Cornish group proposes Christian prison

A PROJECT to build a prison based on Christian principles has won the backing of several denominations in Cornwall. The prison, to be called the Carpenter’s House, would be a new model of prison, designed to address reoffending rates that stand at more than 60 per cent.

It would also address what Mike Critchley, the project’s chairman, described on Monday as a “glaring vacuum of prison capacity in Cornwall”. There is no prison in the county.

“Regretfully, prison expansion is a boom industry, with a minimum of 12,000 prison beds needing to be identified by 2012 and built by 2014. Cornwall should be offering to provide some of this requirement,” Mr Critchley said. The group is seeking funds in order to provide a feasibility study and to lodge its proposals with the Government. It hopes to complete the project by 2012.

In April, the Government scrapped plans to build three Titan prisons, each holding 2500, and opted instead for five new, privately funded establishments, each holding 1500.

The Carpenter’s House would work on the lines of the Kainos Community, a Christian charity whose Challenge to Change pro-gramme with inmates in three prisons has cut reoffending rates by 87 per cent. Its chief executive, Patricia Rogers, said: “For serious offenders, there can be no greater liberty than the freedom from the burden of offending, and the underlying causes which have brought it about.”

Stuart Mitson, five times a prison governor, is consultant to the project. He is a member of the Prison Reform Working Group of the Centre for Social Justice. “Our prison system doesn’t work. I began in the system 30 years ago, and we were horrified then at the rate of reoffending,” he said on Tuesday. “Whatever government we have, the fact is that they will be building more and more prison places. The tragedy will be if they go on building the same sort of prisons as we’ve already got.”

The UK was not ready to accept a totally faith-based system such as those in the United States, and nor would that work, he said. “We have to accept that we’re living in a secular society, and that what we as Christians have to offer has to fit with what Government and Prison Service wants, and what people will accept. So long as people aren’t coerced into doing things they really don’t want to sign up to, the project can work just as the Kainos Community does.”

A spokesman for the Prison Service said: “We have no current plans to build faith-specific prisons in England and Wales.” It was, though, aware of the group’s initiative.

The project has the backing in Cornwall of Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, the Assemblies of God, Elim/Pentecostalists, and the Fel­lowship of Independent Evangelical Churches. The Bishop of Truro, the Rt Revd Tim Thornton, has welcomed the proposals.