rate of those failing to
return punctually was 2 per cent.
A full-time doctor takes care of the medical service. In discussion
with inmates the question was raised as to whether the diagnoses were
always careful enough, but prisoners who are seriously ill are in any
case transferred to a hospital run by the justice department (at
Froendenberg) or to a public hospital. Specialist doctors visit the prison
regularly or prisoners may be escorted to facilities in the community.
The process for making a complaint is regulated by law and prisoners
are carefully informed about their rights.
There is an establishment of seven posts for social workers, but
in fact only six are filled at present. Similarly, only two of the three
positions for psychologists are filled. The reason is that vacancies
must remain unfilled for six months for economic reasons. One of
the social workers claimed that he and his colleagues have to use
much of their time for administrative work: progress reports or
comments, in cases where conditional release or parole is being
considered. He himself had to prepare no fewer than 432 reports in
1988. This takes so much time that there may not be time enough
for the social work needs of prisoners. He questioned whether,
under these conditions, the work can be handled in a satisfactory
way.
There seemed to be no particularly strong ‘subculture’ and relatively
few cases of violence between prisoners. That was confirmed by an
inmate who had been imprisoned for twelve years and had been in two
other prisons before coming to Geldern. In describing Geldern Prison in
a generally positive way he claimed that the possibilities for illegal or
uncontrolled activities were too few. The situation is different in each
wing and, according to a senior prison officer, there are inmates who
live in fear. But there seemed to be no large, organized, subcultural
structure of power or tyranny.
The reason may be not only the strict control the prison regime has
but also the different opportunities to discuss prisoners’ problems at
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CHRISTIAN KUHN
Education in prison
In 1989 a special occasion took place in Geldern: the first graduation of
an inmate. A 28-year-old inmate had finished his university studies and
graduated twice: in business and economics. Thirteen prisoners who
study full time are located in a special department. An open university
provides them with the necessary material for their studies by post.
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The staff
There are 180 prison officers at Geldern and, with office personnel,
specialist services, teachers, etc., the overall total is about 250 staff.
Before being employed the potential prison officer has to take a test
in writing, mathematics and psychology. Candidates are tested in
Geldern Prison and about 60 per cent of them are refused after
undertaking these tests. The prison officers wear a uniform, but no
badge of rank. They do not carry weapons during the day, not even a
stick or rubber truncheon, but are issued with a pistol for night duty.
Firearms have been used just once since the prison was opened: warning
shots when a prisoner tried to escape.
There is, as some of the officers noted, relatively strong competition
for high-ranking posts. But overall, many officers still seemed to think
that playing safe, being inconspicuous and making no mistakes was the
most useful career plan. That meant being unwilling to look for
promotion since, inevitably, it meant a higher risk. One of the seven
shop stewards (two of whom work part time in order to free themselves
for this union responsibility) confirmed this.
Many of the guards support the new targets of the prison
administration, with its emphasis on resocialization, but there are also
some who do not agree and a few who make no secret of their
aversion towards the prisoners. To counterbalance this, a few are
highly committed and even spend their leisure time on a voluntary
basis if help is needed, for instance, to escort a prisoner on an outside
visit.
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CHRISTIAN KUHN
Next to the prison buildings are some 42 flats (of from 94 to 148
sq.m) used as staff accommodation. The rent is low, but the
neighbourhood around the prison suffers from being seen very
negatively and there is a feeling that the prison, with its housing, has
become little more than a ghetto.
Summary
To determine whether a prison is performing a useful function one could
ask three questions (arranged according to priority):
Problems can appear in all these three areas, whether from the
legislative framework, the structure of the institution, or from the
personal failings of those responsible for implementing the regime.
I thought that at Geldern the first and the second questions could
be answered satisfactorily, so far as one can tell within a visit of a
week. Concerning the third (opportunities for vocational
development and training) the prison seems to be exemplary. Doubts
do appear in connection with social work help and therapeutic
assistance and these seem to derive from the organization of the
institution. Because of the burden of reports and other administrative
obligations, many of the psychologists and social workers are often
considered as a part of the administrative system rather than as a
confidential resource for the prisoners. Here is a fundamental
problem: a penal system which on the one hand has to punish (by
definition) and on the other hand wants to offer help—a help which
only can be realized if mutual trust is established. The prisoner has
to cope with the mixed message that the same institution is
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GELDERN PRISON, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
encouraging him with one hand while beating him with the other.
This tension surfaces openly in the role of the social work services
which at the same time invite the inmate to trust and co-operate,
even to the extent of revealing his weak points, yet exercise control
and make judgements that directly affect his life. In discussions with
prisoners psychological stress was identified as a problem and it
seems to be inherent in the dual aims of the existing structure.
This is not to argue against a penal system which offers social and
therapeutic help—on the contrary. It demonstrates the necessity of
setting up a clear framework of conditions within which such help could
be realized to the best advantage of both prisoner and staff. To this end
one could envisage:
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CHRISTIAN KUHN
NOTE
1 This chapter was written before the recent reunification of East and West
Germany.
168
Chapter Ten
When John Howard died, ‘Texas’ was known only to a small number of
Mexicans, American Indians and the occasional settler who had been
thrown out of, or wandered away from, the established ‘colonies’ to the
north and east. In historically accurate terms these settled states had
ceased to be colonies fourteen years before Howard’s death, but that
probably did not much matter south and west of the Red River which
forms the north-east boundary of what was then known as Tejas, or
Tehas.
More settlers of North European stock gradually moved into
present day East Texas at the end of the eighteenth century. A Spanish-
dominated civilization had already spread north and east from
Mexico. There was a continual potential for conflict between the two
cultures, which eventually came to a dramatic crisis in the San Antonio
area. The Spaniards had earlier established a chain of missions to
‘civilize’ the local population along the San Antonio River. Those
beautiful mission buildings are still a major feature of Texas
architectural history. One of them is called the Alamo and in 1836
became one of the shrines, not only of Texan history, but of the history
of the United States. The Mexicans, under General Santa Anna, tried
to retake some of the land that the newcomers had taken over. About
150 of those North European settlers chose to barricade themselves
inside the Alamo Mission, turn it into a fortress, and to defy Santa
Anna’s army of around 5,000.
Instead of ignoring the Alamo and its small garrison, and pressing
on to fight the main Texan army, Santa Anna decided to take the
Alamo by storm. He succeeded, and all the resisters, including the
famous Davy Crockett, died. Officially they are national heroes, but
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THE TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, USA
with rather less capacity, were built at about the same time to serve
what was then the largest city in the world.
The Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) has continued to build
big, and presumably Howard could not even have begun to imagine
something like the Ellis I Unit, of over 2,000 beds. In Ellis I there are
more people (300) on death row, than the total in any single prison that
Howard saw. Death row is actually a prison within a prison. These
details are given to emphasize the enormous difference of scale between
any problem Howard dreamed of and the problems facing recent TDC
directors.
The size of the state in the early days of the administration of
justice led to a remarkable form of attempted commital to prison.
According to one of my sources1, it is the origin of the American term
‘railroading’, which has long been used as a slang term throughout the
USA to mean compelling somebody to do something they do not want
to do, and for which the legal or other administrative justification is
marginal or dubious. In the late nineteenth century, the railroad
network across the state was complete. The story goes that trains from
distant towns had special coaches attached (or there were even
dedicated special trains) to bring those sentenced to imprisonment for
serious offences to Huntsville. Sometimes a resident of one of those
towns was thought by one of his fellow citizens to be particularly
obnoxious or dangerous, even though it was not possible to prove
anything against him in law. A few of his fellow citizens would wait
until the train was about to depart, nobble him and throw him on the
train, slip the guards a few dollars and wave goodbye. When the train
got to Huntsville, the prison authorities refused to admit him as there
was no committal warrant. He therefore had the choice of making a
new home somewhere or making his way back to a town about whose
public feelings he could have no doubt, but knowing that if he did not
change his ways the whole thing might happen again. It would be
interesting to know the ‘success rates’ of such informal justice, but
statistics are, understandably, lacking.
One long-standing feature of Texas prisons dating from the early
times, and which occurred intermittently in many American prison
administrations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was
that of ‘leasing out’ prisons. Under that system an entrepreneur would
pay the state to utilize the labour of the prisoners, normally by
contracting them out to local farms. That frequently led to abuses and
indeed sometimes to bizarre results. When in California, I was told
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that the site of San Quentin prison was determined by the fact that a
leased prison hulk was inadequately tethered on the north-east side of
San Francisco Bay. During a violent storm it broke away and drifted
westwards until it hit land on the barren headland of San Quentin. It
was easier to transport the guards there and order the convicts to start
building their own new prison than to build new ships and take them
back to Vallejo. As with the railroading story, I could find no
confirmation, but the story of privatized prisons floundering without
control or direction across San Francisco Bay, landing close to where
Sir Francis Drake’s memorial plaque was later found, may not be
without a criminological moral.
The starting-point of that digression in time and place was that of
leased prisons and the problems they increasingly raised for a socially
responsible legislature. The development of a civil service style of
correctional administration can serve as the starting-point for my
main theme, a comparison of Howard’s concerns with the changes,
reforms and setbacks of prison administration in Texas since the
Second World War. We could start with a review of his most famous
chapters at the beginning of The State of the Prisons, especially the
chapters entitled: ‘General view of distress in prisons’; ‘Bad customs
in prisons’; ‘Proposed improvements in the structure and
management of prisons’. Those chapters summarize his main
concerns, which are then illustrated in the narrative of the text with
descriptions of individual institutions. As I discussed the history of
changes in prisons with officials or ex-officials of TDC, or colleagues
at the Criminal Justice Center, I came to think that the most logical
order in which to look at the contemporary response to the questions
that Howard raised was not the same as that which he followed in
those chapters. Therefore I have taken the different topics in the
order that my sources thought appropriate and provided references
to at least some of the specific instances of those problems that
Howard gave in his text.
The main question to which I return intermittently throughout
t h i s c h a p t e r, a n d w i t h w h i c h i t c o n c l u d e s , i s o n e r a i s e d b y
implication in Howard’s writings, but not addressed directly by
him. That is the question of whether, in respect of prisons at least,
people make the system what it is, or the system makes the people
what they are. The history of TDC in the last decades has provided
a remarkable case history of that problem, with examples of the
arguments for and against each point of view. Such a review
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n a t u r a l l y i n c l u d e s q u e s t i o n s o f s t a f f i n g q u a l i t y, r u l e s a n d
regulations, classification, control of different kinds of abuses,
prison employment and cleanliness, system comparison and where
ultimate decision-making power is located.
The first step in the modernization of TDC was to appoint someone
to improve what was widely acknowledged to be an unacceptable
situation. Lee Simmons became director of TDC in 1930 with a
reputation of being a hard but completely honest law enforcement
officer. The ‘straight cop’ took over the ‘bent screws’, but lasted only
four years; the explanation given being that he was a catcher, not a
keeper. It seems a frequent theme in penal history that the two
professions do not trust each other, at least as regards doing each
other’s job. After Simmons’s departure in 1934 the situation
deteriorated and escapes became a major problem, to such an extent
that a most unusual political event occurred. Some ten years later the
main plank in the platform of Beauford Jester as candidate for State
Governor was prison reform, and he was elected on that campaign
issue.
Modern Texas prison administration essentially dates from the steps
Jester took to ensure that the prisons were run by an accountable board
of people with a strong social conscience. Both the way he selected
people and the status and accountability he gave them might have been
suggested to him by John Howard.
Jester, his successor and the director they appointed, O.B.Ellis, all
placed their central emphasis on the quality of staff, and the higher the
grade, the more the quality counted. Ellis, according to his successor
Beto, had two overriding overt concerns. The first was to enable the
prison system to feed and clothe the prisoners through its own efforts.
The second was with humane conditions in prisons, demonstrated above
all by cleanliness. Howard would surely not have objected to either,
although the idea of a department of corrections would have been very
strange to him and the idea that it could act as a system to feed and
clothe itself would presumably have seemed a desirable but unreal and
irrelevant objective.
Ellis was succeeded by Beto, who has become a man of considerable
controversy, both with supporters and detractors, in writings about the
history of prisons. He was, and is, a strong advocate of the position that
the right people make the system. One recent penal scholar, Di Julio, in
his analysis of what is wrong with American prisons, regards Beto as a
desirable role model (Di Julio 1987). A recent book by Martin and
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174
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175
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176
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177
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178
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179
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181
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1 Absence of idleness;
2 Absence of noise;
3 Absence of filth;
4 Absence of odour; the smell of disinfectant is a bad sign. It is a way of
simulating cleanliness while actually covering up other odours of far
less salubrious origin.
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R.W.BURNHAM
is that prisons mean jobs, and a general boost to the local economy.
I understand that more local communities have applied to TDC to be
considered as ‘host’ towns for new prisons than TDC has plans to
build them. The belief that unemployment increases both crime and
the prison population independently as well as directly has long been
held by criminologists of different persuasions. While the evidence
for the validity of the hypothesis is much debated, the evidence
against it is almost non-existent. It seems that in the case of Texas
there is yet another irony of penal reform: unemployment increases
the prison population, but also makes it possible to provide the new
prisons for which the need has been created. Alas, there are no
grounds, literally, for optimism on the part of European prison
administrations from that example. There is still a lot of spare or
marginally used land in Texas.
The increasing control of TDC by the Texas courts has been
referred to several times already. The crucial case, something of a
watershed in Texas prison history, was Ruiz v. Estelle. It was first
brought in 1972, but its implications became clear only several years
later. The case was so complicated that it has already generated at
least two books (Crouch and Marquart 1989, Martin and Ekland-
Olson 1987) and more might be on the way. It would be appropriate
here simply to give a brief outline of events, and then limit any
review to the ways in which it is relevant to John Howard and his
cause.
There is a much stronger tradition in American society than in
British of rectifying perceived private wrongs by means of litigation.
When the defendant is a public body of some kind, the chief executive
officer is quite often named in the law suit. When Ruiz v. Estelle
appeared in the court lists in front of Federal Judge Justice, it seemed
a fairly run-of-the-mill event, for several prisoners had filed suits
before. Ruiz sued TDC for violations of his rights under the first,
fourth and eighth amendments to the Constitution of the United
States.
The state decided to defend the charges. Opinion in Texas prison
circles, with hindsight, seems to be that TDC should simply have
admitted that various provisions for prisoners were unsatisfactory
and inadequate. It could then have pleaded force of circumstances
and lack of resources, not as a defence but as an excuse. As it was
Judge Justice had to rule against it with all the authority of the
Supreme Court of Texas. Instead of a telling-off, with time to put
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things right, TDC found itself under a much more strict court order
with which it could not negotiate and which gave it little flexibility.
Through some clever legal work on behalf of other prisoners bringing
litigation, various other cases were incorporated into the Ruiz
decision.
The results of the decision are still making themselves felt. As far
at I could judge it, the general feeling among the present day staff
is that there have been some gains to both the prisoners and the
system, and some losses, but the gains have been bought dearly and
slowly and the losses may be irreversible. The main gains are a
better staff-inmate ratio, and a greater focus on programmes for
inmate recreation and on putting the prisoners’ time to better use,
apart from compulsory work. The main losses have been in the
relations between staff and the prisoners. Most prison reformers,
including Howard, have emphasized that any rehabilitative effect
which prison may have will derive primarily from the quality of the
relationship built up between a respected member of staff and an
individual prisoner. It seems that on human relationships within the
prison the long-term effects of the Ruiz decision have been mostly
negative.
I should emphasize that the summary account given above is not at
all official, and has no claim to comprehensiveness or objectivity. I have
simply reported the reactions of various past and present TDC officials
with whom I spoke, and of some of my colleagues on the faculty of the
Criminal Justice Center. Those interested in an authoritative and
detailed account are referred to the books cited, but are also advised
that the whole issue is one on which sides have been taken, and
disinterested views are rare.
The significance of the Ruiz case and its aftermath for any analysis
of the significance of the work of John Howard lies within the example
it gives of a certain approach to penal reform. To pick up on an earlier
theme, there are two main traditions in penal reform. The first,
stretching from Howard through Paterson to Ellis and Beto, is, as
observed, that the crucial step is to find the right people, particularly for
the top jobs. With good men, goodness will trickle down, and discretion
will be wisely used to allow flexibility and fairness to coexist, even in
a prison. The critics of that view ask what happens if, or indeed when,
goodness fails to trickle down far enough or fast enough. They tend to
answer by pointing to such undesirable developments as the ‘building
tender’ system.
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The alternative to the ‘good men’ model is the ‘good rules’ or good
system model. The unfolding of the implications of the Ruiz decision
illustrate the weaknesses of that approach. Perhaps the most important
of these is the difficulty of long-term planning, because it is impossible
to predict what events will be brought before the courts, and how the
courts will decide upon them. There is a permanent element of
uncertainty built into the situation, which undermines the willingness of
administrators to make long-range commitments or plan for flexibility.
It tends to encourage any tendency to the suppression of initiative, and
to foster cautious conservatism, perhaps to the point of atrophy.
I have represented both approaches simplistically, to draw out the
contrast specifically because it seems that Howard favoured both
approaches, but did not have the experience of both to see the
contradictory implications. For instance, ‘I am persuaded that a good
gaoler can more easily manage his prisoners by humane attention than
by severity and heavy irons’ (Howard 1792:145) (writing about
Maidstone County Gaol). Four pages later, when writing about
Aylesbury Bridewell, he said, ‘the prisoners here wished that the
magistrates had made rules also for them’ (Howard 1792:149). (The
‘also’ refers to the fact that the magistrates had made rules for the
county gaol close by.) It is possible to infer from these passages and
others in The State of the Prisons that Howard believed in both the
good man theory, and in control by the courts. On the local scale in
which he was operating, the two approaches may indeed have been
symbiotic. My experience in Texas and with other large contemporary
prison systems leads me to wonder whether in future the best we can
hope for is to obtain some kind of a mix of the two, and avoid the
worse features of each.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I wrote this chapter as the George J.Beto Chair Professor at the Criminal
Justice Center, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas for the
spring of 1989. I wish to record my gratitude to the Dean and Faculty
of the Center for that opportunity, and for my professionally valuable
time in Huntsville. George Beto, now in semi-retirement but still
teaching at the Center, is one of the main actors in the story. He was
also my main source of information, and a personal friend; he could be
considered the co-author of this chapter. In so far as it comments
extensively on his main life work, usually but not always positively, it
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NOTES
1 Dr Wayland Pilcher, Professor of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State
University.
2 The Texas (and presumably elsewhere in the USA) version of Murphy’s
Law is ‘There is always one more son-of-a-bitch than you reckoned on.’
3 A model of car introduced by Ford Motor Company in the 1950s with
much fanfare, and a subsequent record of being unbought by the public.
The term has become synonymous for many Americans with the ‘well-
intentioned but ill-thought-out’ product.
REFERENCES
Crouch, B.M. and Marquart, J.W. (1989) An Appeal to Justice: Litigated
Reform of Texas Prisons, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Di Julio, J.J. (1987) Governing Prisons: a Comparative Study of Correctional
Management, New York: The Free Press.
Howard, J. (1792) The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (facsimile of
4th edn), vol. 2.
Martin, S.J. and Ekland-Olson, S. (1987) Texas Prisons: The Walls Come
Tumbling Down, Austin, Texas: The Texas Monthly Press.
187
JOHN HOWARD
A biographical note
DICK WHITFIELD
The bi-centenary of the death of John Howard in 1990 has given rise
to a number of commemorative events in varying parts of the world, of
which this book is one. That in itself is some indication of the influence
his life and work still bring to bear—and, perhaps, an equal indication
of the lack of progress which makes it still necessary. His book, The
State of the Prisons, a uniquely systematic description of conditions in
British and European prisons in the last part of the eighteenth century,
is an astonishing monument.
In the course of this odyssey, and at a time when travel was usually
uncomfortable and often dangerous, he travelled nearly eighty thousand
kilometres on horseback and spent some £30,000 of his own money in his
determination to improve prison conditions; he entered prisons in disguise
in defiance of governments who feared the power of his pen; was
captured by pirates; quelled a riot single handed and more than earned
John Wesley’s tribute to him as ‘one of the greatest men in Europe’.
This account of his life and work is included as a reminder of how
one man, from unremarkable beginnings, could have such a remarkable
impact in a sphere characterized only by indifference. Sir Walter Scott
later wrote, ‘Without courage, there cannot be truth; and without truth
there can be no other virtue.’ Howard had the courage to put his
conviction into practice. He saw the pains of imprisonment and used
truth as the agent of change, not from any intellectual theory or
ideology but through a sense of compassion for other human beings. His
own story provides a fitting conclusion for this book.
Reliable facts about John Howard’s early life are hard to come by; his
birth, on 2 September 1726, is variously located at Enfield in Middlesex
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JOHN HOWARD: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
and Hackney in East London. What follows are the most reliable facts
which his early biographies (John Aiken, 1792 and James Baldwin
Brown, 1823) provided and which have subsequently been checked and
accepted, as far as possible, from his own works and from later
accounts.
The Howard family background was solid, middle class and
prosperous. Howard’s father was a London merchant and small
businessman who specialized in upholstery and carpets and the family
also owned a small farm at Cardington in Bedfordshire, some 80 km
north of London.
John’s formal education began at the age of six, when he was
sent to the school of a Mr Worsley in Hertford. It continued at Mr
John Eames’s Moorfields Dissenting Academy in London, but it
seems that young Howard did not take readily to formal learning
and to the end of his life he remained only indifferently literate. His
published works were normally edited by a friend before being
submitted for printing. He did not proceed to university in his
seventeenth year but was instead apprenticed for £630 to the
London wholesale grocery firm of Newnham and Shipley, in
Watling Street. It was a large indenture payment and coming, as it
did, soon after his father’s death in March 1743, was probably
intended to secure a profitable mercantile future for him. It was
certainly a comfortable start; his allowance permitted him an
apartment, a body servant and two horses. However, he got out of
the commitment and at the age of 20 embarked on the first of many
journeys to Europe. It seems to have been an independent version
of the Grand Tour and was an early indication of the restless urge
to travel which he never lost. Howard later said that ‘my
continuing long…in any place lowers my spirits’, and he tried to
cure what was described as ‘a species of nervous fever and of a
general weakness of the whole system’ by visiting resorts such as
Bristol Hot Wells. It was a debilitating time and he felt he survived
it for two reasons—a ‘rigorous regime’, which included a vegetarian
diet, and the devoted nursing of his widowed landlady, Sarah
Lordore (or Lardeau) at his lodgings in Stoke Newington.
They married on 15 October 1753, but it proved to be a short-lived
union for she died only two years later. Shortly afterwards Howard left
Stoke Newington and moved back to central London, to St Pauls
Churchyard, where he owned several houses in the neighbourhood. His
reaction to his new situation was perhaps predictable—he decided to
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DICK WHITFIELD
travel again, both for interest and to reflect on his own future. Early in
1757 he sailed for Portugal, intending to view the results of Lisbon’s
great earthquake but his ship, the Hanover, was captured by a French
privateer and passengers and crew were all taken prisoner and held in
France, first at Brest and then at Morlaix.
John Howard became the spokesman for the group and was
eventually released on parole to return to England to negotiate the
exchange and release of his fellow-prisoners—a task he successfully
accomplished. There followed a rather more conventional period where
his activities seem to have differed little from the other young gentlemen
of his day; he studied scientific works on medicine and the natural
sciences and pursued a particular interest in taking thermometer
readings under varying conditions, including some from the craters of
Italian volcanoes. In 1756 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
and he continued his temperature recordings, contributing to its journal
on three occasions.
His second marriage was more conventional. His bride Henrietta
Leeds was a distant cousin, then aged 32. She came from an eminent
legal family and the wedding took place at Croxton, Cambridgeshire,
where her family had a home, on 2 May 1758. Perhaps it was this legal
background which encouraged Howard to enter into a formal
agreement with Henrietta which laid down that ‘to prevent altercations
about those little matters which he had observed to be the chief grounds
of uneasiness in families—he should always decide’. How much
Henrietta kept to the terms of the arrangement we do not know. The
couple returned to the Howard estate at Cardington in Bedfordshire at
first but moved for a time to Lymington on the Hampshire coast later,
for the sake of her health. Henrietta’s frail constitution could not
withstand the rigours of childbirth, however, and after seven years of
marriage she died soon after giving birth to their son, John.
The infant John was to become the disappointment of his father’s life.
Little is known for certain about his early upbringing or education
although we do know that John Howard was criticized for both
neglecting him (because of his many absences) and for imposing an
unduly repressive regime when he was at home. John, Junior, went to
school at Nottingham and—briefly—to the University of Edinburgh. It
was at St John’s College, Cambridge, which he entered in the summer
of 1784 that matters really came to a head, however. He was dismissed
for gross misconduct, which seems to have centred on drug taking and
homosexual activities. The following year, while Howard was on a tour
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JOHN HOWARD: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
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DICK WHITFIELD
food allocation—and was allowed to get on with it. Yet everyone knew
of the abuses which had grown, flourished and even became
institutionalized in this laissez-faire prison system. There were probably
around 5,000 prisoners on any one day in England at that time, spread
between almost 250 gaols, prisons and houses of detention. Up to 500
were in the largest establishment, Kings Bush Prison in London, but
most were in small town and provincial lock-ups in which only a
handful of prisoners were kept. Many of the smaller gaols formed the
rear of public houses with the publican doubling his duties with that of
gaoler. To avoid the window tax many were either devoid or severely
deficient in natural light.
That, in many ways, was the least of the problems. Among the
customs prevalent in gaols were those such as garnish, fotting or
chummage, which all gave the same message to newcomers—‘pay or
strip’. Those having no money were forced to give up their clothes and
sleep on the bare floor, often with fatal results. Prisoners were loaded
with irons, which made walking and sleeping painful or near
impossible; gaolers would, of course, grant dispensation for those who
could pay sufficient to have them removed. Howard, writing in 1775,
notes:
Convicts were generally robust young men who had been accustomed
to free diet, tolerable lodgings and rigorous exercise. On entering
Hereford prison they were ironed: thrust into close, offensive
dungeons, some of them without straw or bedding and remained two
thirds of the 24 hours utterly inactive. Ely Gaol was the property of
the Bishop and because of the insecurity of the old prison the gaoler
chained the victims down on their backs on the floor, across which
were several iron bars, with an iron collar with spikes about their
necks and a heavy iron bar over their legs.
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JOHN HOWARD: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
193
DICK WHITFIELD
194
JOHN HOWARD: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
195
DICK WHITFIELD
196
JOHN HOWARD: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
197
DICK WHITFIELD
Our present laws are certainly too sanguinary, and are therefore ill
executed; which last circumstance, by encouraging offenders to hope
that they may escape punishment, even after conviction, greatly tends
to increase the number of crimes. Yet many are brought to a
premature end, who might have been made useful to the state.
I the more earnestly embarked in the scheme of erecting
penitentiary-houses from seeing cartloads of our fellow creatures
carried to execution; [many of whom] I was fully persuaded might,
by regular, steady discipline in a penitentiary house have been
rendered useful members of society; and above all from the pleasing
hope that such a plan might be the means of promoting salvation of
some individuals—of which, every instance is, according to the
unerring word of truth, a more important object than the gaining of
the whole world.
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JOHN HOWARD: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
decision to introduce ‘hard labour’ into prisons, but far from providing
regular, steady discipline and useful work it became drudgery of the
hardest and most servile kind, a hated example of the additional pains
of imprisonment. And he advised Parliament, when a House of
Commons committee was enquiring into the provisional continuance of
the prison hulks system in 1778, that conditions had improved since his
earlier criticisms and that he would support continued use of the hulks
until transportation could be resumed. Considering the wretchedness for
which these floating prisons later became infamous it was an unhappy
endorsement and one can only assume that his short-term view of a
particular problem was allowed to obscure his longer term aims.
Perhaps the best judgement comes from one of his contemporaries,
Burke, in a speech at Bristol:
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DICK WHITFIELD
his reputation that 2,000 people attended his funeral in Russia and one
of the first statues in St Paul’s Cathedral in London was not of a
sovereign, statesman or saint—but a simple, teetotal, vegetarian
traveller who, as the inscription notes:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Howard’s own major work, The State of the Prisons in England and
Wales, was published in Warrington, Lancashire, by William Eyres in
1777, 1780 and 1784 and his Account of the Principal Lazarettos in
Europe by the same publisher in 1789. A second edition of the latter
work was published posthumously in London in 1791, as was a fourth
edition of The State of the Prisons a year later. Subsequent editions have
included the famous Everyman’s edition (J.M.Dent, London, 1929) and
the splendid Patterson, Smith reprint of the 2nd edn (Montclair, New
Jersey, 1973, 2 vols), from which quotations are made in this chapter.
Books on Howard and his work are varied and considerable in
number. A full bibliography by Leona Baumgarter was published by the
Johns Hopkins Press (Baltimore, 1939) under the title: John Howard
(1726–1790), Hospital and Prison Reformer: A Bibliography.
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JOHN HOWARD: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Aiken, Dr J. (1792) A view of the character and public services of the late John
Howard, London: J.Johnson.
Brown, J.B. (1823) Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of John Howard, the
Philanthropist, London: Underwood.
Dixon, H. (1849) John Howard and the Prison World of Europe, London:
Jackson & Walford.
Freeman, J. (ed.) (1978) Prisons Past and Future, London: Heinemann.
Gibson, C.S. (1901) John Howard, London: Methuen & Co.
Howard, D.L. (1958) John Howard: Prison Reformer, London: Christopher
Johnson.
Pettifer, E.W. (1939) Punishments of Former Days, Bradford: Cleggs.
Southwood, M. (1958) John Howard: Prison Reformer, London: Independent
Press.
Stoughton, J. (1884) Howard the Philanthropist and his Friends, London.
201
NAME INDEX
202
NAME INDEX
203
SUBJECT INDEX
NOTE
Page references in italics indicate tables.
204
SUBJECT INDEX
Community Service order 92, 93 discipline: India 39, 40, 42, 48;
commutations, Nicaragua 122 Netherlands 89–90, 98, 99, 105,
compensation 99 115; Poland 64; Sweden 141;
complaints procedures 98–9, 110, USA 176; W.Germany 162
114, 115, 115, 163, 164 discrimination: among prisoners 44–
conditions: as described by Howard 5; racial 71, 74, 84, 103
192–4; England and Wales 17; dispersal units 18
India 37–8, 41–5, 48–9, 52; and drama 124
internal reform 9; and new drug abuse: and crime 95, 132;
buildings 6; Poland 57, 62, 67; England and Wales 27–8;
South Africa 84 Netherlands 95, 102, 103, 108,
condoms, provision 109 109, 111; Poland 63–4, 65; Sweden
contact with outside world 49, 99, 134, 137, 139, 140, 143–5, USA
100 see also families, contact 178–9; W.Germany 161, 162
with
contamination, criminal 90, 101 education: England and Wales 23,
control, social: Netherlands 92; 24, 28; India 40, 47; Mexico
South Africa 70, 71, 85 153–4, 155; Netherlands 100,
convict overseers, India 45, 46 110, 111, 112; Nicaragua 122,
convict warders, India 39, 45 124, 129; Poland 60, 65, 66–7;
corporal punishment: Netherlands by prisoners 124; South Africa
88–9; South Africa 81 77, 79; Sweden 134, 136, 138–9;
corruption: police 30, 36–7; prisoner W.Germany 158–60, 164–5 see
103, 109; staff 38, 39 also vocational training
costs per prisoner 73, 111 England and Wales: lifers 19–20, 24,
counselling: Netherlands 100, 107, 26; prison building 5, 17; prison
109–11; W.Germany 161, 167 population 4–5, 14–16, 15, 16
creativity, encouragement 124 see also Maidstone Prison
crime rates, Netherlands 91–2, 95 escapes 85, 102, 115, 141, 152, 173
crisis, prison 14, 60, 92 ethnic minorities: disproportionate
Crown Prosecution Service 10 numbers in prison 15; and prison
cultures, conflict 170 food 22–3, 161
custody, protective 33 exercise: availability, England and
Wales 20; India 42; Netherlands
‘dacoits’ 31 112, 114; South Africa 80–1;
dance 124 Sweden 136; W.Germany 160–1,
death penalty, abolition 120 162 see also recreation
death row, USA 171, 175 expansion of existing prisons 17
deaths in gaol 40 expediency policy, Netherlands 91
debt in prison 18, 143–4 expenditure: England and Wales 17–
depersonalization 111, 156 18; India 37, 39, 49–50, 51–2;
‘depth’ of imprisonment 6 Netherlands 104; new building 6;
detention: day 101; for interrogation Nicaragua 123
71–2; Nicaragua 127–8; pre-trial expression, free 97
see remand; preventive 31, 71–2;
of reluctant informers 71; without families, contact with 63, 66, 125,
trial 71–2; of witnesses 71 128, 129, 134, 145, 161
‘detenus’, India 31, 42, 50, 52 farms, prison 72, 73–85, 121, 125,
diet: reduced 81; spare 81; special 129, 152–3
22–3, 114, 161 see also food Feltham Youth Custody Centre,
differentiation: England and Wales rebuilding 3
13; Netherlands 90, 101–2, 104, Fick Commission 1951, Netherlands
109; Sweden 145; USA 177–8 100–1
director, prison 102–3
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SUBJECT INDEX
gangs, prison, South Africa 83, 84, 85 illiteracy 34, 42, 49, 82, 108, 154
Geldern Prison: buildings 157; daily imprisonment: frequency of use 130,
routine 160; discipline 162; 131; pre-trial see remand;
education 158; food 161, 162; rigorous 39, 45, 47; simple 45,
inmate council 164; inmate 53 n.9; weekend 101
newspaper 156, 159, 164; leisure India: daily routine 45; lifers 34, 42,
time 160–1; medical services 163, 48; prison population 31–40, 35,
166; staff 164, 165–6, 168; 42; prison system 30–1; staff 42
visiting 161; vocational training Indian Lunacy Act 1912 32, 53 n.4
158–9, 166; work 159–60 Indian Penal Code 1860 52
Germany, Federal Republic: prison industrial relations 25
population 9, 157; prison system informers 18–19, 71
157, 166–7, see also Geldern inmate councils 144, 164
Prison inspection: Britain 17; Howard on
Geurrero Centre for Rehabilitation: 195, 198; India 39, 40, 52;
accommodation 154; armed Nicaragua 128; South Africa 76
guards 151–2; buildings 151; Inter-American Commission on
daily routine 153; education 153– Human Rights 120, 126, 129
4, 155; food 153; freedom of interrogation: Nicaragua 128; South
movement 152; recreation 153, Africa 71–2
155; women prisoners 153; work isolation, effects 81–2, 157 see also
153, 154 solitary confinement
governors, contribution 7, 152
judge, role of 102
habeas corpus, right of 120 Juvenile Justice Act 1986, India 32–3
handcuffs, as punishment 48 juveniles: and anti-penal move 9;
health care see medical services England and Wales 16; India 32–
Helderstroom Prison 69, 73–85; 3, 51; South Africa 74; USA 177
conditions 84–5; daily routine
77–8, 80–1; education 77, 79; law and prison, South Africa 69–70,
food 80, 84–5; gangs 83, 84, 85; 85 n.3
isolation 81–2; Maximum leasing of prisons 171–2, 174
Security Prison 73–4, 75–6, 78–9,
80–1; medical services 79;
Medium Security Prison 73–4,
206
SUBJECT INDEX
leave: India 48, 49; Netherlands 97, Mulla Committee see All-India
99, 100, 104; Nicaragua 121–2, Committee on Jail Reforms
125; Poland 64; Sweden 134,
140; W.Germany 157, 163 National Guardsmen, Nicaragua
leisure see recreation 121–3, 125, 127, 128–9
letters: India 48, 49; Netherlands National Police Commission, India 34
98, 99, 100; South Africa 81–2; national prisons 133, 145
Sweden 139 neighbourhood prisons 133–5
library, access to 47, 77, 82, 100, Netherlands: prison organization 96–
112, 161 104; prison population 9, 90–1,
life, quality of 17, 24, 35 91, 103, 104, 108; prison system
literacy programmes 49, 79, 112 88–90, 93–6; staffing 96, 102,
local prisons 17–18, 28 110–11; ‘waiting list’ system 5
Long Lartin Prison, improved see also Breda Remand Prison
conditions 8 newspapers, access to 65–6, 81–2
lunatics, criminal, India 31–2, 38 Nicaragua: Directorate General of
lunatics, non-criminal, India 31–2 State Security 128; prison
buildings 120–1, 128–9; prison
Macauley, Lord Thomas Babington population 121; prison system
38–9 119–23, 125, 129; State of
Maidstone Prison: canteen system Emergency 120, 128 see also
23–4; daily routine 20; education Matagalpa Prison
23, 24; food 22, 28; life normality principle 134
sentences 19–20, 24, 26; Nyköping Prison: buildings 135–6;
prisoners’ views 23; Probation criticisms 144–6; daily routine
Service 25, 26–7; Psychology 137–8; discipline 141; education
Department 19, 24, 25–6; 138–9; inmate council 144;
rebuilding 13–14; security population 137; prisoners’ views
category 18, 28; Segregation Unit 143–4; recreation 139–40; staff
18; staff 25–6; as training prison 136, 141–3, 146–7; use of drugs
17–18, 19, 28; visited by Howard 140; work 138–9, 144
13; vocational training 21–2, 23;
Vulnerable Prisoner Units 18–19; offenders: habitual 42; unintentional
work 20–1, 22 63
management: centralization 102–3, officers: contribution 7, 110–11,
145; India 38, 39; Netherlands 141–3; industrial relations 25
102–3, 110; Poland 60 open prisons 18, 19, 96, 115, 122,
marriage, right to 97 125, 129, 133, 157; half-open
Matagalpa Prison: education 124; 61, 62, 96, 115, 121–2, 125, 129
food 123; philosophy 129; overcrowding 5; England and Wales
population 123; work 125 17–18; Netherlands 100, 103;
mechanism of system 8 Nicaragua 120–1, 128–9; Poland
medical services: India 40, 47; 57, 58; South Africa 73, 75–6,
Poland 66; South Africa 77, 79; 84–5, USA 183
Sweden 136; W.Germany 163,
167–8 see also psychology ‘panchayat’ system 45
services panopticon model 95, 105, 115
Mexico: legal system 150–1; work pardons, Nicaragua 122, 127
153, 154 see also Geurrero parole: England and Wales 26–7;
Centre for Rehabilitation India 40, 48; South Africa 82
Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines passes: Nicaragua 125; Poland 64
Commission 6, 10 payment see wages
mosque, provision 23
207
SUBJECT INDEX
Penal Code: India 38–9; Mexico Poland 58; and shared casework
150; Netherlands 93 25, 26–7; Sweden 146; and youth
Penal Practice in a Changing Society, sentencing 15
White Paper 1959 5 property offenders, India 34
penal theory: Netherlands 88–9; protests, Poland 57
Nicaragua 119 proximity principle 134, 137
people, effects on systems 172–3, psychology services 19, 24, 25–6,
178, 185, 186 63; South Africa 79; W.Germany
planning, long-term 186 163. 166
Poland: prison population 4, 57–3, Public Interest Discontinuance
59, 61, 62–3; prison system 56– project 10
60 see also Sluzewiec Prison punishment, and rehabilitation 47
police, corruption 36–7
police cells, prisoners held in 17, 70, radio, access to 65, 82, 100, 160
72 rasping house, Netherlands 88–9, 111
policy, repressive 33, 38–9, 61–2, recidivism: Mexico 154; Nicaragua
103–4, 126 see also sentencing 122, 125, 129; South Africa 82;
policy Sweden 135, 143
population, prison: changes in 103, recreation: India 47; Mexico 153,
108; decline 7, 9–10, 58–9, 63, 155; Netherlands 93, 100, 104,
66–7, 157; expansion 4–6, 14– 110–12, 114; Nicaragua 129;
15, 15, 42, 57, 61–2, 85; and Poland 58, 65; South Africa 77,
internal reform 8–9; and racial 79, 80; Sweden 136, 139; USA
classification 71 see also under 185; W.Germany 160–1
individual countries Red Cross, International Committee
possessions, personal 42, 49, 154 122–3, 128
poverty, and conviction 36–7 reductionism 4
pressure groups 9, 50, 52 reform, criminal justice 3–4, 10
Prison Act 1894, India 39, 52 reform, prison 3–4; India 30, 38–9,
Prison Decree-Law, Netherlands 99, 49–52; internal 7–10, 57, 62,
103 146–7; limited extent 2–3, 6;
Prison Principles Act, Netherlands negative 4; Nicaragua 119;
96–7, 98–100, 105 opposition to new building 5;
Prison Reform League 4 Poland 57, 59, 63–4; positive 4;
Prison Treatment Act 1974, Sweden pressure groups 9, 50, 52; and
141 reduction of population 6–7; USA
prisoners: foreign 108, 114, 142, 173–7, 185–6; W.Germany 157
158; inmate council 144, 164; refurbishment 17
and internal reform 8; legal status regime maintenance 71
97–9; mentally disturbed 102, rehabilitation 111, 114; England and
103, 108, 109 Wales 24; India 39, 40, 46–7, 49;
prisoners, political: India 31; Mexico 151, 152, 153–4, 155;
Nicaragua 126; South Africa 82 Nicaragua 122, 127, 129; South
prisoners’ committee, Netherlands 114 Africa 78, 85; Sweden 135
Prisons Act 1959, South Africa 69– release, conditional: Netherlands 94;
70, 74 Sweden 132 release, early: India
privacy: Netherlands 97, 101; South 48; Netherlands 90, 94, 97
Africa 76, 81, 84; W.Germany 156 religion, provision of places of
privilege system: Nicaragua 121–2; worship 23, 167
South Africa 81, 84 remand prisoners: increased numbers
probation service: England and 14–15; India 31, 32–7, 41–2, 45;
Wales 10, 14, 15, 25, 26–7; Mexico 151; Netherlands 92, 95,
Netherlands 91, 111, 112, 113;
208
SUBJECT INDEX
209
SUBJECT INDEX
210