Archbishop Calls for Commission to Investigate Failing Penal System

The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for a commission of enquiry to investigate the penal justice system which he says is failing offenders and victims alike because it cannot adequately address the primary need to change the behaviour of convicts.

In a lecture to the Prison Reform Trust Thursday, Dr Rowan Williams argued that a commission was necessary to explore different models of penal justice because of problems rooted in an inadequate sense of responsibility, not simply on the part of the offenders but also of society at large.

"If we seriously want to address the problem of reoffending, it is clear that a penal culture in which there is no real attention to how offenders change is worse than useless - literally worse than useless, in that it reinforces alienation, low self-worth and the lack of any sense of having a stake in the life of a community," he said.

Dr Williams said the real neglect was the failure not only of society, but also of the system to adequately explore how offenders might reform.

"If the underlying problem in crime is a breakage in relationship, this means that the offender has lost the active sense of being answerable for others. That sense is ... inseparable from the assurance of having others who are answerable for you," he said.

"The most unhelpful and indeed damaging way of treating this is thus surely a system that leaves the offender without any grounds for believing that he or she is the object of anyone's responsibility. This is emphatically the message that much of our present system still gives to the offender."

Dr Williams warned that a creeping consumerism threatens to unbalance the relationship between society, the offender and the victim, adding that moves to put parts of the system out to tender or franchise further send the message that the community as a whole is not fully committed to changing offending behaviour:

"The idea that offender management should be put out to tender is one that could sit very comfortably with some sorts of talk about community justice if we are not careful; and this buys into a very questionable understanding of genuine collective responsibility fully owned by the state - a properly common moral discourse about crime and punishment."

He concluded his lecture with a call to politicians to regard punishment as more than "the expression of disapproval" and acknowledge that "something needs to change in a person's awareness and conscience".