Open AccessBack to Churchill: an old vision for prisoner reintegration
Author(s) -
Kim Workman
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
policy quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2324-1101
pISSN - 2324-1098
DOI - 10.26686/pq.v5i2.4289
Subject(s) - prison , imprisonment , punishment (psychology) , reign , state (computer science) , perspective (graphical) , criminology , law , political science , prisoners of war , sociology , world war ii , psychology , politics , social psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , algorithm
During his brief reign as Liberal home secretary in 1910, Winston Churchill embarked upon an ambitious reform of the English prison system. His first principle of prison reform was ‘to prevent as many people as possible getting there at all’. He believed that there should be a just proportion between crime and punishment, and that even convicted criminals had rights against the state. Underlying Churchill’s prison reforms was a real understanding of the nature of imprisonment from the perspective of the prisoner, which drew from his having been a prisoner during the Boer War.