I began my career as a prison officer at a high-security men’s establishment, working with prisoners serving sentences ranging from 25 years to natural life. From there I transferred to a busy London prison housing short-termers, lifers and everything in between, before returning to the high-security estate.
After a decade in the job, I’m used to the different ways people talk about prisons and the people inside. Holiday camps one day, hell on earth the next.
But the phrase is hate the most is “behind bars”. It brings with it connotations of fierce institutions, punishing regimes and emotionless, monotone staff. It’s illusory. And yet, I’ve been reading it a lot lately.
There it was in various political responses to last week’s justice and home affairs committee report, Cutting Crime: Better Community Sentences. The report acknowledges the critical situation in England and Wales’s prisons, and calls for more community sentences that can provide both punishment and rehabilitation. Prison sentences of under a year are to be scrapped for most offences in England and Wales, mainly affecting cases of shoplifting, common assault or battery, and the assault of emergency workers. Mentoring, community engagement and individualised treatment are all ways of holding a person........