THE EFFECTS OF LONG-TERM
IMPRISONMENT
A.J.W. (Tony) Taylor
Victoria University of Wellington
Abstract
• Purpose of prisons
• – to change the behaviour of the majority of
inmates through retaliation or reformation
• - to retain the intransigent minority in
accordance with basic principles of human rights
• - thereby ‘Improving public safety by ensuring
sentence compliance and reducing re-offending
through capable staff and effective partnerships’
(Dept. of Corrections’ Strategic Business Plan, 2009)
• Accountability in the rehabilitative chain
The theme
• Those who cannot learn from history are
doomed to repeat it: and those who do,
can select remarkable guides and
guidelines
- adapted from George Santayana
Outline
• Unfettered ideology / administrative policy
v Academic appraisal
• Evolution of prisons
• Excessive deprivation compounding other
factors
• Repeated observations
• National and International authorities
• A Penal Commission
Disputation driven by:
• Ideological assertions versus
principled accountability
• Beliefs and initial gut reactions versus
consideration of declared criteria
• Reliance on public clamour versus
resolute appraisal of data
• Assumption that all victims want vengeance all
the time versus clinical and survey evidence to the
contrary
Home Secretary Winston Churchill
‘The mood and temper of the public in regard to
the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the
most unfailing tests of the civilization of any
country. A calm and dispassionate recognition of
the rights….even of the convicted criminal
against the State,... [and] tireless [efforts]
towards the discovery of curative and
regenerative processes,… mark and measure
the stored up strength of a nation, and are the
sign and proof of the living virtue in it’
(House of Commons 20th July 1910)
Evolution of prisons
• Caves and dungeons in pre-Biblical times
• Monastic chambers AD 1084, & Pope Innocent 1143 four rules
• Fr. Mabillon mid-17th proposal for laity
• 1675 Fr. Fillipo applied riules to y.. in Florence Hospice
• 1704 Pope Clement XI created cellular Prison in Rome
• Elizabethan Bridewells, transportation, America,
Australia, Norfolk Island
• Philadelphia, Auburn, Elmira, Pentonville, New Zealand
• Modern super-max
Transportation
• Anglo-Saxon focus…..1615-1785 est. 60,000 to America
• 1779 hulks as staging posts ‘most brutalizing…
demoralizing, ..horrible’, and fatal - Webbs
• 1788-1850s NSW, Van Diemen’s Land, Norfolk Island,
WA. est. 16,000 …’imposition of perpetual tyranny and
slavery’ – Maconnochie…. a living death.. cf. Henry
Garrett (McGill, 2006)
•
Pentonville opened 1842
• The official report of 1853 recorded 220 cases of
insanity, 210 of delusions, and 40 suicides in the
60,000 prisoners that had entered the place
• Model for 54 prisons in Britain
• Staff training centre – Col Arthur Hume to NZ
1881
• Tyranny of Edmund Du Cane 1869-1896 –
deprived prisoners of sleep, made bare rations
unpalatable, removed w.c.s from cells, restricted
moral and educational instruction.
Excessive deprivation
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Personal and social identity, and human rights
Isolation
Less eligibility implied and confirmed by statute
Clothing
Food
Security
Hygiene
William Penn, John Howard, Elizabeth Fry,
Alexander Maconnochie, Thomas M Osborne,
Mary B. Harris, Alexander Paterson
Repeated observations
In 1846 Dr Lauvergne (cf. Bourdet-Pléville, 1960,
p. 70): in the bagnes in the 1830s:
– the coarse food, constipation, extremes of heat and
cold, the merciless hardness of the guards, and the
iron yoke, turn men who are normally stupid and
docile into tigers. It is dangerous to leave them for
long periods in prey to melancholy…. From these
causes stemmed the attacks of despair which often
culminated in assaults on guards or the murder of
another convict - both offences carrying an
inescapable penalty - the guillotine’
Dr Chassinat
‘in the three great bagnes of Toulon, Brest
and Rochefort…the death rate [in the
period 1822-1837] was at it highest during
the first year of captivity, was still
considerable during the second year, and
diminished steadily afterwards; results he
put down to grief, discouragement and the
fright inspired by those undergoing the
discipline of life in a bagne for the first
time’ – (Bourdet-Pleville, 1960, pp. 80-81)
Charles Dickens – on the Eastern State
Penitentiary Pennsylvania
• The prisoner ‘is led to the cell from which
he never again comes forth, until his whole
term of imprisonment has expired He is a
man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow
round of years; and in the mean time dead
to everything but torturing anxieties and
horrible despair’
Prison Chaplain John Graham (1922,
p.266)
‘The wearing away of personality is the central
effect of prison life…The absence of all choice,
of the need or the opportunity to make decisions,
resulted in really weakened will-power in some
cases when the men at last emerged. They
found they could not decide anything, even
when to cross the street. It was some time
before they ceased to feel like sheep in a flock.
The will atrophied’.
Clinicians
• The Swiss surgeon A.L. Vischer (1919) described the lifeless
reaction to captivity among prisoners in solitary confinement, and he
recognised it again among groups of POWs of different nationalities
during World War 1.
• He called it ‘barbed wire disease’, saying that ‘[M]ore than anything
else the barbed wire winds like a thread through [the] mental
processes’.
• He linked the condition to the ‘complete uncertainty of the duration
of ‘imprisonment’, and to the lack of sufficient work to help prisoners
occupy their time (ibid, p. 31).
Solitary confinement
The Webbs (1922)
• ‘the dreadful experience …did not, in fact,
lead to penitence and moral regeneration,
but [to the] loss of health, mental
depression,…much insanity, repeated
attempts at suicide and an appalling death
rate ’
GBS preface….
Environmental emphasis
•
Prisoners and polar explorers : a man going berserk
after only two weeks, unwittingly confirmed my
expectations when he said:
‘its hard to define…like being locked in a prison.
…came down expecting wide open spaces. I get
angry and tired… miss the green and the blue
something terrible…it makes me unhappy…. ..
I would like to see some free water and the sea …
there is nothing but endless white and endless
black’.
Richard Korn (1988)
• mental and physical condition of women
prisoners in super-max had deteriorated to
a critical point – led to controls being
increased to protect inmates from each
other, staff from them, and public breaking
in to release them.
Lorna Rhodes (2005)
• drew attention to the pathological function of supermax
prisons in producing or exacerbating mental illness. She
found 20-25% of supermax inmates showed strong
evidence of mental illness.
• She commented that such places also affect ‘the
psychology and self-perception of prisoners, whether or
not they can be described as mentally ill’, and they raise
‘broader questions about the larger or “collateral” effects
of the US prison complex’.
• Their ‘crowded condition, frightening interactions with
other inmates, and multitudes of prison rules’ heighten or
produce symptoms of anxiety, rage, dissociation, and
psychosis.
Who said it and when?
legislators and prison architects were planning
and constructing too many ‘monolithic
maximum-security installations’. Even at that
time, they saw that the ‘dead hand of the past
[demanded] that massive piles of stone concrete
and steel with all the modern security gadgets
be built even though…only a bare twenty per
cent of those sent to prison [required] maximum
security. The frenzy for security and custody
[was] costing the taxpayer millions of dollars’.
Official Inquiries abroad gathering dust
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1883-84 New York Board of Charities
1895 Herbert Gladstone Report
1931 Wickersham Report
NZ Royal Commissions/ Ministerial
Commissions of Inquiry, Ombudsman’s
Reports…
Official Reports
1930s and 1940s, Royal Commissions in Britain and
Canada acknowledged mental deterioration in prisoners
but regarded it as unacceptable
In 1943 the International Red Cross Committee (IRCC)
recognised the condition in prisoners of war when
recommending priority in repatriation be given to those
‘whose mental and physical condition appears
to be endangered by prolonged imprisonment,
and to the ‘aged prisoners who have endured
long imprisonment’
Latest authoritative appraisals
• In 2002, the European Parliament made a
forthright condemnation of ‘the material
condition, limited human contact, and special
conditions that were likely to exacerbate the
deleterious effects inherent in long-term
imprisonment’.
• In 2005 The WHO Health in Prisons Project also
noted that there was ‘complete agreement that
the public health importance of prisoner health
was sadly neglected throughout Europe’
Conclusion
• Societies that profess to be more humanitarian
than barbaric should constantly monitor their
treatment of captives.
• New Zealand has already done so with regard to
the care of the mentally ill and children in need
of care and protection. It needs to do the same
for criminals if it is properly to protect their
potential victim/casualties and the taxpayers.
• Conceivably an independent Penal Commission
might help Parliament and the country to do that.