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Around 88 thousand people are waking up in prison in England and Wales today. Around 11,000 are serving sentences of 10 years or more and maybe around 500 people are waking up this morning on their first day in a prison cell. The Government’s Sentencing Review published yesterday, essentially a pragmatic response to the reality that UK prisons are full, raises not just practical considerations but deeper questions for our society about what prison is for, what it’s like to live in there or work in there, and what happens, what should happen, when people come out through the gates again as nearly every person in prison today will.

The review highlighted that it costs £54,000 a year to keep someone in prison. And in England and Wales, a higher proportion of people are sent to prison compared with the population than any other country in western Europe. This reveals something about not only government policy or the criminal justice system, but the culture, expectations, beliefs and assumptions of a society that seems to say more than other countries that prison is the answer to crime.

Teaching the difference between right and wrong is a key preoccupation of organised religion, including Christianity, which as a set of beliefs and values, has had an unusually close relationship with the state over the centuries.

But it would be a mistake to imagine that these lines between right and wrong, even if rooted in Christian values, have always been agreed or have stayed the same. What is wrong enough to deserve your freedom being taken away has changed significantly, with still the predominant presumption that conviction of a violent crime requires prison more than, say, fraud.

Profound themes of justice, redemption, restoration, forgiveness and punishment lie underneath a governmental review of something as practical as sentencing. For some, the deprivation of freedom is punishment enough. For others, the balance towards rehabilitation mustn’t tip too far.

Christianity has a centuries old mechanism which confronts individuals with the harm we cause each other, gives us strength to face it, not avoid it, and offers the possibility of spiritual if not physical release. It’s called confession. And hidden within it, is a sign that the movement from incarceration to freedom is at the heart of what it is to be human, but that starting again isn’t something that’s easily done. A bracing confrontation of the truth of our crimes is required. ‘Restore thou them that are penitent’ we pray.

Restore: a sign that in a just and free society, for nearly all those in prison today, with hard work, honesty and sorrow, our culture still wants to say there is, must be, a way back.

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