Is Imprisonment the Best Way to Deal with Offenders?

”Her Majesty’s Prison Service serves the public by keeping in custody those committed by the courts. Our duty is to look after them with humanity and to help them to lead law-abiding and useful lives in custody and on release”. [Cavadino & Dignan, 1997: p114].

A Brief History

As the population grow and people organized communities and societies, there were always some people to offend the rules and norms of these groups and societies. The way the authorities dealt with the offenders changed throughout the history and it is in a continuous progress till today.

Before the eighteenth century the criminals were treated with severe torture and many of them were executed in public (bloody code). By the end of 1700’s the way they dealt with the criminals has changed [Foucault.1991] and the idea of training and controlling the offenders appeared which was known as enlightenment era. This change due to the way people understood the world and the conditions of human nature from the previous century.

Through the latter centuries prisons changed from the houses of corrections to private prisons and later to the central government (home office) controlled prisons.

How to Deal with the Offenders

How to deal with the offenders? This question remains the most difficult question to be answered by philosophers, scientists, theorists, politicians and criminologists throughout the history. People needs security and maintaining Law and Order “As prison has the highest profile of any sanction in common use in our kind of society, it plays an important part in reassuring people that “something is being done” about the problem of law and order, and the social threats which they are persuaded to take most seriously.” [Cavadino & Dignan, 1997: p113].

From the functionalist view prison is an important institution in order to control the selfishness of human nature, egoism, and to treat the unruly people with justice. With punishment, they argue, we may show the citizens the limits of acceptable behaviour. They also argued that punishment and imprisonment makes the criminals negative models for the younger generation [Durkheim, 1960].

The Marxists argue that prison is a means in the hands of capitalists to exploit the lower or working classes and making them a tool in their hands outside or inside prisons, in order to make bigger capitals and collecting more power and money. “Prison and other correctional institutions were repressive forms of social control, born out of class conflict and designed to protect the vested interests of a wealthy and governing class.” [McLaughlin& Muncie, 2001: p 173]. So the Marxists do not agree with any kind of prison as a way to control crime and maintain law and order. They argue that capitalism is the source and cause of all the problems and offends in the society and only by changing the system in to a socialist system, they argue, we may put an end to all the social, economical and legal problems.