People in prison : (England and Wales) / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Department by command of Her Majesty, November 1969.

  • Home Office
Date:
1969
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: People in prison : (England and Wales) / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Department by command of Her Majesty, November 1969. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE TASK OF THE PRISON SERVICE AIMS AND PURPOSES PRISONS AND THE PENAL SYSTEM 7. We start from the point at which people enter prison, omitting such earlier stages as the detection of crime and the place of the courts or the criminal law in our society. We shall consider what happens to the fifteen hundred or more people committed to custody every week, and the staffing and organisation of the prisons, borstals, detention and remand centres in England and Wales to which they are sent. Every week another fifteen hundred people are released from custody. Society expects these to knit together once more the scattered strands of their life in the community. The White Paper therefore deals with parole and after-care, which are now regarded as an integral part of the whole penal system. 8. Despite this concentration on the penal system and what happens to those offenders who are convicted and committed to custody, it is important to emphasize that the prison system is only part of a whole process of social rehabilitation. Its work has to be seen as contributing to one overriding purpose; and that purpose is the protection of society. 9. The part played by the prison service in the treatment of offenders must follow the part played by the courts. It is true that members of the service make reports to the courts, and that these may properly influence what happens to an offender, but no member of the service has any authority to decide whether a citizen should or should not be sentenced to imprisonment. Nor, with some exceptions in the case of detention centres, has the service any control over the total number of people committed to its custody. The service cannot put up a “‘house full” notice, tempted though some governors of local prisons may have been to do so in recent years. PRISONS AND SOCIETY {0. Penal institutions, on the other hand, do not exist in isolation. They form part of our society. So do all members of the prison service and all people in custody. A great deal follows from these principles. Everyone in custody expects to return sooner or later to the community, the average stay in custody after conviction being less than twelve months. It follows that what happens to people in custody must always be planned with conditions after release in mind. It also follows that the probation and after-care service, which helps in a person’s pre- paration for release and provides continued support and guidance when he returns to society, sometimes for years, sometimes for life, should be closely
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