Catholic prisons charity, Pact, held its Carol Service at Farm Street Church on 9 December. Speaking at the service, Bishop Rachel Treweek, the Anglican Bishop for prisons, said:
I pray that more will be done in the coming year not only to enable prison to be a place where doors within people are unlocked to enable healing and transformation, but also that more will be done to ensure that those who walk through the gate have a front door to go through to a place which can be called home; And that there will be an even greater focus on creating new doors of opportunity for purposeful and meaningful work which allows people not to be labelled as an ex-offender but to be known by name and valued and loved.
Bishop Moth, who presided at the Carol Service, also reminded us that it is Jesus himself who transforms lives.
In the same week, the Government published its Prisons Strategy White Paper. The document includes a £4 billion commitment to the prison build programme currently underway. This would increase the maximum prison population by nearly a quarter, adding 18,000 additional places. In his response, Pact CEO Andy Keen-Downs spoke of an alternative strategy of investment in families, young people and communities to offer attractive alternatives to crime:
We could perhaps spend £1 billion on modernising and replacing some worn out prisons and making sure all cells are safe and have some basic IT. We could perhaps switch the remaining £3 billion to invest in other things – in mental health community services and secure beds and therapeutic treatment for mentally ill people, and expand the use of community sentence treatment orders. We could, quite simply, stop sending mentally ill people to prison. We could spend some of the money investing in family life, in family hubs, in positive parenting programmes, in community youth programmes and in tackling child poverty. We could do all of this with a clear focus on tackling systemic racial inequality. And we could invest in our young people and communities to offer attractive alternatives to crime. And if we paused for a moment, and considered the futility of ever-lengthening prison sentences, we could give prison staff the space they need in which to focus on the real rehabilitation work that attracted them to the job in the first place.
Andy’s full response can be read here.
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