Comment: Banning smoking in prisons is a threat to public health
The anti-smoking movement has always been hysterical and unhinged. But now it has become a threat to public health.
Plans were revealed overnight for the prison service to ban smoking across all of England and Wales' jails.
This risks significant disorder in the British penal system, right at the time that it labours under cuts to its funding. It threatens the stability of our penal system, from which all of society is affected. It is a proposal which threatens public health as well as the mental health of inmates.
Smoking is already banned in indoor public areas in prisons. Under the current plans smokers would also be banned from smoking in outdoor public areas. Currently, they are allowed to smoke in their cells, which are defined as "domestic premises". Under the new plans they will not be. By 2015, a prison sentence will mean you must give up smoking.
Paternalists will no doubt consider this an attractive prospect, but paternalists are always more interested in imposing their own values on the world than they are in considering the practical repercussions of doing so.
Let's do the maths. Seventy-two per cent of male – and 70% of female – prisoners suffer from two or more mental health disorders. Twenty per cent of them have four of the five major mental health disorders. Eighty per cent of them smoke.
It's worth, for a moment, taking these facts together and coming to tentative conclusions about the effect of a smoking ban.
The Prison Service wants to take criminals with mental health problems and take away their right to smoke at the same time as their liberty, while putting them all in a building together. And they expect something good to come from it.
Such considerations are clearly beyond the reach of the Prison Service, which evidently intends to justify its managerial existence by making the penal establishment as chaotic as possible.
It announced the ban in the standard robotic language of the managerial class: "We are considering banning smoking across the prison estate and as part of this are looking at possible sites as early adopters."
This language mimics authoritativeness and professionalism, but this plan has about as much logical consistency as a Monty Python sketch. If this is about second hand smoke – something which only has health effects after sustained exposure over years – then the ban would not apply to smoking in the exercise yard. Campaigners against so-called passive smoking have never been able to satisfactorily explain their problem with smoking outside.
The health risks to prison wardens are minimal to non-existent. The health risks to prisoners are substantial and realistic, given the degree of disorder we can expect as a result of the ban. The health risk to the public from a prison system which tries to deal with widespread disorder while sustaining severe cuts to its funding is incalculable.
We all rely on a functioning penal system which turns convicts into constructive, law-abiding members of society. This, combined with the privatisation of the probation service and the ban on experienced providers contributing services, threatens to create precisely the opposite effect.
The anti-smoking lobby long ago gave up on reason or proportion. It is propelled merely by its own insistence that a long life is more moral than a luxurious one. It is a club with an open door policy for the tedious and the jealous. For decades now it has been over-publicising, and in some cases outright lying about, the health effects of second hand smoke.
The attitude towards prisons reflected by parts of the media and the political class is equally irrational.
The debate over prisoner voting, the prospect of which apparently made David Cameron "physically sick", reflected a level of emotional outrage which the proposal did not justify. The tabloids are constantly on the prowl for Playstations or Sky TV in prisons, in an endless crusade to return the penal system to a period of Victorian brutalism.
They do not care a jot for rehabilitation or preventing future victims of crime. They care only about satisfying their own infantile emotional response to the imperfect nature of the human condition. It is the political equivalent of a child in the playground lashing out because someone stole his teddy.
For any serious person, the only valid question to ask of prison and probation services is: does it cut reoffending? There is no other consideration.
The fact this proposal could even see the light of day reflects how disinterested we are in the welfare of prisoners. They are now a group to be endlessly abused, rather than people we need to help. The mean-spirited punishment of convicts will do nothing to discourage crime, but instead perpetuates a sense of alienation which contributes to it in future.
We are losing the great British art of practicality, the sense that one should focus on what can be done and how to do it, rather than misty eyed dreams and a violent, relentless focus on principle.
The proposal that nicotine patches be offered to prisoners as a substitute shows how utterly illogical and unscientific this debate has become. Patches do not work. Propose them to a smoker or a former smoker and they will still be laughing at you when they are half way down the street. They are a joke.
Prisoners are a perfect target for the anti-smoking brigade. They suffer the dual victimisation of smokers and convicts and can be happily deprived of their rights and freedoms without anyone giving it more than a second's thought.
The plan does precisely no good to anyone, but such considerations long ago stopped motivating the anti-smoking movement. It is as detached from reason as witchcraft is from medicine.
The opinions in politics.co.uk's Comment and Analysis section are those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the website or its owners.
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