Sr-speech 29206 482

sr-speech_29206_482
U1
0:00
You. 1s Good morning. I'm going to talk to you today about prisons and 1s why they're important and how they might be improved. So with that, we can get started. 2s Ladies and gentlemen, it might sound a little bit of a strange thing to say, but actually prisons are the line of a civilized society. Why do I say that? Well, quite simply, because prisons are institutions where people who have offended, perhaps violently offended against society can be taken out of that society, but at the same time housed, fed, 1s treated humanely until they're ready to go back into society. And as such, our prisons are an essential part of the modern judicial system. 1s You see, prisons basically have three functions in society. First of all, they protect it. By taking away dangerous and violent individuals and putting them away from society, they obviously protect the other members of society. 1s Secondly, prisons act as a deterrent. Quite simply, if I suspect that the consequence of my illegal action is going to be a protracted stay in a prison, well, theoretically at least, I will think twice before committing that criminal act. And thirdly, and I think perhaps most importantly, prisons have a function as meeting a fundamental human need, which is the need for vengeance. 1s Let me explain. In a primitive society, if an individual is wronged by another member of that society, then that individual has the right, and in most cases, actually would be expected to avenge themselves. If, for example, you steal one of my pigs, I'll steal one of your pigs. If you kill my son, I will kill your son, and so on and so on. In this way, primitive societies meet this fundamental need for vengeance. But of course, it comes at the cost of an almost never ending cycle of violence, blood feuds, for example, which can go on for generation after generation. 2s The modern judicial system tries to solve that problem of never ending violence by taking the administration of justice out of the hands of the individual and placing it in the hands of a state organized system. Under this system, it is not the individual person who exacts then for any wrongs that they have been subject to. It is the state. The state does it on our behalf. Now, of course, different states do this in different ways. Some countries, like the United States, like China and like India, have the death penalty as the most serious punishment that can be meted out. In the European Union. We believe that the death penalty is itself wrong, and therefore the most serious penalty that you can get in the European Union, regardless of the crime that you commit, is life imprisonment. But either way, whether it's life imprisonment or the death penalty, all modern judicial systems use prisons as an essential way in which they can meet out punishment to offenders against society. 1s However, the success of this judicial system depends crucially on one factor, and that is perception. The victim must perceive that justice has been done and that the justice meted out is in accordance with the severity of the crime. And the trouble is that perception is a very dangerous thing, especially when it falls into the hands of politicians. Let me explain. In the United Kingdom in the 1990s, the then conservative government decided that it would launch a program to try and curry favor with the people by cracking down on crime. They were going to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. There would be no lenience for anybody who broke the law. They would go to prison. Now, that all sounds good as a political soundbite, but let's have a look and see what the result of that policy has been. Well, basically the result has been that over the last 30 years, the prison population in the United Kingdom has more than doubled. Today, there are 85,400 inmates in prisons across the United Kingdom. And if you look at that in terms of a ratio or a percent. Of the population. It means 148 inmates for every 100,000 inhabitants in the UK. And that is a high figure. It compares, for example, to just 98 in France or 82 in the Netherlands and a mere 75 in Germany. In other words, proportionally, far more people are in the prisons in the UK than they are in other countries across Europe. And even that would be okay if the result was a genuine decrease in the level of crime. But apparently, despite this tough approach, crime has not diminished. In the United Kingdom, 25% of all people who come out of prison almost immediately reoffend. They go straight back to a life of crime. And that 25% is only the known figure, because they're the people who get caught. Presumably, there's quite a lot of people coming out of prison who go back to a life of crime and do not get caught. And so experts think that the actual figure of reoffenders is probably closer to something like 50%. So clearly, something in our prison system is not working very well. And in order to understand why, I think we have to stop and look to see why people end up in prison in the first place. 2s A quick survey would show that two thirds of all the inmates in the UK's prisons have no qualifications whatsoever. In other words, those people find no other way of making ends meet. They find no source of income through jobs because they have no qualifications. And so eventually, inevitably, they find themselves turning to crime. Perhaps they start stealing cars or breaking into people's houses. All too frequently, they end up dealing in drugs, and then sooner or later, they get caught. They get sent to prison. But when they're in prison, they don't receive any proper education, they're not given any skills, they're not given any training. So when they do leave prison, they still have no qualifications, no way of earning an honest living. And at the same time, they now have a criminal record to boot, which makes it even less likely that they're going to get a job. And so they simply go back to what they know how to do, which is to commit crimes 1s also. The UK prisons. The prison population. 20% of the prison population has the literary skills of a ten year old. So how are these people supposed to survive in society? 2s Many of them also come from a very troubled background. Some 25% of them come from foster homes, which means that they have been taken away from their families at an early age and put into state care. Often these foster home foster homes leave a lot to be desired. Hardly a year or two seems to go by without some new scandal about the sorts of things that go on in these institutions. 60% of the people imprisoned come from broken families, families where the mother and father are separated or divorced. And clearly these people already feel let down by society. But what happens as soon as they do something wrong? Society turns round and puts them behind bars. It hardly seems very fair. So that is why more and people, more and more people nowadays are thinking about innovative ways of dealing with illegal activity, criminals in society. One 1s suggestion is that you would only send the most violent offenders to prison, only the ones who constitute a danger to society. Another might be to make sure that people in prison are given proper education and proper training, so that when they leave, they have skills. But also we could perhaps use modern technology more to deal with people who would otherwise go to prison. For example, you could use an electronic tagging system under which people would basically be confined to house arrest. They would not be allowed to go on holiday, they would not be allowed to travel, but they would not have to go to prison. And they might be given specific time slots in which they could do useful things, such as community service, for example, or going to the shops to do the shopping, or going to the school to pick up their children. I'm not trying to say that these are going to be Panacea's for all the crime problems we have in the UK. Crime is a complex issue and it cannot be solved with easy solutions. But it does seem to me that our modern judicial system will only remain modern if it can keep up with the times. And at the moment, it is failing to do so. Thank you.