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31 How. J. Crim. Just. 1 (1992)

handle is hein.journals/hjcj31 and id is 1 raw text is: The Howard journal Vol 31 No 1. Feb 92 ISSN 0265-5527 The Responsible Prisoner: Rehabilitation Revisited1 ANDREW COYLE Governor, Her Majesty's Prison, Brixton Abstract: This paper was first delivered to a meeting of the Howard League in Scotland in March 1991. The Scottish tradition of imprisonment has always betrayed a healthy scepticism about the reforming value of imprisonment in itself, recognising that it is primarily a punishment which consists of the deprivation of liberty. The rehabilitation of the prisoner is likely to come about, if at all, as a result of personal change. Future recidivism is likely to be affected, positively or negatively, by external features, such as accommodation, support and employment. This realism has now been translated into a set of ideals. The challenge facing bodies such as The Howard League is to ensure that the Prison Service translates these fine ideals into fine deeds. The instances of imprisonment as a punishment for other offences than theft and assault, are not numerous; and the long periods of imprisonment that take place in England are unknown in Scotland, where the period very rarely exceeds a year. (House of Commons 1826, Appendix 1, p. 46) The problem of Recidivism is small, diminishing, and not incapable of solution. (Ruck 1951, p. 55) The Government's penal policy is that the prison sentence should be imposed upon those, and only those for whom an alternative disposal is not appropriate. (Scottish Prison Service 1990, foreword) These three quotations span a period of 160 years. They encapsulate in an interesting fashion the journey taken by the Scottish prison system along a road which to a large extent has only recently taken it back to its roots. The first quotation is taken from evidence given by an Advocate Depute to a House of Commons Select Committee on Scottish prisons in 1826. It came from an age in which there was little belief in the concept of imprisonment as an end in itself, when both the numbers in prison and the length of their stay were considerably smaller and shorter than was later to be the case. The second quotation is from Sir Alexander Paterson, the doyen of 20th century English penal reformers, written in the age when there was supreme confidence in the value of the prison system as a reforming agency and in the rehabilitative value of imprisonment. The final quotation is an extract from the foreword written in 1990 by the Secretary of State for Scotland to the document Opportunity and Responsibility. It underlines a return to the earlier philosophy that 1

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