In the past 100 years, our correctional institutions have adapted to a changing role in a rapidly evolving society.

The type of prisoner who would have been confined 50 years ago in a maximum security prison may now be found in any one of several kinds of minimum or medium security institutions. We speak today of correctional rather than penal institutions, but still use the general term “prison” for convenience.

The diversification of institutions is only one of the manifestations of the progress that our prisons have made steadily since independence. This progress has not merely consisted of the improvement of conditions and practices that militated against the rehabilitation of prisoners but also the development of programmes that affirmatively promote rehabilitation, utilising scientific techniques and personnel with professional and technical training.

It is this progress and the philosophy that activates it that makes it appropriate to discuss the prison’s role as part of crime prevention in today’s society. The prison is thus by inference placed in its proper setting as one of the wide variety of instruments that the society uses to prevent and control crime, and penology in its proper setting as a sector of the general field of criminology and the broader field of the social sciences.

It is high time it was more widely recognised that the prison is more than an instrument of society’s retributive vengeance; that its basic philosophy is a correctional rather than a punitive philosophy; and that penologists are not zoo-keepers but men and women engaged in a delicate and difficult salvage operation.

The prison is not merely a scrap-heap where we dump the slag that is left after science has extracted everything possible from even the lowest-grade ore.

It is an important step in the total process of extracting, converting and refining the potentially valuable material that passes on a never ending conveyer belt through our courts.

It is true that crime is prevented not only by the varied agencies and programmes that seek to keep boys and girls from becoming delinquent, not only by the police service that tries to stop the criminal before he commits his crime, but also by the two departments that together implement the correctional process: prisons and probation.

The public ordinarily does not think of these functions as preventive, for all the two services deal with are convicted offenders. If it thinks of the prison as a preventive agency at all, the public means that it is expected to deter potential offenders through the fear of punishment.

However, the primary function of the prison is to reduce crime by preventing its repetition. The more than 100,000 convicts who are incarcerated every year present possibilities of a very substantial saving in future crime, with all its calculable and incalculable costs.

Prisons provide society some protection from crime by merely keeping offenders in custodial segregation for varying periods up to life imprisonment. It is equally obvious that this may solve the problem caused by specific criminals without solving the problem of crime in general, just as the segregation of lepers may or may not promote the prevention and cure of leprosy.

But even with specific offenders, imprisonment has limited value as a protective stratagem unless they are confined for life.

If, on the other hand, modern society sought to protect itself against those who are a menace to the persons or purses of their fellow citizens by life imprisonment or other inordinately long sentences for all sorts of crimes, it would eventually find itself with an ever-increasing burden of crime.

Prisons could also play a role of great significance if they were organised and staffed not only to provide training and treatment with a view to rehabilitation but also to serve as research centres.

Research in prisons can shed more light on the causes of crime, how to prevent crime, and effectively deal with offenders whose crime we do not succeed in preventing.

Prisons can only protect the society when they no longer serve as instruments of retribution; when they hold offenders in custodial segregation only as a measure of safety, not as punishment; and when its primary aim is rehabilitation, reclamation and reform

— The writer is a senior Kenya Prisons Service officer and Public Policy and Development Expert