Prison Suicide - the liberal Death Penalty
You have to wonder why the Guardian, ever in the forefront of liberal reform, stuck the news about record prison suicides on page 14 of its print edition – here is the web version: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/28/one-prison-suicide-every-three-days-england-and-wales-say-reformers
Of course, about three square miles of the paper had to be given over to ambiguous coverage of the death of the tyrant and murderer Fidel Castro, still admired by many Guardian readers and (I suspect) staff. Even the Guardian now acknowledges Castro’s wicked actions, but it still has many readers and (I think) writers who are ready to excuse these, or at least offer mitigation.
But even so, a left-hand page (newspaper design experts put dull stuff on the even-numbered left-hand pages, and the big news on page one and on right-hand, odd-numbered pages) deep inside the paper is surely not what this extraordinary piece of information deserves.
Look especially at the graph ( scroll down) for once not distorted (as so many are, especially in the ‘Climate Change’ industry) by messing around with the scales to make things look bigger than they are.
Since 1978, there has been an undoubted and severe rise in ‘apparent self-inflicted deaths’ of people whose lives are, in theory, entirely under the control of the authorities. Plainly it varies greatly from year to year, but the figure is significantly higher now than it was 40 years ago, when the prison population was significantly lower (roughly half what it is now).
Suicide is harder in prison than out of it. Modern life offers many relatively easy ways of self-slaughter, if that is what you want to do. Prisoners don’t have access to them. Yet they still manage to end their lives.
We have discussed here the true suicide rate in the outside world, often obscured by vague ‘narrative verdicts’ and other coroners’ evasions. I have speculated on the possible effects on self-slaughter of the widespread use of poorly-understood psychiatric ‘medications’. Likewise we have to wonder if such ‘medications’, which I believe are widely prescribed in prisons, might also be associated with suicide. I doubt if anyone has kept any sort of record, as there is so little official interest in this possible correlation.
It is also of course well-known now that illegal drugs circulate widely in prison, perhaps (who can say?) because the authorities initially made no really serious effort to discourage this at the beginning, and now lack the resources to correct what has turned out to be a very major mistake,
Violence in prisons has also greatly increased in recent times. See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/27/prison-violence-staff-cuts-moj-deaths-assaults - 65 assaults a day. Some of these are truly horrible.
But my question is this : If prison suicides have not fallen below 50 a year in England and Wales (out of a population now around 80,000) in the last 20 years (and have often been higher) are we not knowingly sentencing many prisoners to death when we send them there?
This is a measurable, undeniable failure of our non-deterrent non-punitive liberal prison system, supposedly based not upon punishment (the loss of liberty is now officially said to be the sole punishment) but on ‘rehabilitation’, a mythical activity which is often asserted but has never, to my knowledge, ever provably taken place anywhere in the world.
Prisons which no longer seek to make the regime itself a punishment are, by their nature, less under the control of the authorities than those which do.
Can it be that such an arrangement (leaving inmates increasingly at the mercy of their fellow-prisoners, who are freer to organise in gangs, make weapons etc) actually produces more despair than a rigid rule of hard labour by day and single cells by night?
Could it also be that the unacknowledged policy of waiting until criminals are recidivist serial offenders before sending them to prison (which is what we in fact do with almost all crimes short of homicide) is also helping to make prisons harder to control and more anarchic?
In any case, I must ask can those who piously recoil from a death penalty that (in the modern era) was rarely used more than 18 times a year:
Why are you not equally outraged by the fact that so many people in prison who have *not* been sentenced to death, and some of whom may even be innocent of the charges on which they were locked up, predictably die , violently and in despair, in the prisons your ideas have created?