The Prison Dilemma: To incarcerate or rehabilitate? - A controversial argument

By Bernd Maelicke

THE GERMAN PRISON SYSTEM – a topic that interests politicians when elections are looming, and the media whenever scandal is involved – is expensive and largely ineffective: over half of the people released from prison re-offend within five years. Locking people up does not rehabilitate them. Instead, the influences of prison subculture prevail. Bernd Maelicke examines the causes of this dilemma, and highlights pathways to the successful social reintegration of offenders. With the "Rehabilitation Agenda 2025", Bernd Maelicke outlines guidelines and an action plan for concrete and desperate improvement.

His credo:
"Punishing people is easy, but usually leads nowhere. Showing people a better path and helping them navigate it is difficult, but it's worth it."


Roughly 50,000 people are released from German prisons each year. Over half of them have committed minor or moderately severe offences, almost one third are dangerous or serious offenders. While the German penal system – an exemplary model for a treatment-based approach – has experienced wide reform over the past decades, re-offending rates remain high. This "revolving door" that is the German penal system costs about 4.5 billion Euros each year.

This is the starting point for offender rehabilitation expert Bernd Maelicke. His assumption is that imprisonment is only truly necessary for serious and dangerous offenders. In his view, for most offenders, prisons remain "schools of crime" that do
little to change them for the better. The detrimental effects of prison subculture predominate.

Drawing on case studies, personal and professional experiences, and empirical data, Bernd Maelicke demonstrates where
the shoe still pinches. He outlines innovative strategies and projects that are slowly emerging in Germany, that focus on
supporting offenders with their social reintegration more effectively, and that policymakers and practitioners around the
world can draw on to better prevent re-offending and protect potential victims.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nomen Verlag
• Release date: Oct 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9783939816652

Book preview

manner.

I. Of pathways, both straight and winding

Turning Points (1)

Back then, they called me Baldy – lice infestation had cost me my hair. There were five of us. The other boy was alone. His lanky figure was easily discernible in the darkness. He was coming from the direction of the church of St. Nikolai – the venue for the afternoon market – and took the short-cut through the park. That was his mistake. He was wearing sandals, swinging his fabric bag back and forth as he walked, and looked rather cheerful. Then he stopped, noticed our menacing group, and considered running for it. But the boys were already upon him and he went to the ground. He covered his face with his elbows, tried gaspingly to call for help, his bottom lip was split open. He whimpered, loudly at first, then more quietly and increasingly fearfully. I was stood to the side, staring into the darkness, and felt – nothing. What we took from him was hardly worth talking about: just a few coins. For that, we rewarded him with a few extra kicks. He remained on the ground whimpering as we ran off.

That was in Göttingen in 1953. At the time it had not been clear to me that my life could not go on like that. It wasn’t the only mugging I was involved in. I was merely 12 years old, an emotionally neglected and desolate child in search of attention and appreciation.

Childhood in the transition from war to peace

Today, memories of my childhood during the wartime years remain tranquil and idyllic, even though we were bombed out in Berlin three times. My father was an ardent national socialist and economist who pursued a successful career in the propaganda ministry (one of his colleagues in the ministry, and a family friend, was the later Federal Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger). As late as March 1945, my father volunteered to serve on the Eastern front. My mother was later informed that he had run into the Russians’ hail of bullets. Like many children of my generation, I grew up without a father.

After the war, my mother lived with my brother and me in Berlin in a small flat in the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood. The house had been badly damaged by the bombing runs, many window panes were missing, and at night I could see the stars and the moon from my bed. Firewood and briquettes were always in short supply, and I was always hungry. On the streets, wood was traded for potato peels, and I pilfered briquettes and coals from moving handcarts.

We often sought refuge at my grandmother’s house on a manor near Buckow in the Märkische Schweiz region, roughly fifty kilometres east of Berlin. Green fields, gentle hills – it was a beautiful and peaceful world. Back then, I did not understand why all women, young and old, were brought into barns and cellars during the nights to hide them from the Russians. By day, the Russian soldiers were my friends – we roared across the fields and meadows in their T-34 tanks.

In 1948, my mother decided that something had to change. My grandfather was living with his second wife in Göttingen – a cosy and intact world compared to Berlin: barely any war damage, stable supply conditions, and a more gracious and merciful occupation force. My grandfather told my mother that he would take one of her boys in.

Flight to the West

In March 1948, my mother brought me to the zonal border in Thuringia, where I was handed over to paid escape helpers. Be a brave boy, you’ll be fine!, she said. Then she was gone.

Late in the evening, the freezing cold westward march through the Harz began. I was carrying but a small backpack containing the essentials, and a man said: This way, always keep up!. Our column of maybe twenty people marched through seemingly endless hilly forests. The ground was mushy. I was frozen solid; my fingers were stiff from the cold. I had no idea where Göttingen was, nor where the Soviet zone ended. All I could see was the person in front of me with his small leather suitcase. Just keep up with him, don’t lose him, then you’ll get there eventually, I reassured myself.

Dogs were barking behind us, we heard shots being fired somewhere. I could barely see my hand in front of my face and started to panic whenever I lost sight of that small suitcase. I can’t remember how long we marched. Eventually it became light again.

My grandfather and step-grandmother, I referred to her as Aunt Gustchen, gave me a warm welcome at our agreed meeting place on the border. We drove into the historical city centre of Göttingen, Nikolaistraße 21. Intact houses everywhere, no bombing damage to be seen. The flat was heated, I got my own room, and there was more than enough to eat.

However, that first impression was deceiving. Aunt Gustchen was strict and dismissive of me. My grandfather always seemed to be sad – likely a consequence of the war – and allowed his wife to incessantly boss him around. Their relationship was cold and marked by lovelessness. I soon felt that, to them, my presence was more burdensome than enriching.

I was alone, trapped in a life with old people who were foreign to me. Still I never reproached my mother for giving me away. A war widow in post-war East Berlin with two adolescent boys, she was constantly overburdened and acted out of existential necessity.

Alone in an alien land

My relationship with my grandfather and his wife continuously deteriorated. I was rebellious, unable to accept him as a person of authority. At the same time, again and again I felt that Aunt Gustchen treated me unfairly.

To this day, I still vividly recall an occasion one April 26th, the day on which both my grandfather and I shared our birthdays. It was early in the morning, the old man was sat in his armchair, and Aunt Gustchen said: Bernie, congratulate your grandfather right now!. I replied: "No, I won’t! It’s my birthday today! My birthday!". What has also stuck in my mind to this day is the martinet – a wooden handle with seven long leather lashes – that Aunt Gustchen used to whip my naked backside over and over again whenever I disobeyed her.

The attention and appreciation that I was denied at home I sought and found on the streets. At age eleven I joined a gang of youths whose fathers had not returned home from the war. The oldest were sixteen or seventeen years old, I was the youngest by far. I was full of admiration for the gang leader, a tall, authoritarian lad who spoke a clear language and who stopped at nothing. He made me feel like I was his friend.

Years later, I read in the newspaper that in the 1950s in Göttingen, the first rockers had assaulted harmless pensioners in the park armed with chains and brass knuckles, and realized that we had been the precursors of these rockers.

At the time, we saw ourselves as a clique that wandered the historical city centre of Göttingen. The criminal energy that developed in our group little by little was not a consequence of material deprivation. After all, all of the boys came from middle class backgrounds. It was rather an expression of fatherlessness and the general crisis of authority after the war. At first, we shoplifted in stores or on the market, later we robbed and burgled. Being the youngest, I usually stood on the street and kept lookout while the others burgled homes and subsequently split the loot among themselves.

I had no say in anything and never got a share of the swag. However, I was one of them and was allowed to be there whenever the boys carried out their deeds. And that was all that really mattered to me anyway. I found a sense of belonging, felt solidarity, could put myself to the test, received praise, appreciation, and also criticism. In order to impress my peers, I started stealing from my grandparents and splitting the loot with the others on the streets. I would sometimes borrow large illustrated books and pictorials from the city library and cut the pictures and photos out. Of course, I knew that I would get into trouble for it – but it was a form of protest and revolt that was obviously important to me.

In hindsight, one might be able to say: so what? Life was haywire anyway. Back then, most people will probably have experienced lovelessness or are likely to have stolen something. During wartimes and in the years that follow them, almost all people commit terrible crimes. And besides, in the end, I actually made something of myself.

While all of this might be true, I know now that my fate had not been in my hands. I just got lucky. I was inches away from sliding further and further off the rails. Back then, I had no-one in my life who could have had a positive and reassuring influence on me.

At school, I slipped further and further into the role of the outsider. I skipped school, got bad grades, and felt like a failure. Soon, the teachers, too, viewed me as a difficult pupil who could not be reached.

A social worker from the youth welfare services visited our home several times, and eventually she wanted to shuffle me off to a care home for difficult youngsters. It cannot go on like this, she said, someone needs to teach this boy some boundaries!. I was standing right next to her, my grandfather said nothing, Aunt Gustchen nodded. I thought about the martinet, and just wanted to get away.

Nowadays, the things that transpired in such institutions are common knowledge. Discipline, order, beatings, and sexual abuse were the order of the day. Children were to be broken. I cannot imagine the impact that such injurious experiences would have had on my personality and on my life. Later on, I met many people who had to endure such educational or corrective measures. Their emotional wounds were often still far from healed, and at the very least they bore painful scars for the rest of their lives.

My salvation

And then, something like a miracle occurred. It was July of 1953, the last day of school before summer break. I was seated in the very back row of the classroom, indifferent as ever. Suddenly the door to the classroom opened. A beautiful young blonde woman entered. Is Bernd Maelicke here?, she asked the teacher, her gaze wandering the rows of young faces.

Before she even noticed me, I jumped up, ran to the front, and fell into my mother’s arms. She wanted me back! Words cannot describe how happy I was.

Everything changed from that moment onwards. In the meantime, my mother had remarried and moved to Lake Constance with my brother. We drove there on the very same day. Despite my catastrophic report cards, she had somehow managed to enrol me in the 5th grade of Singen grammar school. This marked the beginning of a new era for me. I could reinvent myself. I was two years older than my classmates, knew the big wide world, and spoke perfect High German. My scholastic performance promptly improved, I was soon appointed class spokesperson, and had real friends without criminal interests.

Returning to my mother was the pivotal turning point in my life. In criminological recidivism and desistence research, turning points are life-changing experiences that can completely change a person’s orientation, direction, and trajectory.

Today I am certain that returning to my mother, and the new life that came with it, saved me from prison. Without this fortunate twist, my chances of leading a fulfilled and crime-free life would have been minimal. For that, I remain thankful to her to this day.

I have met many people in the course of my life who have not been as fortunate as I was back then. People who have not experienced such turning points, people who no-one saved. People who saw no alternative for themselves other than deviant behaviour.

Does their misfortune excuse their crimes? Of course not. But at the same time, punishing and thus marginalizing people is always the easy route. Doing so contributes nothing to their rehabilitation. Showing them a more promising route and actually helping them navigate it might be more arduous, but it is well worth it – for victims whose victimization is avoidable, for potential offenders, and for society as a whole.

Becoming a criminal

Evil is all around us, always

Let’s assume a violent offender breaks out of prison. Lots of time went into planning his perfectly organized escape. He is now on the run.

Public reactions to such a scenario are always the same: the papers print alarming articles; television broadcasters report live from the scene. Mugshots are distributed along with a notice that the offender could be dangerous and is possibly armed. The gutter press asks the typical questions: how could this happen? Why can’t the justice system guarantee our safety? First calls for the state minister of justice to resign are voiced. Concerned citizens ask themselves whether the escapee might already be in their street, even in their front yard. They compare the mugshots with the faces of the people queuing behind them at the supermarket check-out. They double-check whether their front door is locked before they go to bed at night. They demand more walls, more barbed wire, and stricter controls and monitoring by correctional officers.

While such reactions are understandable, they are even more irrational, because the heights to which the security standards in prisons are escalated are essentially irrelevant – 96 per cent of all prisoners will someday be released from prison, either after having served their sentence in full, or after being granted early release.

There are currently around 63,000 prisoners in the 180 prisons in Germany. Roughly 48,000 are convicted offenders serving sentence, while the remainder are in secure pre-trial detention. There are only around 3,600 women prisoners, which is why this book largely focuses on the prison system for males. Women who offend require a gender-specific approach, one that was, for example, presented in 1995 by Hannelore Maelicke titled Is the imprisonment of women a man’s business? (German: Ist Frauenstrafvollzug Männersache?).

Roughly 4,000 persons are being held in youth detention centres, around 2,100 are in socio-therapeutic institutions or wards, and about 500 are in preventive detention (German: Sicherungsverwahrung). About 40 per cent are serving sentences of up to one year (half of them shorter than six months), while almost 7 per cent are imprisoned as a substitute penalty for failing to pay a financial penalty (German: Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe). About 83 per cent of prisoners are in closed enforcement settings, while 17 per cent are serving sentence in open, i. e. less severe, more relaxed enforcement regimes. This latter figure shows a great deal of variation between the different federal states, ranging from 5 to more than 30 per cent. Only a very small minority of prisoners, currently about 2,500, is serving life sentences.

About 50,000 people are released from German prisons each year, which corresponds to the population of a city like Passau. There are currently around 800,000 released prisoners living right among us. These releasees become neighbours, workmates, club colleagues, and customers in shopping centres, but also homeless people and rough sleepers. Their biography of imprisonment is not apparent at first glance. Usually, even more than a second glance is needed.

Exploring the fascination of evil

I just can’t seem to help myself: whether it’s Venice, Barcelona, the south of France, Mallorca, or Scandinavia – wherever I travel, I know a prison when I see one. Regardless of how secluded the location, whether they are hidden behind normal façades, in industrial estates, rail triangles, or out in nature in hilly terrain.

Aside from Alcatraz, Robben Island, and old GDR-correctional institutions, prisons are not tourist attractions. Many people drive past them without recognizing them for what they are. From their perspective, prison is a place for the potentially abnormal, a place where all the things happen that are not allowed to happen in a normal society – the law-abiding, the good on the one side of the walls, the law-breaking, the evil on the other.

The prisoners are the others. There is no other real explanation why people who have never even set foot inside a prison get an uneasy feeling when they approach or come near one. Add a small group of prisoners walking towards them, visibly sporting martial tattoos and being escorted by correctional officers to outdoor work activities, and many will feel the spontaneous urge to run away and seek safety. Among acquaintances of mine who work in other professions and who I tell about my many visits to prisons, somewhat surprisingly a common recurring question is whether I am actually ever scared when I go there, and whether I am armed for the case of an emergency.

Because it seemingly has no place in everyday life (at least not visibly), the things that society deems abnormal and evil come with enormous fascination. The public media appear to be almost addicted to presentations and representations of crime and violence. Crime thrillers and detective stories are aired on television day in and day out, more than 100 murders are televised on an average day. Horrific acts of violence are displayed in great depth and detail. Numerous talk shows scare their viewership by debating the allegedly rising degree of brutality shown by young offenders, and even the danger posed by gangs of senior citizens.

Contrarily, crime in Germany has been decreasing, largely as a result of changing age distribution structures in German society: the proportion of older people – an age group that commits significantly fewer crimes – is continuously increasing. Severe violent offences like murder, manslaughter, sexual offences, robbery, and extortion are declining in large German cities and urban centres as well.

The number of less severe crimes like criminal damage, theft, and common assault/bodily harm have shown increases. However, this has very little to do with actual increases in offending burden. Rather, the root of this trend lies in more intense investigative work on behalf of the police and law enforcement agencies and a greater willingness among the public to report offences.

Yet, this does little to diminish the persisting fascination for the bad and the evil. On the contrary, this fascination is easily upheld with each isolated instance of severe crime that is exploited and broadly elaborated in the media. Regardless of what reality looks like, people picture evil as something threatening, menacing, morbid, and psychopathic, and are oddly prone and amenable to allow themselves to be bothered by it. At the same time, expectations of the security state are cultivated: offenders are safely and securely put away behind prison walls and thus no longer pose a threat to anyone. All that matters is that they are caught and locked away.

Locking people up: the false solution

One gets the impression that the public ascribes almost magical powers to prisons: prisons make criminals disappear like a magic hat. The belief, or perceived universal remedy, appears to be that once offenders have been caught and subjected to the long arm of the law, no-one needs to fear them anymore.

Moreover, publicly calling for criminals to be locked away creates the impression of being tough on crime and adopting a vigorous and intrepid approach to dealing with violent offenders, rather than being a softy, do-gooder, or wimp, especially in political circles.

There is some truth in this: people who have offended cannot commit more offences on the outside for as long as they are in prison. This notion would bear fruit if it were possible to lock away each and every offender for the rest of his life. Life imprisonment precludes that an offender can be a threat to the public again. Right now, we are talking about roughly 800,000 people who have been released from prison and who live in freedom. Housing all of them would require two thousand new prisons – an absurd and nightmarish thought. And this does not take into consideration that new offenders shall continue to appear, and millions of crimes will continue to be reported or remain undetected behind the dark figure.

I shall not waste any time or effort on debating the death penalty here. Let it suffice to say that crime rates are no better in countries where capital punishment is still practised.

Lock them up is a call that is frequently repeated, and it sounds so simple. However, as we will see, it is a poor solution in the short term, and usually no solution in the long term.

A story begins

Most crime dramas end with the offender being identified, apprehended and sentenced. The tension and excitement are over once he has been caught. Evil has been defeated, good has prevailed, and we can turn off the television and go to bed reassured.

The dramaturgy of an average crime drama has a stronger influence and characterizing impact on the public’s perception of crime than we should ever be comfortable with. The committed murder is presented as the problem, and the subsequent arrest and imprisonment of the perpetrator is shown as the solution to the case and the resolution of the conflict. This gives rise to the impression that an offender’s biography ends at the moment of apprehension. This impression is, however, fatally flawed since it is not seldom the case that apprehension and incarceration in fact mark the true beginning of a criminal career. Before, during, and after their imprisonment, young offenders in particular go through what can justifiably be termed a school of crime, or an education in crime.

Let us begin where crime stories have usually already ended: apprehension, courtrooms, prison, and release – a cycle of offending and re-offending that continuously repeats itself. These trajectories and developments – that often persist over several decades – are generally not portrayed in public depictions and discourse. After all, the biography of a successfully