THE Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken of the current “custodial obsession” within the justice system, calling for alternative models of community and restorative justice to be used.
In the annual Prison Reform Trust lecture at the Methodist Central Hall earlier this month, Dr Williams described how the current system was letting down both offenders and victims by not succeeding in its primary task: to change the behaviour of those convicted.
He also criticised government plans to put parts of the prison service out to tender: such a move did not “sit very comfortably” with talk of community justice, and shied away from the idea of collective responsibility by the state. He called for a commission of inquiry.
Dr Williams said: “If we seriously want to address the problem of reoffending, it is clear that a penal culture in which there is no real attention to how offenders change is worse than useless. . .
“The statistical likelihood is that an offender will be accommodated in overcrowded conditions, deprived of privacy; that contact with family will be vulnerable to unpredictable moves and varying policies in different institutions; and that informal personal support (such as the excellent work of the Samaritans, for example) will be at best patchy.”
But although he called for a fresh look at both community and restorative justice, he said that there was a need for “clarity and honesty about what offences can and cannot be appropriately dealt with under the non-custodial and reparative model”. These included cases of abuse, or where there was a continuing threat to public safety.
Society must explore how offenders might reform, he went on, and not neglect them by just sending them to prison. “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.”
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