Hell is full of good intentions or desires

                                                                                  – St Bernard,Psalm 1150.

Dorin Muresan

“Prison services today are in danger of losing the financial trust of the government .” I heard this very statement for the first time in 1993 during one of the first meetings with workers in prison in which I participated. The truth behind the statement seems to be appalling. When the government sets its priorities with regard to allocation of taxes,  prisons are never on the list. If a country is in difficult economic times,  when tax revenues are slightly lower and the overall economy is such that more and more people remain unemployed, who should receive more resources? The Education System? Heath Care Systems?  Well, Maybe. But Prison Systems? Not really.

lf we ever see a call on TV or in the newspaper for donations to help the people of Africa whose lives were shattered by an earthquake, how many of us would send money? When a call comes into a news broadcast that prisons are overcrowded and prisoners no longer form a part of educational programs due to lack of funds to hire teachers, or inadequate nutrition , how many of us would donate money to help inmates or the prison staff? The answer to this question is quite predictable.

What I mean is simple. When times are good in terms of the economy, the government rarely has enough money to fund programs and infrastructure . So, I doubt many of us working directly with correctional services or researchers in the field are surprised that it takes more resources than what is made available. Let’s be honest with ourselves – we are committed to good corrections and understand the need for more resources ,but if given chance of choosing a better teacher at our child’s school or another prison worker, government financiers would fund the former, ignoring the latter in most cases.

The need of more resources for sustaining correction systems is not new, but the rest of government and private programs make the situation  more complicated.  We can talk about our problems, but it wouldn’t bring about the desired change. That is because 80% of people do not care, while the other 20% are glad to hear that prisoners out there suffer.

“Long Sentences will cut crime and lower the chances of recidivism, especially for the most risky criminals.” At least that is what many of our legislators and the courts, prosecutors and police seem to think. The facts seem to differ. Various studies have agreed that high-risk offenders have a higher recidivism rate if kept in correctional institutions for longer than those who spend less time in prison.For low-risk offenders, the longer they are kept in prison, the higher the relapse rates are. While the rate of recurrence seems to be the same in community prisons and correctional systems, community prison services have surprisingly been more successful in curbing the crime rate and reforming prisons, that too at a lower expense. Current studies also show that providing unnecessary  “treatment” to offenders over what they supposedly need, for example, drug therapy, anger management  has had a negative impact. The old phrase “If it is not broken, do not fix it” seems to be applicable to the correctional environment.

Regardless of Geographic locations,Globalization has opened doors to unimaginable opportunities that were unpredictable a few years ago . While Globalization left a positive impact on global development, It did leave some negative impacts, crime being one of them. The challenge to curb the ever increasing crime rate applies to all the existing global execution systems. This context may show some level of reflection to be considered in the construction of penal policy.

The big question here is, how can we combine the capacity to develop programs for social reintegration of inmates, promoting non -custodial alternatives, with the requirement of a louder political environment and to strictly control the dynamics of crime and punishment as severely by prison? How can our need for security and control be met without sacrificing the fundamental principles of social reintegration,normalization, openness and accountability? This is the dilemma faced by judges concerned with individualization of sentences, taking into account the severity of the offense  and the characteristics of the offender while resolving criminal cases.The true art of maintaining a balance between the strict managerial executions of custodial sentences and focusing on developing the skills of inmates in social reintegration  needs to be adopted and is the key to all the problems faced by correctional institutions. The sustained social reintegration of those who had violated rules at one point of time is the need of the hour.

We are in a difficult business that involves taking decisions about the lives of others. Often, when we try to do so, we need to avoid making mistakes that have negative consequences on inmates in particular. The road to hell must be  paved with good intentions.

 – Dorin Muresan

( Dorin Muresan is currently a Board Member of International Correction and Prison Association (ICPA) and Co-Chair of the Staff Training and Development Committee. He also serves as the Deputy Prison Governor at Dej Prison Hospital in Romania. He has gained immense expertise in the field of prison service and has achieved recognition for coordinating e-learning projects for prison staff and for the development of the “Telemedicine” project in Romanian Prison Services).