The Camp Street Prison had been built in 1885, but twenty-five years before, in a swirling debate on “crime and punishment”, someone had asked in The Times of England: “Do we lock up a man to make him better, or prevent his getting worse – to keep him from doing more mischief, or solely as a retribution for the mischief he has done? On these points, there would be no securing any unanimity of purpose.”
But, here in Guyana, more than a century later, we still have not debated what we expect from our prisons — even as our government rushes to show it is doing “something” by extending all three prisons, including the torched Camp Street one.
“Prisons”, as we know them, had evolved from the “poor houses” that had been built to accommodate the large number of people dispossessed during early capitalism’s “primitive accumulation” phase — those who would have turned to petty crime. Before that, wrongdoers were kept in jails merely to hold them until they were flogged or executed for their crimes.
The “eye for an eye” principle that undergirded vengeance and retribution was the guiding principle of prisons. By the middle of the 18th century, the humanitarian impulses of the Roman era were brought to bear on the pitiable situation by one Cesare Beccaria in his pamphlet “Crimes and Punishments”.
Beccaria followed his contemporary Jeremy Bentham’s “utilitarian” view of morality, in which actions were to be judged by the pain or pleasure created. Criminal actions under this scheme could be countered by imposing on the wrongdoer a penalty that outweighed the pleasures he would have contemplated in committing the act. The jails encouraged isolation wherein wrongdoers could reflect on their deeds; that is, be “penitent” – hence the name “penitentiaries”.
As a matter of fact, Bentham spent most of the last decade of his life designing a prison in which the appropriate punishment could be doled out in the most effective manner. His design, called the “Panopticon” — in which the guards were on duty in a structure in the centre of radiating, spoke-like rows of cells — was imitated across the empire. The prisoners could not know if they were being observed, and so presumably would always be on their best behaviour.
But by the time the Camp Street Prison was being built, the authorities were already having second thoughts about the purposes of imprisonment under what had become the “classical school of penology”. They decided there might be very different impulses behind even the same crime, and modified the punishment regime to suit the individual circumstances. There might be, for instance, mitigating circumstances such as insanity.
By the end of the 19th century, another perspective on the purposes of prisons was enunciated under the influence of the burgeoning scientific investigations into human psychology. This was dubbed the “positive school”, which posited that criminals were impelled by their inherited traits to criminal careers, and were therefore not totally responsible. But while society had to protect itself against criminals, it should punish each prisoner as if he were a free moral agent. The prison was to sequester the criminal from society.
During the 20th century, the immutability of the inherited criminal traits was questioned, and precipitated a change of philosophy towards incarceration of criminals towards their rehabilitation. In fact, during this period, which lasted until the 1980s, prisons were now called “reformatories”, and innovations such as probation, medical treatment, and education aimed at “curing” the wrongdoer were introduced.
Additionally, during the 20th century, there was a growing body of thought that concluded that imprisonment was futile without addressing social problems such as unemployment, homelessness, poverty, discrimination, inadequate health care, and unequal education, which might have “socially constructed” the criminal.
On the other hand, in the US at least, the ‘rehabilitation” approach is being increasing abandoned in favour of incarceration of targeted “criminal sub-groups”.
Should we not interrogate our specific position on prisons in Guyana before extending them?
