Punishment & Rehabilitation

The last tweet I sent into the ether last night was this one which even by my standards, I agree is a bit random.

Passing HMP Prison Northumberland on the bus and was surprised upon investigation afterwards that it is run by @SodexoGroup https://t.co/oavAmvTDwE
You have two hard court areas outside badly overgrown with weeds and vegetation. An ideal opportunity for a work party outside?

— David Williams (@davidredbutton) August 21, 2019

To give it some context, about three weeks ago, myself and my holy companion caught a double decker bus from the Henry Hotspuresque town of Alnwick in Northumberland to the slate grey town on the Tyne of Newcastle. The journey took 2 and a half hours all told but what struck me most about the journey was the pointless detour we took to the above named prison. There was a solitary rural bus stop outside but no escaped convicts got on the bus. It was a dead end which all prisons are. Two large hard court areas outside which I'm sure had witnessed games of five a side at the beginning of the 'Punishment & Rehabilitation' project were now full of tall weeds and vegetation. Yellow Rapeseed plants had pushed themselves up through the asphalt. Now if what was not going on outside was a reflection of what was going on inside then in the words of Shania Twain, 'that don't impress a me much'. Thinking about these things about a month later as you do, I googled the Prison and found out that it was a private 'profit making' concern. Now call me old fashioned but I don't think Education, Health Care or Punishment & Rehabilitation should be run on an 'on profit basis'. Our esteemed and glorious leader Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has huffed and puffed in his first few weeks in charge about longer prison sentences. As a boarder at Eton he is probably of the mind that incarceration, in with your chums, is a jolly good thing, but it isn't. From my limited experience of 4 months (114 days) in a tough Dutch Jail, the first month gave me a good idea about what crime and rehabilitation were all about. Even in the 'liberal oasis' of the Netherlands, they do jail time like they do in other countries namely 23 hours lock up, 1 hour walking around a so called recreation area. If you are a 'non-conforming' prisoner they have solitary confinement and all manner of carrot stick techniques at their disposal to make their charges conform. Because I had had the temerity to shout out the word 'Fascists' at the Prison Officers who had kept me banged up for 23 hours a day in my first week of 'orientation'. I was kept in my cell on solitary watch for 48 hours where I ended up singing Welsh hymns and graffitiing on the cork board in my cell. This blog post is not about me, it is about the men in Norhumberland Prison and in all the other Houses of Correction in the UK. It might sit well with the comfortable and complacent Daily Mail readers who appear to run this country but longer sentences is not the answer. One answer to the complicated conundrum of punishment and rehabilitation is 'farm gangs' and 'gardening gangs'. Instead of punishing people (because that is what they still are, regardless of their crimes) by keeping them banged up for 23 hours, rehabilitate them in the fresh air. Instead of an hour walking around a quad or playing football against another prison what about Fruit Picking in a No Deal Brexit Britain? The migrant foreign workers wont be here to pick the fruit so who is going to do it? Prisoners of Her Majesty's England that's who. Instead of looking in, look out and think about the benefits of hard physical work and fresh air. You wont be able to rehabilitate everybody but instead of punishing everybody and in many cases breaking them at least you will have a critical mass who upon release might look more favorably upon a system that at least tried to give them worthwhile activities in the fresh air and HMP Northumberland can start by clearing its hard courts with a work detail or with a privatized group of reluctant, paid staff.