Dominic Lawson: A simple truth: prison works, and it is neither cruel nor vengeful to say so

Those who believe that intelligent debate has all but died out in Britain should pay an occasional visit to the Royal Geographical Society in London. About once a month it hosts events organised by Intelligence 2, a relatively new company which sells tickets to debates on topics of political or philosophical importance, featuring leading proponents on both sides of the argument.

You might think that £20 a seat is a stiff price for a public which can watch Question Time or listen to Any Questions for nothing. Yet these events are almost invariably sold out. On Wednesday night about 700 people turned up at the RGS for the latest intellectual set-to, under the rather clunky title of "Prison Works".

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A look at the speakers persuaded me that the audience would, if anything, be swayed to vote against the motion. The three arguing against were Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, Lord Ramsbotham, the former chief inspector of prisons, and Lord Woolf, until recently the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. That is a formidable line-up. Besides their professional qualifications, these are all good people. Indeed, the waves of niceness emanating from them were almost tangible, at least where I was sitting.

Against these paragons were ranged Theodore Dalrymple, a former prison doctor renowned for his dyspeptic writings about his erstwhile charges; Dr Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, who achieved an unwilling notoriety with The Bell Curve, which among other things asserted that the average black is innately less intelligent than the average white or Asian; and Dr David Green of the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, who is an excellent writer but not a natural orator.

Before the debate, the audience voted 170 for the motion, 288 against, with 249 undecided. At the end of the evening the votes were 351 for "Prison Works", and 337 against. In other words, almost all the undecided had been deeply unimpressed by the arguments of the most attractive manifestations of the English judicial establishment. Afterwards, I went up to Harry Woolf and, a little tactlessly, asked him why he thought his side had lost the debate it seemed to have won before it started. "Because of Charles Murray's argument that prison is the best way of protecting the poor," he replied. It was almost as if Harry Woolf was conceding that his side had been beaten by its own best debating weapon: an appeal to our concern for the least well-off in society.

That, indeed, was Charles Murray's tactic. He pointed out that the vast majority of crimes of robbery and violence are carried out by young men in deprived areas against others in their local community. "In England," he declared, "your safety is contingent on your income." He's right. The least well-off can not afford to secure their persons by moving around only in private transport, or their homes by elaborate security systems. Dr Dalrymple added the observation that: "If my home is burgled and my visible possessions are stolen, then I have lost about 5 per cent of my wealth. If a poor family's home is ransacked in the same way, then they lose everything they have."

Juliet Lyon countered with the statement that, "This divide between victims and offenders is a false and unhelpful one." I am not sure if she meant by this that many victims may themselves also be offenders, or that those who commit crimes are in a general sense victims of society. Whatever she meant, it was a remark which underlines the way in which the philosophy of so-called "liberals" has become completely detached from ideas of right and wrong, which are still held by the great majority of the general public.

I suspect the latter still have the idea, however quaintly old-fashioned it might seem to Home Office civil servants, that people should be sent to prison to "repay their debt to society". In other words, it doesn't matter if prison has no rehabilitative effect; it doesn't even matter if it hasn't got a great deterrent effect: those who commit crimes of theft, with or without violence, should suffer the loss of the right to move freely within the community for whose values they have shown such contempt.

There is a conventional view that we lock up far too many such people. It is true that there has been a significant increase in the prison population in recent years. The fact that recorded crimes have dropped gradually over the same period is actually a text-book demonstration of the "incapacitation" effect of prison, rather than, as many allege, proof that the Government is gratuitously throwing people in jail. Indeed, as was pointed out during the debate, if burglars were apprehended and jailed with the same efficiency as in the Britain of the 1950s, then the prison population would be not at its current level of 80,000, but 200,000. That was a time, let's remember, when this country was possibly the safest and most law-abiding in the world.

One thing was not at issue between the two sides: our prisons are grossly overcrowded. This means that prisoners are moved around much too frequently, so that training and treatment programmes are hamstrung. Juliet Lyon's solution to this is not to build more prison places - she said that was unaffordable - but to free more prisoners more quickly. Dr Dalrymple retorted that this was like the NHS hospital manager who told him that the correct response to overcrowded wards is not to demand more beds but to throw out existing patients. It makes sense financially in the short term: in the long term it amounts to criminal irresponsibility.

It was at this that point that an exasperated member of the audience exclaimed: "If we want to belong to a good society then we have to believe that prison is not the answer - to vote otherwise is to descend into barbarism." This received a devastating retort, not from the panel, but from another member of the audience, who had worked for 26 years in the Probation Service.

He observed, with the benefit of such lengthy experience of humanity in the raw, that "We cannot base our views about this on what we want the world to be like." Unfortunately, we can, and do.

I would go further. Too many people base their views about prison not merely on what they want the world to be like, but on what they want the world to think of them. To say that "prison works" is to appear cruel and vengeful. To say that it doesn't is to appear gentle and kind. Yet to base an argument on the desire to be seen as virtuous, is not itself virtuous. On the contrary, it is nothing but vanity.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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