Mandela Day is a moment to question everything you know about prison

The US has the world's largest prison inmate population. AP

“No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” So said Nelson Mandela, perhaps the most celebrated prisoner of our times.

He spent 27 years incarcerated under harsh conditions, including penal labour. He was resisting South Africa’s apartheid system and eventually became the nation’s first president elected by universal suffrage.

His birthday on July 18, commemorated by the UN as Nelson Mandela International Day, is dedicated to promoting humane conditions of imprisonment, raising awareness about prisoners as part of society, and valuing the work of prison staff as important social service. A 2015 UN General Assembly resolution sets Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the “Nelson Mandela Rules”.

These rules have been long-awaited. All throughout history, prisoners lost not just their liberty but basic human entitlements. They were stigmatised and shunned by society and subjected to cruelty including slavery, torture and other degradations.

Prison economics raise disturbing concerns, even as prisons are not a priority, with countries spending less than 0.3 per cent of their GDP on penitentiaries

Today, prisons hold more than 11.5 million people worldwide, equivalent to the population of Belgium. A third of them are in pre-trial detention without being convicted. In some countries, people can be locked up for years waiting for justice, even for periods longer than the sentences they would have served had they been found guilty in a timely manner.

The provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) apply to people in prison, but only as an after-thought. There is little progress in achieving the SDG target of ensuring equal access to justice for all.

Overall, there are 140 prisoners for every 100,000 people in the world. Two million prisoners are in the US and 1.7 million are in China, followed by Brazil (0.8 million) and India (half a million). Adjusting for population size, the US has the highest incarceration rate at 629 per 100,000.

On a continental basis, Africa imprisons the least (92 per 100,000), followed by Asia (93). But they are catching up fast with 50-70 per cent increases in absolute prisoner numbers. While only 7 per cent of prisoners worldwide are women and girls, their numbers have risen by a third since 2000. Gender differences in poverty, sexual and physical victimisation, and mental illness are blamed.

Detentions have increased by 28 per cent worldwide since the start of the millennium. Curiously, as more countries abolish the death penalty, there is a lengthening of imprisonment duration, including greater use of life sentencing.

My first visit to a place of detention left the most profound impression. It was to Kigali Central Prison in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 genocide. Thousands were jam-packed, and many fainted or died as they stood for days at a time.

The question for me was whether to support the new government to build more jails for humanitarian reasons. Would speeding up justice not be more effective, and humane? The latter is what happened through Rwanda’s community-based courts, and prisons emptied fast.

What, therefore, is the purpose of imprisonment? Opinions have divided society for centuries. The notion of “retribution” justifies jailing as moral balancing by inflicting suffering on offenders as payback for their wrongs. The “restraint” theory posits that locking up criminals makes communities safer. The “deterrence” argument claims that curtailing wrongdoer freedom discourages future transgression. The “rehabilitation” ideal seeks to impart skills to transform prisoners towards productive, law-abiding directions.

Research is unclear on which of these theories holds most water. Probably all contain grains of sense depending on the varied contexts of crimes and criminals.

One debate concerns the quality of the prison experience. Is a relaxed prison regime more effective than a stringent disciplinary approach to reduce re-offending? The evidence is conflicting. Differences between liberal Scandinavian and punitive American prison styles suggest that the wider societal context has stronger bearing.

Prison economics raise disturbing concerns, even as prisons are not a priority, with countries spending less than 0.3 per cent of their GDP on penitentiaries. Nevertheless, the annual cost per prisoner in a western state prison averages around $40,000-100,000. This excludes the hidden costs for relatives visiting and supporting their loved ones, either travelling long distances or disrupting their own lives and livelihoods to move closer.

Still, the prison sector can be troublingly lucrative. “For-profit prisons” were pioneered in the UK and adopted elsewhere, as in France, the US and Australia. Investors financed prison construction or created corporations to manage prison services. Extracting 10-15 per cent returns is not unusual. Part of their revenue stream comes from prisoner labour. I saw this for myself in a prison shop that specialised in bespoke furniture and designer clothes that retailed for hundreds of dollars while their creators earned a dollar a day as the “prison wage”.

Apart from the moral dimension of making money out of crime, evaluations show that private prisons can be less safe and secure, more punitive towards inmates and conceal abuse and exploitation.

Meanwhile, prisons in low-income countries face extra challenges. Their daily care allocation per prisoner may be less than a dollar, in comparison with the UN’s poverty line of $2.15. Real hardship is inevitable for the indigent, old, sick and weak. Especially when provision for health care, water, sanitation, and hygiene is limited, and commonly prevalent mental health and substance abuse issues are neglected.

Many criminologists argue non-custodial approaches such as suspended or conditional sentences, home confinement and curfews, fines, and community service could be alternatives to imprisonment for the majority of convicted offenders. But uptake is slow. The expected de-congestion of prisons during the Covid-19 pandemic prisons was not realised.

Kigali Central is now a museum, like Mandela’s Robben Island, and Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol where petty criminals and Irish freedom fighters lived and died side by side. They testify to the eternal struggle between humanity’s bad and good sides.

I could sense this clash when I taught a class of violent offenders at Scotland’s high-security Kilmarnock prison. And the topic of my lecture in their social studies course? The genocide in Rwanda focusing not on the crime, but on redemption.

In reality, we still don’t know the best way to redeem our transgressions. And it will be long before more of our prisons become museums. In the interim, Mandela’s words deserve reflection: “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones”.