Back to Churchill: an old vision for prisoner reintegration

Abstract

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.