Prisoners are people; the right to human treatment
Prisoners are people; the right to human treatment
Crime has been called a many-headed monster with tentacles that reach out far and wide embracing people in all walks of life. Of the numerous problems that confront society in modern times there are probably few that have so strong an impact on the general public as that concerning the criminal.
Crime is a world problem of tremendous complexity. It directly affects not only the police, the lawyer and the judge along with the average person who reads about it in his daily newspaper, but the psychologist, the psychiatrist and the social worker.
Somehow, though, most of us are apt to forget that it also affects the man who has actually broken the law and who is "sent away". We may not realize it but the plain fact is that 98 per cent of those who go into prison ultimately return to their communities and to society.
A person who has broken the law or committed a crime has the same feelings, the same emotions and ambitions as other human beings. The act he committed may be the result of blind passion or of a life of distorted viewpoints, out of keeping with what the rest of us consider right and normal. But the mere fact that a man has broken the law and been sent to prison does not stamp out his desires and ambitions, or make him any less a human being even though all of us condemn his act.
Today, whether we admit it or not, society still punishes for punishment's sake. The majority of our prisons are still grim man-cages, surrounded by high forbidding walls, patrolled by armed guards and bristling with other restrictive devices. And although much progress has been made in recent years in prison reform, the public still believes that merely locking a man up will sober him and make him want to be a better person. Yet the reverse is usually true. Most men come out of such places worse than when they went in, filled with bitterness and even hatred for society which deprived them of their freedom without giving them a chance to better their condition.
In the past few years, the idea has been gaining considerable ground of prisons without walls, without guns, without armed guards, where the dignity of the individual is recognized and where emphasis is placed on self-discipline. Such prisons, known as "open institutions", now exist in a number of countries, and in 1945 Sweden became the first country to make them the normal basis of its entire prison system.
Since 1948, the United Nations has assumed the leadership in international activities concerned with the prevention of crime and the treatment of offenders (both young and old). Through its Department of Social Affairs it has taken over the work formerly performed by the International Penal and Penitentiary Commission, and has arranged periodic meetings of regional groups to re-assess the practical forms of crime prevention and treatment of offenders. A world congress on this entire subject is now scheduled for 1955.
Unesco has not done much in the field of criminology. It has dealt with certain psychological and social aspects of juvenile delinquency, primarily in co-operation with the World Federation for Mental Health and the International Federation of Senior Police Officials. Since 1950 it has given financial aid to the International Society of Criminology which groups five international associations dealing with the scientific study of criminal behaviour, and last year helped finance the second International Criminological Course at Unesco headquarters.
For the sixth anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, the Unesco Courier devotes this issue to the idea that prisoners are people, that the person who breaks the law is a human being who has the right to be treated as such, that prisoners should be returned to society with a better attitude than when they entered prison, that they must be taught the dignity of work and given an opportunity to acquire new skills by which they may make an honest living and once again become decent citizens.