| International News

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster, England, delivered the 2006 Prisoners' Education Trust Annual Lecture April 26 at the Old Hall, Lincoln's Inn on the subject of a Christian approach to punishment and prisons, drawing on the almost 30 years of visiting and assessing the conditions within prison walls.

“Prison must not be a dustbin for the problems society fails to address elsewhere,” he said, noting that “our Christian understanding of the human person insists that the innate dignity and worth of everyone is not negotiable.”

Noting that prison population has nearly doubled since the early 1990s and continues to grow, that the numbers of incarcerated women and juveniles have more than doubled in a decade and that the imprisonment of blacks is now seven times that of whites, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said that the prisons in England and Wales “are becoming a public disgrace.”

“Terrible overcrowding” has led to record number of inmates committing suicide, widespread drug use and the decline in the availability of education and other rehabilitative services, he said.

“Public money is going into expanding rather than improving the prison system,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said.

“Overcrowding means individual prisoners have cuts in their access to prison education and in programs to reduce reoffending. More prisoners are placed far from home, with a deleterious impact on family relationships.”

Tougher sentencing grows out of government guidelines and “a climate of increased public intolerance… often fed by rhetoric from politicians and irresponsible media reporting,” the cardinal said.

Yet, he stressed, “there is no sign that this increased severity is making our country better or safer.”

He challenged the perception that “the only way to deal with crime is to have more prisons and to lock of people for a longer period.”

“I totally disagree and think such a policy is essentially counterproductive,” he said, adding that education and alternative means of punishment and rehabilitation.

He also suggested that underlying society’s response to crime is a misunderstanding of the humanity each person.

“I believe, as a Christian, that a human being is never a ‘closed’ or ‘determined’ entity,” the cardinal said. “Everybody can be redeemed.”

“There is a possibility of change for everyone,” he said. “Thus within a penal system, resources, human, material and educational, must be available to every prisoner to support and enable their development and rehabilitation. It should also recognize individual transformation when it does occur and the duty to receive offenders back into society when they have convincingly reformed.”

“At the present time,” he said, many of those incarcerated “are not being treated with the dignity and respect which is theirs as human beings.”

Noting that those advocating alternatives “cannot be naïve to the very real threat” posed by “the most serious and dangerous offenders,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor suggested that “the lowest risk offenders” should be diverted out of the prison system and society should “punish them in the community.”

Such punishments should range from “interventions, drug treatment, community service, tagging, curfew and police surveillance options” as well as employment and training programs rather than fines, which can most adversely affect the poor, he said.

“True justice must produce outcome for the victim, for society and for the offender. It must be possible within a penal system for an offender to make different choices from those that they have hithero made and the system must make it possible for that transformation to take place and be assisted at every point during the offender’s sentence and life thereafter,” said the cardinal.

“Our present penal legal system is a long way from meeting such a description.”

He added that there should also be “greater concern for the victim” and “more emphasis on restorative justice,” which allows “victims of crime to participate in the administration of justice and which obliges offenders to make amends to the victim and the community.”

He said that the concerns he has about British society’s view of punishment shares about the Catholic Church.

“In case you think that I am pointing the finger elsewhere, I think there also needs to be changes in attitudes wihin my own church, the Catholic Church toward those in prison,” he said. “It is true to say that concern for those in prison is not sufficiently high on the agenda of many Christians.”

“On this,” he added, “we all need to examine our consciences.”

“Through justice and mercy, hope and forgiveness, no one is beyond the reach of God’s purpose,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said. “Society should never give up of any individual, for every place is potentially a place of redemption.”