Crime & Punishment

There’s a certain irony in how we approach crime and punishment. Society spends years trying to stop toddlers from turning into little monsters, only to throw grown-ups into a system that guarantees they come out worse. We wag fingers at misbehaving children, scold them for mixing with the wrong crowd, and lecture about consequences - and then shove offenders into prisons that are basically networking hubs for criminals, where the ‘wrong crowd’ is the only crowd.

It’s the same old battle: punishment versus rehabilitation, nature versus nurture. Some people think that locking criminals away and making life miserable will scare them straight – just as Victorian parents believed a good thrashing would instil lifelong virtue in their offspring. But fear-driven discipline didn’t exactly create well-adjusted, happy children; it bred resentment, defiance, and the occasional serial killer. Likewise, prisons built on punishment alone don’t reform criminals – they manufacture reoffenders.

Look at the numbers. In England and Wales, nearly 50% of adults released from prison reoffend within a year, with the rate rising to 64% for those serving sentences of less than 12 months. In the US, the five-year recidivism rate is over 76%, a staggering indictment of the system. Countries with punitive justice systems – the UK, the US – have appalling rates of reoffending. Why? Because prison, in its current form, is the equivalent of sending a naughty child to a school run entirely by other naughty children. They don’t come out better; they come out fluent in delinquency, with a new set of criminal contacts and an even bigger chip on their shoulder.

But when you bring this up, the same tiresome crowd starts banging on about ‘soft justice’. Apparently, anything short of medieval dungeon conditions is just coddling criminals. Never mind that Norway, with its plush ‘hotel’ prisons, has one of the lowest reoffending rates in the world. Their system treats inmates like humans, focuses on rehabilitation, and, shockingly, produces fewer criminals. Meanwhile, Britain sticks to the ‘lock ’em up and hope for the best’ method – which, given the state of our prisons, seems to involve throwing inmates into a pressure cooker of violence, drugs, and institutionalised incompetence.

And here’s the real sting – the punitive approach isn’t just ineffective, it’s eye-wateringly expensive. The UK spends approximately £4.4 billion annually on prisons, with each inmate costing the taxpayer around £47,000 per year. Meanwhile, reoffending costs the economy an estimated £18 billion annually – far more than the cost of rehabilitation programmes that have been proven to reduce crime. Worse still, shifting to a more rehabilitative model would require an upfront investment, meaning the initial expenditure would hit government finances before the benefits materialised. The long-term gains – reduced crime, fewer victims, and a lower burden on the justice system – would far outweigh the costs, but that doesn't fit with the short-term thinking of politicians obsessed with electoral cycles. The UK government spends billions annually on prisons, yet reoffending costs the economy even more in policing, legal proceedings, and lost productivity. It’s the worst kind of false economy. For every pound spent on proper rehabilitation, there’s a potential saving of far more in reduced crime, fewer victims, and lower long-term incarceration costs. 

The same money wasted on keeping people locked up in failing institutions could be used to stop them ending up there in the first place – better education, mental health services, addiction treatment. But no, we prefer to throw good money after bad, because ‘being tough on crime’ sounds better in a soundbite than ‘actually solving the problem’. The irony is that the politicians clinging to this outdated model aren't even serving their own fiscal interests - just their electoral ones. A properly reformed system wouldn’t just reduce crime; it would cut costs in the long run, free up resources for essential public services, and boost economic productivity. But when the rewards take longer than a single parliamentary term to materialise, no one in power wants to touch it. Pragmatism loses to populist pandering every time.

And it's not just prisoners affected by their environment. Prison officers, spending years immersed in the same brutal conditions, often end up compromised themselves. Corruption, violence, and smuggling scandals involving officers are disturbingly common – a 2023 report found that more than 120 prison staff in England and Wales were dismissed or convicted for corruption-related offences over a five-year period - proof that even those meant to uphold order aren’t immune to the system’s corrupting influence. If nurture plays a role in criminality, then surely we should acknowledge that forcing people – both inmates and staff – into dysfunctional institutions makes it more, not less, likely that they will adopt criminal behaviours. If working in prisons can lead officers to offend, how can we expect prisoners to emerge rehabilitated?

It’s the same mistake people have made with children for centuries. Slap a label on them – ‘troublemaker’, ‘thug’, ‘criminal’ – and that’s what they become. Victorian parents did it, assuming some kids were just ‘bad seeds’, destined for the gallows. We do the same with ex-cons, branding them for life and then wondering why they can’t get a job and end up back inside.

The answer isn’t complicated. If you want fewer criminals, stop designing a system that churns them out like a factory. Just as children need boundaries, guidance, and a chance to learn from mistakes, so do offenders. Prison should be about rehabilitation, not just revenge. But that requires society to admit that the people inside aren’t monsters – they’re products of their environment. And if we’re serious about reducing crime, we might want to start by fixing the places that manufacture it.