Prison won’t work till we restore right and wrong, fathers and proper coppers: PETER HITCHENS
In this opinion piece, Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens argues that prisons only succeed at deterring and reforming criminals when backed by a broader conservative moral order — strong families, religious upbringing and a visible police presence — none of which he believes Britain still has. He contends that imprisonment is a relatively modern, "liberal" invention that worked well in Victorian Britain because of pervasive moral discipline and policing, but has since broken down as those supporting structures eroded, particularly from the 1960s onward.
Hitchens traces prison's history from pre-1800 transportation and executions through the Victorian era's purpose-built, intimidating jails such as Wormwood Scrubs, Armley and Strangeways. He notes England and Wales held just 27,000 prisoners in 1960, a figure he says stayed low until the "Cultural Revolution" and "Permissive Society" of the 1960s brought mass divorce and weaker families. He argues that today's absent policing lets many offenders commit crimes repeatedly before being caught, so by the time they are jailed they are already hardened, while prisons themselves have effectively been taken over by inmates rather than authorities, meaning offenders often emerge worse than when they went in.
- Hitchens: prisons only work within a strong moral, family-led society
- 1960s social changes eroded discipline, he argues, undermining deterrence
- He says prisoners, not authorities, now effectively run jails
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Britain sends more people to prison than many comparable countries, and the debate over whether it actually works to cut crime and reform offenders is a long-running one. Some argue prison mainly serves to punish and remove offenders from society, while others say it should focus on rehabilitation, and this tension shapes ongoing arguments about sentencing, funding and prison conditions.
The prison system in England and Wales has its roots in the Victorian era, when large purpose-built jails replaced earlier punishments such as transportation to penal colonies overseas or execution. Prisoner numbers stayed relatively low for much of the twentieth century before rising substantially in recent decades, alongside wider social changes affecting family structures, policing and community life.
This piece is a personal opinion column reflecting on those historical shifts and what they might mean for prison's effectiveness today. Understanding it requires knowing that debates over crime and punishment often link back to broader disagreements about social change since the 1960s, the resources and visibility of policing, and the role of family life in preventing offending.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Hitchens's supporters would argue that prison statistics speak for themselves: reoffending rates remain stubbornly high, and it is reasonable to ask why incarceration that once seemed to deter and reform now so often fails to do either. They would say that any institution's effectiveness depends on the wider social fabric around it, so it is not unreasonable to point to family breakdown, the decline of a shared moral consensus and thinning police presence on the streets as factors that leave courts sentencing people later and harder than they might once have been. On this view, campaigning for stronger families, community policing and clearer moral expectations is a compassionate, preventive approach, aimed at stopping people arriving in the criminal justice system in the first place rather than merely punishing them once they do.
The case against
Critics would counter that this argument risks romanticising a Victorian past that was also marked by brutal, overcrowded prisons, harsh treatment of the poor and mentally ill, and forms of policing and moral enforcement that were often discriminatory and coercive rather than genuinely just. They would argue that reoffending is better explained by measurable, addressable factors, such as underfunded rehabilitation and mental health services, inadequate education and job prospects for prisoners, and overcrowding, rather than by a vaguely defined loss of religious or family values. They would also caution against treating 1960s social liberalisation as the root cause of crime, noting that many countries with progressive family structures and secular societies have markedly lower reoffending rates than Britain, suggesting that practical investment in policing, courts and rehabilitation matters more than restoring a particular moral order.