Kevin Baldeosingh
When prisons were first invented, it was a sign that kings and other rulers were becoming more humanitarian.
This might seem counter-intuitive, given the conditions of prisons, even in developed nations and more so in countries like ours. But, before prisons, criminals would either have to be executed, or punished in public and or at best exiled.
Even nowadays in T&T, there are people who call for public hangings as a means of reducing crime. But such executions in Western nations were done away with centuries ago, and the reason wasn’t entirely mercy. “Executions became the occasion for rowdiness and disgust—both because the crowd had begun to identify with the victim, not the executioner, and the spectacle had become revolting, offending a new sensibility about pain and bodily integrity,” Morris and Rothman note. “Thus, it became desirable to mete out punishment away from the public gaze and to find alternatives to the gallows.”
This is why understanding history is crucial to making prisons more effective. This book only deals with prisons in the United States and the United Kingdom, but practices do not vary so significantly that the research cannot be applied to T&T. Nonetheless, most members of the public fail to understand the death camp point. “Whatever practices are followed in a society at any time, the majority of citizens perceive these practices as too lenient toward the criminal,” says another researcher.
Which leads to another fundamental and, again, counter-intuitive point: prisons do not reduce crime. “Research into the use of imprisonment over time and in different countries has failed to demonstrate any positive correlation between increasing the rate of imprisonment and reducing the rate of crime,” the experts say.
This doesn’t mean that prisons should be done away with, only that the present model is not working. The Scandinavian prison model, for example, is described as “a factory with a fence”. Ideally, the prisoner earns roughly as much as if he were free but this salary pays for his accommodation in prison, compensates victims, supports his dependents, and saves for release. “However, these sensible goals are rarely realised, and there is frequently abuse in the exploitation of labour,” the researchers say.