Punishment by Custody

Abstract

This chapter deals with three main kinds of custodial setting: prison, custodial establishments for children and young people, and, in a brief addendum, hospital custody for people with mental health problems. These are not a comprehensive view of the vast scope of custodial settings, but they enable the examination of typical uses of punishment as custody. In examining them, this chapter encounters a striking ambiguity which lies at the heart of the tension in all three types of custody, between their claimed therapeutic purposes and functions, and their actual punitive ones. The dichotomy is rarely as sharply defined as this, however, which makes the task of clarifying, describing and interpreting the significance of forms of punishment that much more difficult. The chapter touches also on the desired nature of custodial regimes, as opposed to their unintended consequences, in terms of increasing rather than reducing offending behaviour or in producing a significant rate of suicides; it also deals with the use of custody for such groups as asylum seekers and attempted immigrants; finally, it considers a number of non-penal settings in which children, older people, people with mental health problems and people with learning disabilities are dealt with. It should be noted that the discussion of corporal punishment in Chapter 6 contains much of relevance in relation to boarding schools, especially public schools.

Imprisonment as it exists today is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

(Shaw, 1922)