Making Good: Prisons, Punishment and Beyond

By Martin Wright
Hampshire: Waterside Press, 2008

A seminal piece when first published in 1982, Wright’s Making Good sadly, retains its relevance to scholars and practitioners interested in the state of penology, corrections, and the criminal justice system today. Martin Wright, former Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, produced an extraordinary volume that served as a forerunner in restorative justice and prison reform. This reprint of the original is, while dated in many respects, still a worthwhile read for those of us interested in earlier, groundbreaking efforts to strike a(n) (impossible?) balance between humanity and retribution. The text’s most important contribution, 26 years after its original publication, is as a marker against which to gauge our “progress” in this regard.

As Baroness Vivien Stern states in the Foreword, Making Good provides a “welcome opportunity to assess the direction penal policy has taken in the past quarter century and to reflect on whether we have progressed and where we have failed” (p. ix). Unfortunately, it is difficult to make this judgment based on Making Good alone. With statistics, studies and programs current to the late 1970s and early 1980s, and primarily those of the United Kingdom during this time (although in all fairness Wright refers to processes and statistics from a variety of nations, including Canada and the U. S. and certainly draws on examples of progressive programming in a range of nations) Making Good loses some of its relevance to current penological studies, practices, and debates.

Certainly the ‘pluses’ of Wright’s work continue to be (as was the case in the 1980s) its well articulated and well documented argument that prison is damaging and in many, if not most cases, unnecessary. He makes amply clear the long-lasting negative impacts of prison and its overuse among populations who would benefit from more community-based reintegrative measures.

Wright begins the book by writing about prisons: a brief history, discussion of public attitudes toward this form of punishment, and an exploration of reasons underlying the public’s hesitation to reject imprisonment as a standard punishment. From here he describes the harmful and damaging effects of prisons, which far outweigh their supposed benefits. Wright then offers a thoughtful and detailed description of the types of offenders who should not be sent to prison and considers a litany of programs that exist or would be worth exploring to facilitate this ‘exodus’. Recognizing that some offenders will still require incarceration (e.g. very violent offenders, violent recidivists) he proposes a detailed “reformed régime” for the remaining incarcerated.

The last two chapters might be described as the most innovative and ‘revolutionary’. Wright argues that while bringing people to court may act as somewhat of a deterrent, the potential of court sentences for preventing crime is marginal. Rather, he states, the courts should concentrate on individual cases with the objective of answering the following question: “what can be done by the offender or others to repair the harm caused by the offender’s act, and make similar acts less likely in future?” (p. 210). The answer of course is to focus on prevention and making amends, which he explores in detail, providing examples of programs and policies from the 1970s and 1980s, forerunners of today’s restitution and restoration based approaches, which work toward these goals.

Making Good is a book whose statistical references, examples, and contextual framework are based on the state of affairs over a quarter of a century ago. Readers may find parts of it outdated; although Wright is careful to clarify his use of ‘man’ and ‘him’ as not excluding women, gendered references sneak through, as do descriptions of crime types, methods of committing criminal acts, and procedures for detecting offenders that reveal technological advances since 1982. Although these “blasts from the past” may mean the book is not particularly appropriate for use as a classroom text, these relatively minor instances do not take away from the ultimate message of the book. In fact, the text is a worthwhile read in spite of these examples: one cannot help but marvel at how little our approach to punishment has changed in 25 years. The book will be appealing to an audience concerned with the “monstrosity that is our current prison system, the unchecked growth of the criminal justice system as the response to social problems and the poverty of ideas in dealing with the harm caused by crime” (p. xi).  Perhaps the book’s most promising contribution is to remind us that ‘making good’ in the current criminal justice system should be a top priority if we truly want to prevent crime, address the harm crime causes, and reduce human suffering.