Man-Made Hells
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by an excess of time. This ratio is what has made imprisonment of prurient interest to the public which still perceives incarceration as an anomaly. But as Vivien Stern puts it in A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World (Penguin Books, special Indian price, £6.99), incarceration of people is the norm for most of the world.
Stern divides her study into four main sections. The first sketches how imprisonment came to be the main punishment for criminal offences. The second looks at life in prisons, the similarities across regions and how women and minorities fare within it. The third and fourth examine the efforts being made to improve prisons and lists alternatives to imprisonment. Stern argues that the institution needs to be revised simply because it provides a setting for profound abuses of human rights under the justification that it is done to protect the public. Besides, the costs are prohibitive and often unsustainable.
To begin with The Great Incarcerator, the US, which leads the pack against human rights abuses. The US has the worlds highest crime rate: A telling statistic is that the prison population of the US is twenty times that of Britain, even though the American population is only four times larger.
Imprisonment is a big enterprise in the US. More than one and a half million people are locked up on any one day. Over 10 million Americans will see the insides of a prison or jail in any one year. It is also a growing enterprise. In 1996 there were more than three times as many prisoners as there had been in 1980. The expenditure is... more than $40 billion in a year.
Americans incur vast costs to avoid becoming victims of crime, spending billions on security, burglar alarms and firearms and incurring huge unquantifiable non-monetary costs in the choice of where to live and work, and how much time to spend outside house and office. No one knows whether the ratio of American expenditures on protection to that in other countries is greater or less than the ratio of crime rates. A nation may have a low crime rate because it spent heavily on preventing crime.
Why is the crime and imprisonment rate so high? A nations crime rate is a function of four things: the scope of a nations criminal laws; the rate at which crimes are reported; the propensity of the population to commit crimes; and the expected punishment cost. The lower the expected punishment cost, the higher (other things being equal) crime rates will be.
All four factors figure in Americas crime rates. Partly because of its Puritan background and partly because both federal and state governments enact criminal laws, the US criminalises conduct more than most non-Islamic states. Add to these the requirements of insurance companies, incentives to the police, the publicity given by the media and specialised groups.
Stern makes a plea for change but doesnt reckon with the crooked timber of humanity: men are as cruel as they are paid to be, negligent, corruptible and lazy. Prison is a hell that is both man-made and manned by men. No man-made system can be perfect.