No Room in the Cells

It seems most countries are having a building boom in prisons. About nine million people fill the world’s prisons at any one time with the United States leading the field. These numbers continue to grow everywhere and there are never enough cells.

In Britain it has created such a difficult situation that the Home Secretary recently took the unusual step of writing directly to the country’s judges warning them that the prisons were getting too full and would they kindly try to reduce the number of criminals being sentenced to prison. While the intention was good, the result was disastrous. As a consequence many judges have become more lenient with their sentences and guess which criminals gained the benefit? No prizes for guessing that it was the child sex offenders.

One persistent Welsh sex offender who had been caught with a large number of obscene images of child sex abuse was released with a suspended sentence instead of the expected prison sentence. Leaving the court the abuser told the press that he had been rather lucky. Such decisions reflect the attitude shown by judges in many countries. Faced each day with murder, theft and horrific crimes there appears to be a feeling that a known sex abuser with a large collection of appalling images of violent child sex abuse is actually committing a lesser crime than burglars and thieves.

There are two compelling reasons why this attitude has to stop. The first is that sex offenders are a continuing threat to the most vulnerable members of society. Society must protect its children from abusers in their midst and regrettably prison appears to be the only effective way this can be done.

The second reason is that prison forces the abuser to face some of the consequences of his crime and gives a chance to change some of his patterns of behaviour. While prison rehabilitation courses have often been less successful than desired at least they have enabled some offenders to control their drive to abuse and that has to be a plus.

Prison reform is needed – but not by increased tolerance of child sex abuse.