DOING TIME

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

My gracious lord of Canterbury is in the news again and that’s never a good thing. “Archbishop of Canterbury backs votes for prisoners,” according to the Guardian, while the Daily Mail provocatively headlined its story “Archbishop backs axe killer.”

Several quotes were included in both these stories, none of which put Dr. Williams in a particularly good light. But knowing how bad religion coverage can be in the media, I was anxious to read a fuller account of what the Archbishop had said on this subject. Were his thoughts as bad as the pull quotes in these stories made them out to be? No.

They were way worse::

So I want to start by enunciating a basic political principle and a basic theological principle. As you will see, they are not a million miles apart. My basic political principle is: the prisoner is a citizen; and that if we lose sight of the notion of the prisoner as citizen, any number of things follow from that, and indeed are following from that. The notion that in some sense not the civic liberties, but the civic status of a prisoner is in a ‘cold storage’ when custody takes over, is one of a whole range of issues around the rights of prisoners. And indeed touches a little on that particularly neuralgic subject of votes for prisoners. Maybe more of that later on.

Dr. Williams seems to assume here that “civic liberties” and “civic status” are fixed states and should never be intefered with by any government for any reason. If he truly believes that, he has just made the case for lowering the voting age to one hour.

But the prisoner as citizen is somebody who can on the one hand expect their dignities as a citizen to be factored into what happens to them.

Why? If I have, say, taken a life, I have no right to expect my “dignities as a citizen to be factored into” anything at all.

And we reasonably expect that penal custody will be something that contributes to rather than takes away the capacity of the individual to act as a citizen in other circumstances and thus issues around restoration, around responsibility, around developing concepts of empathy and mutuality are all part of what it seems to me to be a reasonable working-out of what it is to regard the prisoner a citizen.

Once again. Why? There are crimes for which “restoration” is impossible. How does one “restore” a childhood to a child who has been sexually abused or made to pose for child pornography? How do you “restore” the life of a woman that you’re raped?

How do you “restore” a daughter to her parents or a wife to her husband if you’ve murdered them? How do you “restore” trust in a wife whom you’ve beaten to a bloody pulp? I’ll tell you how you don’t do it. By Dr. Williams’ arid theorizing.

So the ‘prisoner as citizen’ is my political principle. And my theological principle is a little harder to express in brief and snappy terms but I’ll do it in what may sound a rather shocking phrase; the prisoner is ‘gifted’. That is to say, the prisoner is someone who in theological terms has received dignities, liberties as a human being, as a person – and someone whose gifts, received from the creator, are given to be shared. When those gifts are overlaid by failure, by crime, by any number of distortions, then they need release (to use what’s perhaps an appropriate term), and penal custody ought to have in view the question of how gifts are released for sharing.

No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Wrong. “Penal custody ought to have in view the question of” the fact a crime has been committted and that the state has the right, check that, the divine duty, to exact a price for that crime in order to secure the public peace.

Nothing else.

Penal systems should obviously never permit their prisoners to be treated in an inhumane or un-Christian manner. But they are under no obligation whatsoever to see that whatever “gifts” prisoners have are “released for sharing.”

And in seeing that those two principles are in fact very loosely allied –because both of them presuppose that the restoration of an offender is something to do with the restoration of a capacity for relating, for taking responsibility, for self-understanding and the understanding of others — if there’s any element of restoration in penal policy that needs surely to be its direction. And that applies not only as we think about the general issue of restorative justice – the restoration of relationship — but has something to do with healthy relationships within penal institutions; with the working constructions of the penal institution being so understood that they don’t simply turn the screw further on an erosion of civic dignity and human giftedness.

Odd how the concept of punishment seems utterly foreign to His Grace’s Weltanschauung. Odder still how the idea that actions have consequences doesn’t seem to have sunk into Dr. Williams’ addled head at all.

To him, crime is a “distortion” that the state is obligated to help put right. And the fact that you’re a serial rapist or a presidential assassin ought not erode your “civic dignity and human giftedness” in any way.

So those are my starting points. And they relate a little bit to again a point I made a little while ago, speaking to the PRT, that at present we’re in danger of perpetuating a penal philosophy and system which actually leaves everybody as victims. It leaves victims of crime as victims: their victimhood unaddressed and unaltered. It leaves those under sentence as victims in other ways. We ought to want to move beyond a situation where claims around victimage are driving policy, but also a situation where the victimising of the prisoner by the denial of those basic civic issues is perpetuated.

Good God. Of all the magisterially stupid things Rowan Williams has said, this might be the most idiotic. We’reall victims here? Really? The guy who tortured and murdered my daughter and I are both victims?!! Sorry if I have a tough time giving a crap whether my daughter’s murderer has all his civic rights or not.

Once again since it doesn’t seem to have sunk in the first time. Governments have been established by God to keep the public peace. Governments have the right to criminalize certain behaviors and to jail or execute those who commit them. Governments also have the right to establish who may or may not participate in its affairs.

Christians are obligated to visit those in prison and the government of an overwhelmingly Christian country should do all it can to see that incarcerations are as humane as possible. Job training and therapy should be provided so that those who can be saved will be. But denial of the right to vote or to participate in civic affairs is not victimization.

And to fatuously assert that everybody’s a victim here is one of the most insulting and demeaning things I’ve ever heard an alleged Christian clergyman say about anything. No everybody’s not a victim. Saying that everyone is doesn’t just trivialize the suffering of the victims of crime, it ignores that suffering completely.

A very strong theme that comes through in the Green Paper is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be controlled in our attitudes here, by understanding the prior, overwhelming, need as the protection of the public.

Well, that and justice, something which seems to have joined sin on the scrapheap of Anglican history.

And early on in the Green Paper we read about how protection of the public for short sporadic bursts so to speak, by custody without purpose, doesn’t actually make anybody safer in the long run.

It does prevent certain people from committing crimes. So there’s that.

We all know the sort of argument that says prisoners in custody have quite a comfortable and secure time and they ought to be made more uncomfortable.

Dr. Williams puts it a bit crudely but it makes sense. After all, punishment ought to have a, well, punishing aspect to it.

To that, one needs to say the punishment is custody. The punishment is not being made as uncomfortable as possible in custody. Punishment is the deprival of liberty.

So if British prison cells were the equivalent of Hilton luxury suites, then having to stay in them for a certain period, one’s meals paid for by the state, would still be punishment? I have to tell you that that’s not much of an incentive to not rob a bank.

But we need to balance that by saying at the same time the deprivation of liberty, the fact of custody needs some purposefulness about it if it’s not simply to mean a temporary act of damage limitation which in fact turns out rather worse than being a temporary act of damage limitation, because most of the evidence suggests it in fact intensifies long-term damage both to individual and society.

Where’s the crime victim in all that verbiage? Where’s the right of a civilized society to protect itself from people who mean to harm its citizens? Where’s the right of a society to provide justice to those who have been harmed?

People commit criminal acts for a variety of reasons. And don’t get me wrong, I believe in the possibility of rehabilitation. I’ve seen and read of too many examples of it.

But note that I said “possibility.” Because unlike Dr. Williams, who seems to suggest that all prisoners just need a little fine-tuning to make them once more productive members of society, I don’t believe that every criminal can be or wants to be rehabilitated.

Any rehabilitation scheme, regardless of what it contains, must have something of a punishment aspect to it. Because any program that does not drive home to the inmate the fact that he or she committed a crime, that he or she did something wrong, is less than worthless for both the inmate and for society.

The stress in the Green Paper on work, on restorative strategies, on responses other than automatic remand, especially as it applies to the young; all of it I think recognises very fully and very rightly that custody in itself is not the answer: we need to ask what is the content.

I agree about the young. These, I think, can be pulled back from the brink much easier than older criminals can.

And I would want to underline the insight, because it is one that has wider implication; that if public protection takes over and drives everything in the field of penal policy there is a real difficulty in many areas of civil liberties, human dignity and so forth, especially as that takes over beyond even detention as a matter of public protection.

In other words, civilized society could protect itself better if it just stopped worrying about protecting itself so much.

And I would want to underline the insight, because it is one that has wider implication; that if public protection takes over and drives everything in the field of penal policy there is a real difficulty in many areas of civil liberties, human dignity and so forth, especially as that takes over beyond even detention as a matter of public protection.

I don’t know how this speech struck any of you but I got the impression that with all Dr. Williams’ talk about “civil liberties, human dignity and so forth,” the only person in this whole transaction who matters is the criminal. Victims of crime certainly don’t merit consideration and neither does the right of a country to protect its citizens.

And so, to paraphrase Dean Wormer from Animal House, I have one piece of advice for Rowan Williams. Cold, bloodless and intellectual is no way to go through life, son.