Winston Churchill speaks to Harper on prison reform

In his astonishing autobiography, My Early Life (1930), Winston Churchill speaks of his “hybrid” life as war correspondent and cavalry officer.  The most compelling passages regard the Boer War where he relates the events leading up to his life as a P.O.W. (retained as a political prize and because of his leadership role when under fire); followed by his captivity; and then his stunning escape, which earned him a national and international reputation.  His period of captivity, which lasted less than a month, shaped his attitude towards prison life and prison reform.

As Home Secretary in 1910, while remembering his P.O.W. experience, Winston Churchill introduced penal reform and began ameliorating prison conditions, dragging England out of the nineteenth century.   Stephen Harper, on the other hand, with his more-than-Spartan prison reform about 100 years later, is presently dragging Canada back to the nineteenth century.   In October 2012 Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced that the services of part-time, non-Christian chaplains will no longer be required in federal prisons next year.  The cost savings is about $1.3 million annually.

Here is what Winston Churchill might say to Harper and Toews:

… the whole atmosphere of prison, even the most easy and best regulated prison, is odious. Companions in this kind of misfortune quarrel about trifles and get the least possible pleasure from each other’s society.  If you have never been under restraint before and never known what it was to be a captive, you feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined to a narrow space, fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men, and webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I hated any other period in my whole life.  Luckily it was very short.  Less than a month passed from the time when I yielded myself prisoner in Natal till I was at large again, hunted but free, in the vast sub-continent of South Africa.  Looking back on these days, I have always felt the keenest pity for prisoners and captives.  What it must mean for any man, especially an educated man, to be confined for years in a modern convict prison strains my imagination.  Each day exactly like the one before, with the barren ashes of wasted life behind, and all the long years of bondage stretching out ahead.  Therefore in after years, when I was Home Secretary and had all the prisons of England in my charge, I did my utmost consistent with public policy to introduce some sort of variety and indulgence into the life of their inmates, to give to educated minds books to feed on, to give to all periodical entertainments of some sort to look forward to and to look back upon, and to mitigate as far as is reasonable the hard lot which, if they have deserved, they must none the less endure.[1]

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[1] Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Mandarin Paperback, 1989), pp. 273,274.  Churchill’s autobiography was first published in 1930.