A Modest Proposal.
John Wareham is a renaissance man. An author, a psychologist, a thinker, a doer,
an innovator. I’ve known him as a mentor
and friend since 1988. He gave a speech
recently in New Zealand on how we should rethink prisons and prison reform.
1. Make
our prisons government owned enterprises and discard the warehousing model. Storing and punishing human
animals is at best a short term route to immediate profit. In the long term, it merely produces more
criminals.
2. Treat
prisons as income streams not cost centres. Recognise that the full cost to
society of incarceration includes a massive but invisible item; lost tax
revenue.
3. Change
the mission to the creation of productive, tax-paying citizens. Most inmates will be released back
into society, so this is the outcome we’d all like—right?
4. Impart intensive life-changing ideas. Implant the big,
liberating concepts that underlie the mostly invisible social and individual
forces that create the special predicament and serial incarceration of the
prison inmate.
5. Imbue
returning inmates with skills they can market. The demand for unskilled labour is
effectively exhausted. Ideally, in the
2016 economy re-entrants need to be capable of creating an income stream,
not just hoping to find a job. To
do this, they need to re-enter with a marketable skill and entrepreneurial
know-how.
6. Treat
offenders and ex-offenders as assets not liabilities. The untapped talent of prison
inmates is astonishing. They are an
effectively free source of teaching personnel. The best prison teachers are hard-nosed
ex-offenders who have been liberated intellectually and emotionally. So embrace the Taking Wings mantra, it
takes an ex-offender to render an offender an ex.
7. Increase
the return on investment by changing the prison reward system. Benchmark success in terms of
taxes paid by returning ex-offenders, and award bonuses to all prison personnel,
including inmate teaching staff, in terms of their success in creating
tax-paying citizens.
All of the above can be achieved at minimal
cost. We already own the prisons, and they are crammed to the bars with
raw talent and potential teachers. It would
just take a new way of seeing things.
Attaboy
John!!
KR
