How Compassion Can Transform Our Politics, Economy and Society by Matt Hawkins

Author:Matt Hawkins [Hawkins, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367353940
Google: RcZpzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 57932553
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

The modern prison has endured, despite 200 years of endless criticism and failure. It has a suffocating grip on the mentalities of politicians and the wider popular culture. Within these collective mentalities, punishment is often, but not always, the fallback position rather than compassion and support. However, despite the drive for more prisons and punishment, the prison has not achieved hegemony. In fact, as this chapter has shown, the presence of the institution, and the toxic regimes inside, has made a desperate situation worse in terms of how those inside have been treated. As James Baldwin beautifully pointed out, '[p]eople who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned' (Baldwin, 1972/2007).

Furthermore, the various crises that have continually erupted in the system over the last 50 years have ensured that the institution has experienced an ongoing 'crisis of legitimacy' (Fitzgerald & Sim, 1982) in the eyes of prisoners, the public, state servants, and politicians, to which the state appears to have no answer except to introduce more repressive measures to ensure some modicum of order, the latest being arming prison staff with pepper spray at a cost of £2 million. The prisons lack of legitimacy has also been reinforced by the presence of radical prisoners' rights organisations, activist groups, and charities who have contested the ideology that the prison is a panacea for conventional criminality and the social dislocations engendered by the wider, unequal social order. This is where compassion, underpinned by a sense of social justice, becomes visible as these groups have denied legitimacy to the idea that punitively banishing conventional lawbreakers from the social body will somehow miraculously lead to a reduction in crime, peace in the heartlands, and a restored, tranquil social order.

In that sense, as Stuart Hall pointed out, despite living in 'iron times' (Hall, 1988, p. vii) nothing should be taken for granted as hegemony is never a complete process. It is contested, fought over, and sometimes lost. Discourses are always open to contestation. So while the edifice of authoritarian thinking, policies, and practices developed and supported by successive governments - Conservative and Labour - might seem insurmountable, penal hegemony is not complete, the arc of history clearly illustrates its abject failure to offer any kind of solution to crime and deviance.

Those who defend imposing punishment and pain on the few lawbreakers who are caught also ignore, and indeed deny, the evidence that human beings are not inherently punitive or retributive, even in the most traumatic of circumstances. Gee Walker, whose son Anthony was brutally murdered in a racist attack on Merseyside, did not demand vengeance for her son's racist killers (Sim, 2009). Nor do a number of the families of those who have been murdered in America support the death penalty for their killers (American Civil Liberties Union, no date). Taken together, the response from Gee Walker, and the families of the deceased, illustrate what it means

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