International Centre
for Prison Studies
Deposition by Baroness Vivien Stern CBE, Senior Research Fellow at ICPS, to a
Public Executive Session of the Senate Juridical Committee of the
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico - chaired by Senator Eudaldo Báez - 16 May
2002
(The Committee is considering a revision of the penal code of Puerto Rico and is
taking evidence to inform its proposals)
My name is Vivien Stern from the International Centre for Prison Studies, King’s
College, University of London, United Kingdom. It is a privilege for me to appear
before your Committee this afternoon. Your invitation to me is a great honour and I
am very pleased that I can make a small contribution to your work of reforming the
penal system here in Puerto Rico.
Penal reform is a difficult task. Penal reform means reforming the system of
convicting and punishing criminals and on that subject there are many opinions and
many emotions. I have been fortunate to have been involved in penal reform in many
countries; in my own country, the UK, for 25 years, and in Eastern Europe, Asia, the
Middle East, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand. It is a particular pleasure for
me to be speaking to a Senate Committee, because I am also a member of our Senate
– the House of Lords – in England, where I sit as an independent, that is, a non-
political member. I speak often about the subject we are discussing here today –
prisons, prisoners, victims, alternatives to prison and the prevention of crime.
Let me begin by talking about prisons and crime policy, about incarceration.
Prisons are a headache, a problem for any Government. In many countries prisons are
very problematic places, with disturbances, riots, badly trained or corrupt personnel
and human rights abuses. Sometimes Governments turn to private companies to help
them out of their difficulties but that can be very problematic also. So bad prisons
present Governments with many problems.
But: running good prisons can be difficult for a Government. If prisons are run
without corruption, if prisoners are treated humanely and respectfully, if prisoners are
given education classes and work training and drug treatment, if they are encouraged
to rehabilitate themselves, then the politicians can face complaints that the system is
soft, prison is like a good hotel and there is no deterrent to crime.
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In spite of this, the second choice – to run good prisons – is the right choice for any
Government.
First, it is right because it is a requirement of international law. All countries are
bound by the UN convention on the treatment of detained persons, expressed in
Article 10 of the ICCP Rights: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated
with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.” That
means humane treatment and offering opportunities for rehabilitation. It is the right
thing to do, but it is also effective. Research from all parts of the world shows that
humane and rehabilitative prisons are safer for the prison guards, the prison guards
can do a more professional and respected job (they too should be respected), and the
prisoners will often be better citizens when they leave prison.
This is the right policy – but for it to succeed it needs the support of the community
and the involvement of society. You have here in Puerto Rico a great example of the
involvement of society – you have Doña Trina, famous for her work on behalf of
those outside; she helps prisoners’ families. Relationships with outside society are
needed if prisoners are to reintegrate when they leave. More countries are now taking
this path of action to achieve rehabilitation and reintegration into society.
But there is another question and another choice for Governments to make. How
many prisoners are there in the prisons? How many people are sent to prison by the
judges? What crimes lead to prison? What crimes lead to other punishments? And
Governments have a choice too – how many people need to be in prison to protect
society and maintain respect for the law? There is no clear answer to this because the
choices Governments make are very different.
We measure a country’s use of imprisonment by rates per 100,000 of the general
population. The differences are very striking:
USA 690 (the highest in the world)
Russia 670
Kazakhstan 522
Puerto Rico 372 (19th highest in the world)
England & Wales 133 (highest in Western Europe)
World average 140
EU average 99
France 78
Sweden 68
These are very big differences, and having a high rate of imprisonment brings many
problems, as we know in the UK and you know here.
Prison overcrowding is a great evil. It leads to the spread of diseases such as
Tuberculosis (in Russia over 90,000 of the 900,000 prisoners have TB), HIV and
AIDS and Hepatitis B and C. These diseases are much more common in prison than
outside prison. So prisons are a threat to public health and a threat to social health.
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Prisons can have very damaging social costs. Prisoners can lose their home, their job,
their family. They can be introduced to illegal drugs. They can strengthen their
criminal networks.
A high use of prison is also expensive. The well-known prison reformer from Brazil,
Julita Lemgruber, who is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Centre
for Prison Studies, has said that the cost of imprisoning all the non-violent offenders
in Brazilian prisons would pay for 400 schools, 500 medical units or 18,000 homes
for poor people.
Many Governments are finding that a high use of prison is not effective. They are
trying to reduce the numbers in their prisons. There are many ways to do this. Time
limits on pre-trial detention as you have here - 6 months, I believe – is excellent. Bail,
and especially bail for the poor – you have that too. Also, introducing sentencing
reform to revise penal codes to introduce shorter prison terms for many offences. The
evidence is clear – the threat of a long prison sentence does not deter people from
committing crimes. It is the likelihood of being caught, apprehended, that deters
crime, not the sort of punishment that awaits after conviction.
Another important element is to keep out of prison those people who are there just
because there is nowhere else to put them. Many prisons are places to hold the failures
of social services. Go to any large holding prison in London or San Juan and see the
sad procession of the new detainees – the drug addicts, the homeless, and the mentally
ill. Prison is not a place for them.
Then of course many people can be dealt with by alternative punishments. All
countries have some alternatives to prison – in no country does every convicted
person go to prison. But the use of such alternatives varies greatly. I have some
figures, not totally comparable but they give an idea.
In Brazil 96% of sentences are prison, 4% are alternatives.
In Kazakhstan 51% are prison, 49% alternatives.
In Russia 33% are prison, 67% alternatives.
In the UK 30% are prison, 70% alternatives.
The differences between countries are at several points. Some countries have many
alternatives to prison and start with a presumption that for many crimes, except
serious crime, an alternative punishment is best – the principle of using prison as a
last resort. Some countries, Finland and Sweden are two – have a system where prison
sentences of a certain length are automatically converted after the sentence has been
passed into an alternative, unless there is a good reason to believe the offender will
not comply. The last few years have seen a great expansion in countries using
alternatives to prison.
The most popular alternative is community service work – trabajo communitario –
work for the benefit of the community, such as improving the countryside, building
parks, working in hospitals, making furniture for schools for the disabled. Research
studies show that it is very successful.
What does successful mean?
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1. The offenders turn up and do the work.
2. Some of them benefit from it and change their social attitude (moral education).
3. It is very popular with the public – they like the idea of crime leading to
something being paid back – they like the idea of criminals doing something good
for a change (as they see it) and they like the results.
The other main type of alternative is supervision alongside programmes of treatment –
either education, work training or treatment for addiction.
A word about addiction. One factor that plays a large part in every penal system
nowadays is illegal drug use. In many parts of the world prisons are filled up with
small-time drug users, who are arrested with small amounts to feed their own
addiction and thus are labelled as traffickers. They are not of course the big traffickers
who are not to be found in prison. Many countries are finding this a bad policy and a
bad use of resources.
There are some interesting developments towards an approach to drugs that is more
effective, such as treatment and harm reduction. In Portugal, for instance, new
legislation was recently introduced. As a result of this, carrying up to 10 days supply
of illegal drugs will be treated as a misdemeanour rather than a felony. This
misdemeanour is dealt with by an administrative tribunal that has no powers to
imprison but can fine and urge treatment. In California small time drug offenders are
now receiving treatment rather than going to jail. The Legislative Analyst’s Office
predicts it will save $100–$150 million per year. In London police chiefs are urging
that drug use be treated as a health problem and suggest that heroin should be
prescribed by doctors at police stations. These are interesting developments.
Another major new development is the whole idea of punishments that benefit the
victim and that deal with crime in a new way. Many people argue that the current
system does not benefit the victim of the crime, nor does it benefit society as much as
it should. Victims get nothing when an offender is sent to prison and the offender is
insulated or protected from thinking about what he has done. Many different ways
have been tried where victims and offenders are brought together to talk about what
has happened, to understand, and for the offender to make some restitution to the
victim. Under English law paying the victim is always a first choice alternative for
judges before a fine. New laws in England for treatment of juveniles always require
reparation to be made as part of any punishment.
Finally, of course, research is telling us that the system of courts, trials and
punishment plays a small part in crime control – money spent on prevention is better
value than money spent after a crime has been committed. It is undoubtedly true that
in all the prisons of the world certain groups of people are over represented. You
rarely see the rich in prison (although in England we have a Lord serving his second
year in prison for perjury, that is, the offence of lying to the Court while under oath).
Most people in prison are from poor areas, they are young men with poor education
and little hope of a job. The women in prison are poor women, often victims of
violence themselves, in prison because they retaliated against that violence, or got
involved in drug dealing to pay for their children’s education (the prisons in England
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are full of such women from Jamaica and Nigeria). The children in prison are the
children of the street, from the orphanages and the broken families.
Prison can never be the solution to all these social problems; good social policies are
the answer to these problems. These are the questions that Governments have to face
in penal reform in the UK too.
I would like to stop now. I appreciate your attention and I look forward to your
questions.
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