thundering nonsense
Remember the scandal that erupted a few days ago about the conditions the prisoners were being kept in, in Pentonville? In the Times, the 'Thunderer' column was devoted to ridiculing the notion that we should be bothered at criminals living in cells without pillows and with rats and cockroaches for company.
It's so long since I've read the Times on a regular basis that I've forgotten whether the Thunderer is deliberately provocative and actually specialises in saying absurd things with extravagant pomposity and bullishness ... one can only hope so, because the alternative is that someone out there really thinks it doesn't matter how you treat criminals, just because they've committed a crime.
Having mentioned Josephine Butler the other day, this column gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about another brave woman, one of my childhood heroes, the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry.
Elizabeth Fry was a Quaker who was appalled by the grim conditions of the prisons in her time, and set about trying to help women prisoners in particular. People were imprisoned for offences which would now be considered fairly minor, if I remember rightly, and imprisonment was a fairly desperate fate in those days. Babies born to the women in prison might die of cold, they only had straw for bedding, there were lice everywhere, and they might even have needed to persuade other people to buy them food to eat (fraid I don't have the book to hand to check up, so feel free to correct any of this if it's wrong!).
One incident in particular which stuck in my mind (I hope I'm remembering it accurately) was when she and her friends got themselves organised and made little linen bonnets for all the women in the particular prison that they were working in - and then the women were able to shave their heads, to get rid of the lice, and wear the caps while their hair grew back. It was such a necessary practical measure, yet at the same time you can see the concern to allow these people to retain some dignity, and treat them with courtesy as far as possible.
Josephine Butler thought it was wrong to treat anyone like scum even if they were prostitutes: Elizabeth Fry thought it was wrong to allow her fellow human beings to wallow in misery and degradation even if they were convicted criminals. The self-congratulatory attitude that says certain types of people deserve whatever comes to them, no matter how horrible and demoralising it might be, is an attitude which fails to recognise that it wouldn't be in the power of any of us, really, not to end up doing the same kinds of thing (and how would you like it if you had to share with cockroaches!); and it fails to recognise that even when people have done something so bad in society that society needs to take steps to punish them, there's such a thing as doing it humanely and with a view to making them see the benefits of behaving in a moral and civilised way, as well as the bad consequences of behaving badly.
The Times article which made me so cross is here and there are a couple of articles on Elizabeth Fry here and here.
It's so long since I've read the Times on a regular basis that I've forgotten whether the Thunderer is deliberately provocative and actually specialises in saying absurd things with extravagant pomposity and bullishness ... one can only hope so, because the alternative is that someone out there really thinks it doesn't matter how you treat criminals, just because they've committed a crime.
Having mentioned Josephine Butler the other day, this column gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about another brave woman, one of my childhood heroes, the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry.
Elizabeth Fry was a Quaker who was appalled by the grim conditions of the prisons in her time, and set about trying to help women prisoners in particular. People were imprisoned for offences which would now be considered fairly minor, if I remember rightly, and imprisonment was a fairly desperate fate in those days. Babies born to the women in prison might die of cold, they only had straw for bedding, there were lice everywhere, and they might even have needed to persuade other people to buy them food to eat (fraid I don't have the book to hand to check up, so feel free to correct any of this if it's wrong!).
One incident in particular which stuck in my mind (I hope I'm remembering it accurately) was when she and her friends got themselves organised and made little linen bonnets for all the women in the particular prison that they were working in - and then the women were able to shave their heads, to get rid of the lice, and wear the caps while their hair grew back. It was such a necessary practical measure, yet at the same time you can see the concern to allow these people to retain some dignity, and treat them with courtesy as far as possible.
Josephine Butler thought it was wrong to treat anyone like scum even if they were prostitutes: Elizabeth Fry thought it was wrong to allow her fellow human beings to wallow in misery and degradation even if they were convicted criminals. The self-congratulatory attitude that says certain types of people deserve whatever comes to them, no matter how horrible and demoralising it might be, is an attitude which fails to recognise that it wouldn't be in the power of any of us, really, not to end up doing the same kinds of thing (and how would you like it if you had to share with cockroaches!); and it fails to recognise that even when people have done something so bad in society that society needs to take steps to punish them, there's such a thing as doing it humanely and with a view to making them see the benefits of behaving in a moral and civilised way, as well as the bad consequences of behaving badly.
The Times article which made me so cross is here and there are a couple of articles on Elizabeth Fry here and here.
posted by cath at
8:04 pm
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