A place of redemption

The report was published in December with the title 'A Place of Redemption' and has received much favourable comment. It draws on the central insights of the Gospel and the social teaching of the Catholic Church to offer a distinctive analysis of the current situation and how it might be improved. Whilst upholding the need for justice, it offers a fresh perspective aimed at a positive outcome for the victim, for society and for the offender. It invites us all not to dismiss the prisoner as worthless or beyond redemption. This Christian approach to punishment and prison is not a soft option. However, whilst the need to deter and to punish are accepted, emphasis is also laid on taking every opportunity to encourage the reform of the offender.

Recommendations
The report recommends the development of a prison system in which there is better education, more drug treatment, more behavioural programmes and better mental health care.
A strong recommendation is ‘We need to send fewer people to prison and consider how to make more effective alternative punishments within the community’. Alternatives to prison for the large number of people jailed for comparatively trivial offences like shoplifting are necessary. The use of tagging and electronic surveillance should be extended. Prisons must not be a dustbin for the problems society fails to address elsewhere. The key to making significant reductions in the level and impact of crime lies as much in wide ranging social reform as in reforming the prison system. In this context social reform includes reform on mental health care, drug and alcohol misuse, housing, employment and social welfare.
Wisely the Bishops do not direct their criticism only at the civil authority. They also look at the Church and the report contains these words:
‘There needs to be a change in attitudes within the Catholic Church towards those in prison. As a Church we have to acknowledge that concern for those in prison - despite it being one of the baldest of Jesus' commands as to how his followers are to serve him - is not at present high up the agenda of many Christians. On this we all need to examine our consciences’.
This command of Jesus is identified as being inherent in the words: ‘I was in prison, and you visited me’ (Matthew 25:36). Jesus invites us to see himself in the marginalised, alienated and rejected.
The Church does appoint a Chaplain for each prison. Masses are celebrated for the prisoners, discussion groups are formed and prisoners are visited personally at entry and subsequently whenever they request it. The volume of work is such that in practice voluntary lay helpers are needed.

The state of prisons
The report refers to the overall state of the nation's prisons as a scandal. In particular there is terrible overcrowding - by the Government's own admission 82 of the 139 prisons in England and Wales are officially designated as overcrowded. Record numbers of inmates are committing suicide, drug use is widespread and purposeful activity such as education, employment or exercise for each prisoner is declining. The prison population in England and Wales has risen rapidly in recent years and the number of prisoners is currently only just below 75,000. A major cause is tougher sentencing by magistrates and judges in response to the Government's more severe sentencing guidelines. Are our European neighbours suffering similar problems? This country has 141 prisoners for every 100,000 of our population - far higher than the majority in Western Europe. Holland has 100, Germany 98, France 93 and Denmark 64. There are more life-sentence prisoners in England and Wales today than in the whole of the rest of Western Europe added together - yet there is no evidence of a higher homicide rate in the UK than in other Western European countries.
Too often the reaction to overcrowding is ‘build more prisons’. In contrast the report suggests that

• more and better use of non-custodial sentencing
• more and better education for prisoners
• better preparation for release and
• more drug rehabilitation programmes

The involvement of parishes
The report takes for granted that lay helpers are needed on a voluntary basis to assist the work of the Chaplains inside the prisons. There is a specific recommendation that more direct initiatives are needed at parish level to assist ex-offenders and prisoners' families. Training schemes may need to be set up for volunteers, who offer to take on these tasks.
The report also recommends that Christians need to be encouraged to participate in the debate on criminal justice and prisons, and to apply their faith directly to issues of controversy. Christians need boldly to challenge the myths and prejudices, which underlie many statements in the media by journalists and politicians.

The last word
I will give the last word to Pope John Paul II:
‘Prison should not be a corrupting experience, a place of idleness and even vice, but instead a place of redemption'

David Barrett

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