In the 1990s, judges attending Judicial Studies Board seminars would hear the late David Faulkner, a humane and immensely knowledgable Home Office star, explain how German prison sentences were so much shorter than ours, with no corresponding increase in offending. Politicians, terrified of being pilloried for being soft on crime, have never taken any notice. The problem is that we have no principled national idea of what prison is for (Editorial, 12 December).
As a junior assistant recorder, I did my duty and gave long sentences to drug mules from South America, based on the ludicrous theory that the deterrent effect would resound with other potential drug mules, often semi-literate women coerced into criminal activity with no conception of the consequences. Retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation? Some shapeless idea of punishment for its own sake is the unquantifiable last refuge of the ideologically barren. But it’s all we seem to have.
Cutting sentences in half for every non-violent prisoner (I am including serious sexual offenders in the violent category), and spending half the savings on decent education and rehabilitation programmes for the remainder, who are coming out one day under any regime, would do better for the current crisis than any alternative our current politicians have in mind. And the rate of offending wouldn’t go up.
Paul Collins
Former director of studies, Judicial Studies Board (now the Judicial College)
• Re Zoe Williams’s article on life inside the therapeutic prison HMP Grendon (Look, we’ve done some terrible things …’, 18 December), from the early to mid-2000s, I worked as a probation officer in a specialist unit. We ran programmes for convicted sex offenders, based on a therapeutic model and including input from a professional theatre company, using psychodrama techniques. The main programme ran for up to two years and included scrutiny of participants’ childhoods, as well as detailed examination of their offending patterns and behaviours. The observable changes in the men who participated and stayed the course were remarkable.
After the wholesale destruction of the probation service by Chris Grayling and others in government at the time, despite half of it being renationalised later, when the catastrophic consequences of trying to run a justice system based on profits for shareholders became unignorable, the service remains understaffed and ineffective in terms of any rehabilitative content.
Unsurprisingly, the specialist sex-offender programmes no longer exist, and sex offenders in the community are now subsumed within general programmes, based on cognitive behavioural theory. CBT has its uses, but cannot begin to address the complex background factors that underpin all sexual offending, which nearly always include issues of childhood trauma.
Ellie Dwight
Stafford
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
