Vol. 9 No. 7 (July 1999) pp. 332-335.

A SIN AGAINST THE FUTURE: IMPRISONMENT IN THE WORLD by Vivien Stern. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998. 407pp.

Reviewed by Marc-Georges Pufong, Department of Political Science, Valdosta State University, Valdosta Georgia.

 

This is a unique book offering a rare kind of menu very uncommon in academic literature. It looks at how many countries and cultures deal with their violent predators, social deviants, misfits and how people are consigned to prisons simply through poverty. It looks at WHO ends up in the prisons of the world and WHO works in them. It is a passionate, yet telling, comparative examination of imprisonment and prison systems around the world. It also includes discussions of the increasingly explosive business of incarceration.

The United States of course, is not exempted in the later category as exemplified by the construction of new prisons and the increased growth in the population of inmates in the fifty state prison systems in the last 15 years. The War on Drugs is said to be the chief explanatory variable for this extraordinary level of growth in numbers of incarcerated. During the period 1985-1895, the number of sentenced prisoners in state prisons more than doubled. The overall increase was 119 per cent and the increase attributable to offences against the drug laws was 478 per cent. Federal statistics shows a 7.5 percent annual increase since 1985 (See Bureau of Justice Statistics 1995). At the end of 1985, one in every 320 US residents was incarcerated for a total of 744,208 inmates in custody; by 1990, this population had escalated to 1,148,700, and by mid 1996, it was one in every 163 for a total of 1,585,401 inmates in custody. In sheer numbers, since 1990, the average growth in the total population in custody has been 1686 each week.

The prison as a mainstay and central unit to the system of punishment for offenses against the society may be a Victorian relic, but it is not falling into disuse. On the contrary, its use is expanding greatly in the Western World. The statistics for the US noted above confirms this view. In this book Vivian Stern, formally Director of the National Associations for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACTRO), and currently a Senior Research Fellow in the International Center for Prison Studies, Kings College, Cambridge, effectively exposes the waste of the burgeoning worldwide business of incarceration.

In this penetrating examination of prisons around the world, Stern posits passionately that the mainstay of punishment is an anachronistic and perhaps counterproductive system for dealing with crime and/or the rise in crime rates within and across national borders. Arguing that there are inherent flaws in the institution of prisons that threaten democratic values, and thus, fail to meet the needs of modern society, she set forth a compelling case for implementing radical changes in prison institutions worldwide. To that end, she evaluates the evolution of prison systems and explores their differences and how different areas of the world approach and use incarceration as a punitive measure for private and public wrongs, namely; actions between private citizens and those between private individual individuals and the state.

Furthering a similar line of assessments, Stern advances the proposition (i.e., upon evaluating life in prisons across regions and cultural traditions) that there exist a linkage between prison use and culture and society. First, she presents an account of the personal and very disturbing experiences of prisoners, prison conditions, and the treatment of indigent minorities, namely, women and juveniles incarcerated in prison institutions around the world. Second, on the linkage between prison use and culture and society, she argues that the number of inmates and the types of prisons created to house them are not necessarily determined by the amount of crimes and/or types of criminals in the society. She maintains that they are instead determined by the cultural value placed on liberty and, by extension, the way fellow citizens are viewed. In the end, she laments, whether they (the prisoners) are in fact viewed as fellow citizens or as enemies, the society gets not only the prisons it needs, but also the prisons it deserve.

Stern is compassionate and yet firm, with an unshakable view of prison systems and the business of incarceration. This is demonstrated by her colorful writing in the passages of this book. She sees prisons as deformed societies and not as reform institutions. Prisons, she maintains are centers of violence, corruption, and of gross neglect and human rights abuses. She document and presents efforts underway in many parts of the world, be they in the face of resistance or harmony, that are aimed at improving prison conditions for those incarcerated. These efforts, she notes, will mitigate the built-in destructiveness that is so entrenched in today’s prison conditions. Stern also advocates the search for better solution to control criminal offenses in an increasingly divided and dangerous society. Instead of locking more people up Stern argues for a practical and adaptable approach from within each country that can reconcile and heal breaches caused by crime in each society.

As we enter the millennium, Stern urges that we reflect on the institutions we bring with us from this and previous centuries. She argues that it is time to look again at the prison institution with the view that it was created in a different age as an alternative to transportation to the colonies or to replace physical punishment. Stern contends that prisons, as institutions devised and used in the eighteenth and nineteenth century societies and carried over to the twentieth century with little adjustment, requires significant systemic overhaul for the twenty-first century use. She provides three reasons for such systemic overhaul.

First, she maintains that prisons provide a setting in which profound abuses of human rights can be carried out by the state under the reassuring justification that it is needed to protect or maintain public order.

Second that imprisonment no longer fits modern society and their needs. In effect, she argues that it is inefficient because in many cases it gives rise to more problems than it solves. Thirdly, Stern argues that the use of imprisonment needs to be reviewed because it poses a threat to our future. In this view, she notes, locking up massive number of people as an answer to social problems is likely to be as costly and dangerous to the society and as big a danger in the future as polluting the environment and using up the natural resources of the globe. Upon reflection on the so-called 19th and 20th century institutions as we enter the new millennium, she urges that we ask whether they serve us well or whether they hinder progress toward a better and safer world.

Stern also argues that we have taken prisons for granted and prisons have become common parlance in every society the same as schools and hospitals. We have schools and hospitals that serve special needs in human developments, and so too perhaps we think of prisons. And that perhaps we think of prisons, schools and hospitals as serving parallel functions and/or achieving similar end, but do they? Are prisons, correction centers, or reform institutions? She argues therefore for clarity in public policy and the need to understand prison institutions, i.e., to comprehend their manifestations in us, the society around us and by extension, the world (p. xx). In so doing, she maintain, we will see how what is done in Britain is indeed, part of a great carceral machinery stretching from Iceland to New Zealand and from Russia to Ecuador (p. xx).

All parts of the world, she argues, have their version of a place where the door is locked on the outside and the occupant does not have a key. When the colonizers went to Africa Stern argues, the traditional ways of doing justice were swept away and replaced by prisons built on the colonizers’ model. She suggests that we reconsider their impact and ask what benefit to these countries, mostly developing countries, has the prison been. Such reconsideration she maintains should refocus our attention and lead to reforms of prison systems, a change from the current system, that are reflective of each society and culture.

Continuing on the millennium theme, Stern points to other questions of importance that also require similar productive results. She suggests a reconsideration of what actually are prisons by asking what purpose they serve. In whose interest do they operate? Do they achieve the desired or stated objectives? What is the official international view of how they should work? Is it a reality or a façade behind which appalling unlawful acts are carried out in the name of law and order? Which country is top of the league for decent, humane, rehabilitative prisons? Have the people who have tied to make it work succeeded? Is there, somewhere, a good prison or is the idea of prison intrinsically flawed a mechanism with a contradiction at its heart?

The thirteen chapters of the book are divided into four parts outlining the various themes, namely; Imprisonment Around the World; A Deformed Society: The Prison World; Making Prisons Better; and The Future of Imprisonment. Part I has five chapters and accordingly presents an extensive narrative on how imprisonment came into being. It also discusses the main punishment for criminal offences and describes the way that imprisonment is approached and the amount used in different regions of the world. Chapter 2 is a very interesting catalogue of the emergence and development of the Western tradition of imprisonment. Part II has four chapter which looks at life in prison, the similarities among those incarcerated across regions and across traditions, how prison is inevitably a deformed society and how minorities such as women and young people fare within it. In this part Chapter 9 stands out in it depiction of the quadroon between life and death for those sentenced for life or on death row awaiting execution.

Part III with its three chapters, considers the efforts being made around the world to improve prisons and to mitigate their built-in destructiveness and snatch some rehabilitative value out of such negativity. It looks and the rules, keeping of rules (how state supervisors and inspectors imposed suffering on inmates) and aspects of the penal reform. Common in this area is the view that with all the rules and all the inspections, local, national and international together with non-government organization monitoring and reporting violations, there is hardly a good prison; i.e., the ideal prison, or the model for the rest of the world. Finally, with two chapters, Part IV looks at two possibilities for the future. First, the path of more and harsher crime control, much of it provided by the private sector, in an increasingly divided and dangerous society. Second, a search for a better, more satisfying system that reconciles and heals breaches cause by crime.

Vivien Stern deserves applause for conducting a primary field study and writing a book on such a controversial and yet interesting and unique book about the appropriateness of prisons as a mainstay of punishment in countries around the world. While she demonstrates the need for change, and advances interesting proposals for such a change as we move toward the millennium, the economic curve in the business of incarceration suggest that such a proposal will fall on deaf ears within legislative assemblies and hallways throughout the world. Also, the enormous scope of the book remains in my view one source of its strength and also its weakness. Its coverage of conceivably all aspect of prisons across different regions and culture offers a cluster of details that unfortunately can also easily overwhelm a reader. Scholars of comparative law and justice systems together with criminal justice students will find this book interesting. It will make an excellent addition to class readings for undergraduates, graduates, seminars and other research projects.

REFERENCES

Bureau of Justice Statistics, PRISON AND JAIL INMATES AT MIDYEAR, 1995, p. 2.


Copyright 1995