All prisoners in England and Wales could be banned from watching channels such as Sky Sports in their cells, a government minister has indicated.
Offenders in private prisons are able to access pay-TV channels for a small weekly fee, but inmates in publicly run jails can only watch free-to-air ones.
Asked on Tuesday whether this would continue, Prisons Minister Jeremy Wright said “not for much longer”.
The brutality of taking pay TV channels away from convicted criminals is a barbarity that defies belief. I am lost for words.
Our diocese, which represents 300,000 Anglicans in southern Ontario, [a little exaggeration: there are only 320,00 church attending Anglicans in all of Canada] is committed to building communities of compassion and hope through nurturing healthy, vibrant congregations. We are deeply concerned that in a time of economic downturn the government is proposing to build more prisons rather than fund lower cost alternatives that enhance community health and build restorative relationships and stability………..
The Canadian government has regrettably embraced a belief in punishment-for-crime that first requires us to isolate and separate the offender from the rest of us. That separation makes what happens later easier to ignore: by increasing the number of people in jail for lengthier sentences you are decreasing their chance of success upon release into the community.
So if criminals are not to be separated “from the rest of us”, where will they go? As the Anglican Church of Canada drives Christians out of its denomination, it finds itself with a growing number of empty church buildings: if the bishops really meant what they said, they could rehabilitate criminals by housing them in empty churches. The bishops could be in “relationship” with the offenders, fostering “healing and community building”; I get warm and sentimental just thinking about it.
