In my daily Tik Tok plunge on Facebook, I saw a clip about the prison system in Denmark, which sparked some thoughts.
Denmark tries to make prisons as close to ‘normal’ as possible. Prisoners have comfortable cells, work and get paid! and do their own shopping and cook for themselves! They get weekends off after serving half their sentences
I have visited prisons in Africa and New Zealand and love prison movies. The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke and The Great Escape are among my top movies of all time. All prisons I have visited were hard places, with barbed wire, stone walls and strict discipline.
By and large it is probably fair to say that most prison systems fail when it comes to rehabilitation.
Astoundingly, it seems that the most humane, softest prison systems have the lowest re-offending rates.
Another kick in the guts for we believers in western civilisation is that the bigger the western ‘civilised’ country, the worse the rehabilitation, with a recidivist rate of 70% in the US. Coincidentally, the US also has the highest imprisonment rate in the world. It should be the best at prisons – it’s got the most material to work with heh! heh!
Statistics for Arab, African and Asian countries are scant. Anectdotally their prison systems are extremely hard and many do not survive to re-offend, if they actually survive arrest. For an account of African prison experience, read Beating Chains by Rusty Labuschagne.
Don’t get imprisoned in Africa.
In Russia, at least 50% of inmates have previous prison sentences. Prisoners in both countries are released to fight in penal battalions in the Ukraine war.
Shades of 19th Century practice, when significant proportions of armies and navies were criminals!
Coming back to Denmark and its soft system – its recidivist rate is about 20%
My brother, Mpunzane, was a policeman in colonial Swaziland. In his isolated rural post of Nomahasha, he received a report that a prisoner had failed to report at morning roll call so possibly, had absconded.
Apparently, prisoners were ‘allowed to escape‘ after evening roll call but had to return by morning. Mpunzane was about to call out the District, when he was reassured by the Prison Officer -he had released all the prisoners to search for the man!
They all returned by 10 a.m. with the missing man who had drunk too much at a beer drink and passed out on the way home. Consequently, no-one woke him in time to break back into the prison before roll call.
So Kristofferson got it wrong: there is something left to lose if you lose freedom.
It seems paradoxical: the main purpose of prison is to deter crime, yet the better we treat prisoners, the better citizens they become!
The punishment of loss of liberty is sufficient – there is no need to make life very uncomfortable.
Our views of right and wrong change….
sillysocksonfriday 