As it happened it was the luckless press officer who committed the only indiscretion
As it happened, it was the luckless press officer who committed the only indiscretion.”The judge is such a wonderful communicator!” he enthused for my benefit. “I found it quite remarkable how he instantly established a rapport with prisoners, 99 per cent of whom were from ethnic minorities. I was quite amazed.” It is not, of course, the case that 99 per cent of the inmates of HM Prisons come from ethnic minorities and neither Judge Tumim nor I had mentioned race.During his eight years as Chief Inspector, aided by a team 20 strong, Tumim has developed a coherent and challenging analysis of the purpose of prisons. It starts from his belief that only about 2-3 per cent of the prison population is both bad and dangerous.
“They are often intelligent, of strong character with dominant personalities, and they are dangerous, difficult and psychopathic: by which I mean, lacking moral quality.” The remainder are bad, more or less, but also very often plain unlucky. “Some 80 per cent of prisoners,” he continues, “are male, well under 30, have failed to get any real education or qualifications and have had little if any stable family background or upbringing Nearly half spent some part of their childhood in care. Their crimes are very often connected with drink, drugs or motor cars. If they are violent it is mainly from stupidity.”It is to these inadequates that the prison service should be addressing itself.
“We must not ignore the constructive potential of a period in custody – the average is 18 months – and I want to use that period to encourage prisoners to live law-abiding lives Their education must be immediate and intensive. There are three times as many illiterates in prison as on the inner-city estates, so we must start with the three Rs. Second, we must teach them arts and crafts, to get their imagination and self-respect going.”He points to the walls of his office, hung with a selection of prisoners’ art, some of it astonishingly good. “Third, we must give them a moral education: teach them the difference between right and wrong, which many of them do not know.”These young men may be streetwise, but they have no idea how to behave in the adult world because they simply haven’t been brought up Their position in society is very worrying. Nobody wants unskilled young men who haven’t sorted out their attitudes or settled down into marriage or mortgages. These boys, unless they have a terrific grip taken on them by dedicated people who know what they’re doing, have had no training in how to handle drink, drugs, Aids, even hygiene. They must be led into this while they’re in prison and given a social education, or they will have no place in the real world.”I would like to see more officers trained specifically to deal with young offenders.
