Archbishop – Commission of enquiry needed into failing penal system

News from the Archbishop of Canterbury - 1 February 2007

 

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is calling for a commission of enquiry into the Penal Justice system which, he says is failing both offenders and victims because it can’t cope with the primary need to change the behaviour of those convicted.

The call comes in a lecture to the Prison Reform Trust today [Thursday 1st February 2007]. A Commission is needed to explore different models of penal justice, Dr Williams argues, because problems stem from an inadequate sense of responsibility; not simply on the part of offenders but also on the part of the society which imprisons them.

“ If we seriously want to address the problem of re-offending, it is clear that a penal culture in which there is no real attention to how offenders change is worse than useless – literally worse than useless, in that it reinforces alienation, low self-worth and the lack of any sense of having a stake in the life of a community.”

The real neglect, he argues, is that like society as a whole, the system does not adequately explore how offenders might reform:

“ If the underlying problem in crime is a breakage in relationship, this means that the offender has lost the active sense of being answerable for others. That sense is … inseparable from the assurance of having others who are answerable for you. The most unhelpful and indeed damaging way of treating this is thus surely a system that leaves the offender without any grounds for believing that he or she is the object of anyone’s responsibility. This is emphatically the message that much of our present system still gives to the offender.”

Dr Williams warns that a creeping consumerism threatens to unbalance the relationship between society, the offender and the victim. Moves to put parts of the system out to tender or franchise, sends the message that the community as a whole is not fully committed to the business of changing offending behaviour:

“ The idea that offender management should be put out to tender is one that could sit very comfortably with some sorts of talk about community justice if we are not careful; and this buys into a very questionable understanding of genuine collective responsibility fully owned by the state – a properly common moral discourse about crime and punishment.”

Victims, he says, are pressured to treat the penal system as though they were consumers:

“ A system that was at the mercy of organised lobbying on behalf of the victim would not serve the real interest of the victim because it could never break out of the stress on the victim role at just the point where someone might need help to shed that. … Such research as there is on ‘victim satisfaction’ is very far from giving anything like clear support to this. Should we not be thinking about policies that looked towards the restoring to the victim of some renewed capacity to engage responsibly? To make fuller use of the empathy that can be nurtured through reflecting on the experience of injustice and trauma?”

He asserts that the current harmful imbalance in the system, which acts as a barrier to true rehabilitation, is exacerbated by an inability of many to talk about responding to crime in anything other than punitive terms:

“ It would be welcome – though it feels at times like crying for the moon – if politicians and commentators could refrain from speaking as if punishment were essentially about the expression of disapproval and the infliction of legally controlled suffering and not much more. In itself, such an approach this changes nothing but any crime surely indicates that something needs to change in a person’s awareness and conscience.”

 

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