A Point of View: Prisons don't work

BBC News

Prison does not work for the majority of inmates either as punishment or rehabilitation, writes Will Self.

If you stand on a main road in a British city and wait for long enough several kinds of vehicle will pass you by.

Naturally, there will be the relentless snort and grumble of cars and lorries, the snarl of motorcycles and the hiss of buses. But also with unflagging regularity nowadays there comes the demented wail of police cars, ambulances and fire engines weaving through the stalled traffic.

However, there's another kind of vehicle that may well escape your attention: boxy, four-square vans of the sort used by security companies to transport cash and other valuables, but painted white and with anything from two to eight opaque windows ranged along their hard riveted hides.

Next time you see one of these distinctive vans stopped by a traffic light, why not go up close to the windows, wave, and mouth the words of a silent greeting because inside, unseen yet able to view a tinted world, will be sitting a human being just like you, but in all probability shackled.

In prison slang these vans are known as "sweat-boxes" because the tiny individual cells they house, which are furnished with unpadded plastic seats, can grow intolerably hot.

The occupants of the sweat-boxes may be being transferred from prisons to courts, or taken on some other more or less rational journey mandated by their confinement.

However, often they will simply be being "ghosted", another apt slang term that perfectly captures the condition of inmates shifted from one prison to another, without warning, on a senseless go-round seemingly designed to disorientate and pacify.

It was Dostoevsky who said: "The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons." But in contemporary Britain you don't even need to do this, you can simply stand on a street corner and wait for the ghosts to come flitting past in order to appreciate its parlous condition.

We now have the highest prison population in Europe by a considerable measure, and following the recent riots there is no likelihood of it decreasing.

Of course, we aren't quite at the levels enjoyed by our closest allies, those prime exponents of the civilising mission the United States, whose extensive gulag now houses, it is estimated, more African American men than were enslaved immediately prior to their Civil War - but we're getting there.

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