Prisoner rehabilitation - 16 April 1993

For almost 30 years and I had the good fortune to work for a newspaper, which so far as its foreign correspondents were concerned was run on two excellent principles.

The first was invented by the great CP Scott, who after 57 years as editor and approaching 90 generously turned the paper over to younger men, he was a bearded giant of a Victorian who looked like God and broke his boiled egg in the morning I'm sure with one sharp decisive tap. "Take time," he said, "to choose a correspondent and then give the man his head". The second principle is really an extension of the first and was enunciated to me almost off handily the evening that that shrewd and loveable Lancashire man, the late Alfred Wadsworth, hired me over a noticeably austere dinner at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. The date was 1946 and there was a generation of Britons growing into their teens who still thought that eggs in their natural state were a cereal like powdered flour. "Don't feel," said Wadsworth on that memorable occasion, spiking a minute slither of meat, "don't feel that you have to follow the paper's editorial line, even though you can probably guess what it is."

Looking back now, I marvel at the good luck of being taken on by surely the only paper in Britain at the time that told you to write about what interested you and also begged you to report the facts as you collected them, let the moral and the ideology fall where they may. I don't know of any such European paper extant today.

It meant for me that even at times of critical breaking news, I could be riding a hobbyhorse far from Washington and the crackling news tickers. One year, the 100th anniversary of the California gold rush, an anniversary I'd been waiting for, I was out west in the foothills of the Sierra, out among the sensuous mountains and the live oaks and the mine shafts rising through high weeds in the tumbling old ghost towns. It was the spring of 1949 and there was I idling over a breakfast of pancakes and bacon when I see it now with all the clarity of guilt, a headline on the neighbour's paper a foreign affairs debate had suddenly started up in the Senate on the initiative of a senator from Missouri who wanted to torpedo the vast Marshall Plan, which was pouring millions into war-crippled Europe. I found a Western Union office and cabled an apology to my editor for my not being in Washington. In those days, only the most lethal crisis would prompt the huge expense of a telephone call. The next morning, I had a cabled reply from old Wadsworth it said simply, "Stay California. Why do we employ writers?"

I imagine that any newspaperman, whoops newsperson, listening to me now must have a moist chin from the act of drooling with envy, but there was even a bonus to the regular exercise of this second principle. Wadsworth insisted that at least once every two years the correspondent should return as he put it to base to catch the mood of the time in England to be in touch with your audience, so that you'd write about things that interested them or things that you could persuade them to be interested in. The proof of this wise rule came when you came back to New York and suffered a mild shock at noticing that somehow America had changed, of course it hadn't changed but your angle of vision had shifted and for a short time you saw things anew, perhaps not more sharply but differently.

Well, this past month, I was gone for two weeks in London and then back here for a couple of days and on south to the sweeping meadows and flowers and towering pines of Augusta, Georgia, and I might just as well have been away in England for a month, for Augusta the week of the Masters Golf Tournament is not America either. In six days and nights, I never heard a word about the budget, crime, drugs, the homeless, taxes, even about the endless stand-off in Waco, Texas.

The name Clinton I have to confess did come up once over an evening drink a man mentioned that a prominent Southern businessman had contributed a whacking amount of money to Clinton's campaign, but a bystander reminded us that the man had also contributed a whacking amount of money to the Bush campaign. This is standard practice among banks, brokerage houses and the like, they intend to be on the safe side, the side that wins by backing both they can't loose. Everything had to do with the tournament we were watching, the only other political note that jarred the brilliant days and the swift twilights among those Elysian fields was a rather nervous man who'd been burned by the Lloyds debacle and somehow thought I was responsible for it. Otherwise, no echo of news from the outside intruded upon the sight and sounds and endless talk about the beautiful, dreadful game. No wonder sports writers appear to be on the whole sunny, cheerful people, they're on a perpetual holiday from the outside world or if you like the real world.

I'm afraid that my old Methodist background comes pushing through on such occasions into the foreground and makes me feel at last that I've been having a shameful good time. All right, back on Monday morning to America back to the telly. Before 24 hours were out, I was back with the commanding general in Somalia, with the Russian parliament, with the seemingly unstoppable obscenity of Bosnia, and the weird and frightening guru in Waco, and the alarming preparations of the Los Angeles Police Department to cope with any civil outbursts after the King trial verdict. I couldn't decide from the ample pictures of the police training whether they would act on intending rioters that is as a deterrent or a stimulant and then suddenly another prison siege in Ohio and this has provoked a renewed and excitable debate about prisons and prison reform.

In the discussions – I heard four or five of them around the country – nobody brought up what was once known as the Swedish solution, rehabilitation. It was first proposed as a civilised alternative to the brutalising of jail terms in a book written by an American journalist in my goodness it must have been the middle '30s, I can't put my hands on it now it was called Sweden: The Middle Way. Among the social reforms that gave Sweden such a holy name in the United States was one that came to be studied rather late in the day, it was prisoner rehabilitation and it began to be practised in various states of the union. Remember the states have their own criminal codes. However, in time, Sweden ceased to be the model society when we learned that its enlightened sexual laws did not lessen sexual crimes and when the repeaters amongst supposedly rehabilitated prisoners grew depressingly numerous.

The present debate has turned on the experiences of two States that have crime rates among the highest in the country, Florida and California. The story of California has been well reported, it's a reformers happy hunting ground, it tries everything new at some time or another. It was I think among the first states to try to educate and rehabilitate prisoners, to free them from severe restraints and this happened sometime after the Second War. I've never seen any comprehensive figures on the outcome, but in the late '70s, the rehabilitation advocates had had their day. California went for what was recommended only last Sunday by a distinguished conservative columnist, more and bigger prisons and stiffer sentences, but like the latest addition to an airport to accommodate more planes, it soon turns out to be not big enough.

In Florida, which has been busy with new prisons too, the trend has been to cut prison sentences except for the most horrific crimes and to extend parole in no time at all to minor offenders in both senses. And what worries a lot of citizens to let out mental cases once they seem to have quieted down. As we all know too many of them soon erupt into a repetition of the violence that first put them behind bars.

Now, I read in English papers about hopelessly overcrowded American jails, I'm sure this is true in many state prisons, but what is also true, which never really struck me until I came back and looked over some prison facilities was that American convicts have a rather more luxurious view of overcrowding than well I can only say the high average of prisons in Europe and, I dare to say, in Britain.

Riots here happen or are threatened because the facilities are not as extensive as they were in the last place. I watched a long walk around the interior of a prison in Florida to which parolees and repeaters regularly returned, many of them in relief from the squaller and dangers of the streets. Here they had, of course, their own cell, their own toilet, they had a baseball diamond, a library, they had hot showers, three meals a day, colour television and a recreation room. I'm sure the TV producer chose a rather shining example to make a point, but I recall a prison riot in a north-eastern state, which ended when the warden agreed to more varied food, more recreation hours, longer evening hours of television. It became clear from this view of things and from the television discussions that to many youngsters on the foul and gang ridden streets, the jail they constantly returned too is for them a relief a sort of poor man's country club.

I don't know what we do about all this; the mood of the country is certainly to build more and more prisons. President Clinton's problem is that they cost the earth and in most cities maintaining one prisoner for a year costs the taxpayer as much as it would cost him to put the man up in a fairly swagger hotel.

Meanwhile, according to the more furtive and battled members of the administration facing this problem, applications will be gratefully received from anyone who has a new and workable theory of rehabilitation. Write to the President of the United States, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC.

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