“Imprisonment…is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions – poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed – which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.” –Howard Zinn
Whether it is rescuing the economy of one-person, a family, a city, or a country the two main aspects of the process would be increasing the income and decreasing expenditures. As tax-paying Sri Lankans will soon find out increasing their contribution to the national coffers is the only way the rulers know how to increase the income of the country.
One doesn’t have to be a Nobel Prize winning economist to know that increasing income will not do any good to the country if that increased income too is going through the same network of tunnels that brought the country down to where it is today.
Decreasing expenditure is as important as increasing income, if not more, especially since it includes eliminating unnecessary expenditure all together. Law abiding citizens are not putting their families through hardships paying higher taxes for a few parliamentarians or big businesses to get richer and upgrade their luxury living to the next level.
They would certainly want to know how exactly their tax money is going to be spent. Having a transparent system with a genuine effort of reducing corruption is a must, not only since the IMF is demanding that if they are to decide lending money to Sri Lanka, but also since that would be the basis for cutting the expenditure down.
Though eliminating unnecessary expenditure should top the priority list, that itself will not be enough to create a significant impact on the recovery process. However, the type of governments we have had over the years have only focused on reducing the expenditure by cutting down much needed programs such as education, healthcare, assistance for low-income families and prisoner rehabilitation before they focus on bringing the level of corruption down.
Just two days ago BBC/Australia reported that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) arrested two Australian men charged with bribing some Sri Lankan officials, with bribes amounting to US$ 200,000, to secure some infrastructural contracts worth millions of dollars.
Sri Lankan projects
Bribing process has taken place through the years 2009 – 2016 in the pursuit of two Sri Lankan projects. The Australian company, and some of its subsidiaries, the two arrested men were working for had been blacklisted by the World Bank in 2017 and barred them from bidding for any contract in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India. One can only imagine how many other similar incidences may have gone unnoticed.
Though it may be a bit of a stretch, if one assumes that Sri Lankan authorities can bring the level of corruption down, then the next step is to reduce the State sector expenditure wherever possible. This is where scrutinising the return on investment (ROI) of programs such as incarcerating convicted criminals and welfare for the low-income families become important.
If the purpose of punishing criminals is to reduce crimes, then the taxpayers should be interested in seeing a cost-benefit analysis of the use of their tax money in crime and punishment process. There are habitual offenders who spend most of their adult life in the prison system, getting free food, healthcare, and even opportunities of education, because they have a better life in the prison than outside.
Then there are people, especially young people between 18 and 25 years of age, behind bars for minor offences mainly because they couldn’t afford to hire an attorney to present a proper defense. Not only they waste those years behind bars without contributing anything positive to the society or to the economy but also, they may come out as even more dangerous criminals than they were prior to incarceration.
As the Russian philosopher Peter Krpotkin has said: “Have not prisons – which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe – always been universities of crime?”
How a society should treat convicted criminals is a continuing debate all over the world. Different countries have used different philosophies in handling this very important aspect of their societies. The US, for example, imprisons more people per capita (800 per 100,000) than any other country in the world while that ratio in Norway is 66 per 100,000.
According to the World Prison Brief statistics the incarceration rate in Sri Lanka is about 102 per 100,000. Though the official capacity of the prison system of the country is about 12000, currently Sri Lanka has to house about 22000 prisoners.
Norwegian model
The US system is strongly focusing on punishment aspect, whereas the Norwegian model emphasises rehabilitation, treatment, and support systems to help the offender become a law-abiding productive member of the society. Incarceration per capita of most of the other countries fall between these two extremes.
Even though the incarceration rate more than tripled in the US over the last two decades the crime rate has not gone down at all. So much so that increasingly crowded facilities prompted some States to turn to private companies to build and/or run their prisons. The rationale for the privatisation of prison system was the common misconception that the private sector can do the job at a lower cost than the State sector.
But there is a big difference between the public and private systems in promoting rehabilitation and minimising recidivism. One of the main reasons for that is the way the incentives are given under the contracts extended to private prisons, which is based on the number of beds utilised and not on the type of prisoners accepted or the rate of recidivism. It became a big business, as one would expect, for private sector as well as the Government officials who had the authority to handle the tenders.
Studies show that rehabilitation helps reduce the crime rate more than punishment, especially in reducing the rate of recidivism. The ‘deferred prosecution scheme’ in the UK, which allows offenders of relatively minor crimes to avoid prosecution if they participate in a program that addresses the causes of their behaviour and help them to understand the consequences.
The recidivism rate of the participants of the program was down by 15 percent compared to the non-participants. A responsible society should not only try to protect their members from criminals but also should be able to recognise that the criminals themselves are members of their own society and try to help them to become better and more productive members of the society.
Punishment and rehabilitation
Reduced rates of recidivism shows that a well-balanced mix of punishment and rehabilitation is much more economical in improving the standard of living of all the members of a society in the long run.
Finding that right mix can be done using the existing knowledge and proper planning through a collaboration of all the stakeholders which includes the law makers who make the final decisions on the type of policies to implement and the resource allocation.
Mike Royko, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from Chicago once reported: “The subject of criminal rehabilitation was debated recently in City Hall. It’s an appropriate place for this kind of discussion because the city has always employed so many ex-cons and future cons.” Though he was talking about Chicago in the 60s he was not too far off the mark from where most of the cities, States, provinces, and countries around the world are today.
The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fifteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]