Below is a guest blog from a friend of Only Connect, Delroy, who has extensive experience of the Prison system both internally as a prisoner and externally. This is Delroy’s personal view and does not necessarily reflect the broader views of Only Connect.
Prison is no longer a punishment for most people. Prison needs to be made harder to keep people out. When people aren’t scared about going to prison, what’s the point of it?
In my view, most people who engage in crime know what they are doing. There’s a perception that criminals are dumb, but most people that I have met have been very intelligent. They know what the risks are, and that they could end up in jail, but they will take those risks. They know what’s right, but they choose to go down a different direction. Sure, some people go through situations where they have no choice, but most often in my experience, people choose the worse path because it’s easier. I went into my criminal career knowing what I was doing.
That’s why it’s so important that prison in itself is seen as a punishment. It used to be that people avoided prison because they knew it would be hard. Some would go to jail as part of a rite of passage. It was not nice inside, but they could learn things, get an education, work in there. When they came out, it was easier to get jobs in security and debt collecting if you had a prison record. It was a badge of honour. Most of the people that I did time with in the seventies and eighties would come out and work hard to not go back in again. They didn’t want to spend one more second in there than they had to.
Now, I think that doing time in prison is easier. There also isn’t as much chance to learn skills, so people do easy time, come out not having learnt anything, and face a world where it is now much harder to get a job with a criminal record. They then just think back to how easy it is in prison, and aren’t afraid to go back in.
Let me tell you a bit about what hard time was like for me in the seventies and eighties, and what I know it’s like now. Back then, you were up at 6.30, washed and dressed and then you went to your jobs all day. Jobs were things like cleaning, but most people didn’t have mops so it was an on your hands and knees job. You could work up to the privilege jobs, like becoming an outside orderly. We would sew mailbags, shirts – most prisons were self sufficient, we would grow all our own food. You could learn skills, I got my painters and decorators skills inside. When you went back to your cells you just had to sit there with four other bods, doing each others’ heads in.
Every time I engaged in crime I knew what I was facing and it always made me think twice. I first began to see the changes in jail when I went in during the early 90s. I couldn’t believe it when I saw people getting TVs, being able to wear their own clothes, toilets in cells. I guess the payoff is that people don’t get to learn so many skills now. Back then people said it was brutal, but it wasn’t. It was hard, and you got deflated when you went in, but you then got the chance to build yourself back up and you definitely didn’t want to go back in. Now, for someone that’s not bothered about going to the shops, about getting out and about, it’s not to hard. There needs to be more discipline, and more discipline coming from parents and teachers nowadays, but that’s a different story…
