Thought for the Day “Are there no prisons?”
Every December I remember my first Christmas as a history teacher, many years ago. Time spent supervising the kids as they made pomanders, sticking cloves into oranges (and each other), an historically tenuous aid to learning with vague references to the Victorians.
There was a boy I remember more than any other. Teachers all know this boy, because there’s at least one of him in every class. A boy with a face like a cherub and a cheeky mouth. A boy who always answered back. A boy who never missed a day of school because he had nowhere else to be. School was the only place where he was ever noticed. I can still recall him telling me, with a shrug, that he didn’t know where he’d be spending Christmas because both his parents were in prison and his uncle didn’t want him. A boy who drove me mad, and also broke my heart.
“Are there no prisons?” Charles Dickens’s protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, famously asked in response to a request from charity fundraisers about what to do to help the poor. Today, we’re still asking the same question, and the answer is: not enough. The government has announced plans to open 14,000 more prison places by 2031, but despite this, they could still be full within the next few years. Our prisons are overcrowded and as justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has said, people are coming out of prison “better criminals than they were when they went in.” Scrooge is the perfect embodiment for the opinion that prison is the only solution. That he equates poverty with prison is also telling. “Are there no prisons?" is a simplistic, unfeeling response to a wider social issue.
Having faith in a God who values human beings equally, even those who’ve done terrible things, whilst also believing deeply in justice, is something which personally challenges me daily. In a system under huge stress, maybe there are better ways for this to be worked out.
Perhaps places like the Oasis Restore Academy, Britain’s first secure school for young offenders, which emphasises education and therapy rather than punishment and retribution. A place which seeks to ask, “What has happened to you?” rather than just “What have you done wrong?” This question matters.
A boy once said to me, “I didn’t have an orange Miss, so I nicked a tsunami from the cafeteria.” He grinned at me from the back of the class and held up a satsuma, and we all laughed. He was a boy who was eventually permanently excluded from school and ended up in a young offender’s institution and then prison. Are there no prisons? Scrooge asks. When I hear that, I think about a boy.
~ Written and recorded for the Today programme on BBC Radio Four, broadcast on December 12th 2024. It’s available on BBC Sounds for a limited time. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p00szxv6?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile