(Psalm 19:2)

Nuptial + Theology

Methodology

If you only read one more book in your entire life, please make sure it's

PETER PLICHTA's God's Secret Formula

Deciphering the Riddle of the Universe and the Prime Number Code

ISBN 1-86202-014-1, Element Books 1997

"Faith isn't merely reasonable; it's reasoning" - Pope John-Paul II. This entire website is dedicated to Saint Paul of Tarsus, Apostle to All Nations, who while travelling to Rome was shipwrecked on the Maltese islands, where he remained for three months and, as the same Polish Pope John-Paul II perhaps mistakenly expressed it to his own Maltese audience in May 1990, although Paul could not speak Maltese (?!), the natives (or ought one to say "the autocthonous inhabitants") of those islands certainly understood him very well! Like Maltese, English is a language with very ancient roots. You are almost certain to find here a great deal to interest you that is not easily, if at all, available to you anywhere else.

All sample texts and illustrations included within these pages have been carefully selected from the very best produced over the course of the last 6000 years and range from the extremely unfamiliar to the very well known.

This worldwide Internet edition of The Neith Network Library is best understood as a sequel to Valentine Tomberg's, an earlier Preliminary LibrArian's anonymously authored and only posthumously published Meditations on the Tarot - a journey into Christian Hermeticism, for the German edition of which Hans Urs Von Balthasar contributed a Foreword. I+N facilitating the individual reader's personal integration of mysticism, gnosis and magic today, this current Preliminary LibrArian emeritus is, therefore, simply seeking faithfully to transmit within a context of hermetic, catholic, tantric philosophy that selfsame Tradition the continuing growth of which Valentine has promised, even now, to do all he can to nurture and nourish within the heart, soul and body of each and every seriously committed seeker after Truth.

Our focus and aim is not erudition but individual empowerment and fruitful personal growth. You are invited to weave into a higher unity all that is conveyed by, and beneath, the complete English-language text of significant books and articles by Joan D'Arcy Cooper, Joseph S. Ellul, Harvie Ferguson, Giulio Girardi, Colin James Hamer, Sylvester Houédard, Leo XIII, Bodvar Schjelderup, J. D. Solomon & Marco Todeschini, when set alongside a treasury of quotations from Thomas Aquinas, William Blake, Carl Jung, Bernard Lonergan, Plotinus, Zecharia Sitchin & Iman Wilkens... to name but a few.

Sapientibus pauca and, as Roland Barthes has famously written: "The plural of the Text depends not on the ambiguity of its contents but on the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers."

Report of Mystery Planet Corroborates Zecharia Sitchin's Predictions

An exciting announcement by the British Royal Astronomical Society that "a massive planet may lie beyond Pluto" corroborates information contained in texts written on clay tablets millennia ago.

The findings, reported by the Royal Astronomical Society in its Monthly Notices (11 October 1999) and scooped by the BBC on 7 October, include details that were first culled from Mesopotamian tablets by Zecharia Sitchin in his 1976 book, The 12th Planet and updated in his 1990 book, Genesis Revisited.

The current astronomical report, authored by Doctor John Murray, concludes that this mystery planet is large, that it originated outside our solar system but was captured into a vast orbit around our Sun, and that its orbit is retrograde (counter to the orbits of the other planets in our solar system). His conclusion regarding such a distant planet stems from an analysis of the orbits of comets, some of whose long orbital periods indicate a "clustering" caused by the gravitational influence of a large celestial body which, because it orbits the Sun, must be defined as a planet.

Amazingly the seven aspects of such a planet attributed to it by Dr. Murray were detailed by Zecharia Sitchin a quarter of a century ago; he attributed them to a planet that had been called Nibiru by the Sumerians almost 6,000 years ago. Sitchin has derived the seven characteristics of such a planet primarily from an ancient text known to scholars by its opening words, Enuma elish - a text considered by most scholars to be "mythological" or allegorical, but which Sitchin has interpreted as a sophisticated cosmogony describing how (1) a large celestial body, that (2) originated somewhere else, but had been thrust out of its own solar system, (3) was caught into orbit around our Sun (4) in a great elliptical orbit (5) that makes it one more planet in our solar system, (6) orbiting beyond Pluto (7)in a clockwise (retrograde) direction.

With the exception of the estimate as to how far distant this planet is, and thus of what is the length of its orbit (where Sitchin postulates an orbit of 3,600 Earth-years, Dr. Murray has suggested one ten times larger), the latest findings clearly match Zecharia Sitchin's earlier conclusions in all significant respects - but, it is important to add, Sitchin had based his conclusions not on any current astronomical observations but on ancient data.

Asked what gave him the idea that Enuma elish should be treated as a scientific text rather than as myth or allegory, Sitchin explained that the trigger was a depiction on a cylinder seal which he found in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in what was then East Berlin. Known as seal VA/243, this seal wich records the granting of the plow to Mankind by the god of farming, also depicts a complete solar system in which one star (our Sun) is surrouned by a family of planets. A comparison to our solar system, as we know it today, reveals that all the planets we know of - including those discovered by us only in modern times (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) are clearly depicted - plus one more large planet. This seal is dated to c.2500 B.C.

"The realization that the ancient Sumerians had possessed such sophisticated astronomical knowledge, including an awareness of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, led me to treat their texts also as expressions of scientific knowledge," Sitchin said. Thus the showing of one more planet on the seal provided a clue to the true nature of the Sumerian epic and, from that realization, the statements in other ancient texts that the Family of the Sun had twelve members suddenly made sense - the Sun, the Moon plus, not nine but ten planets. "So, although technically Nibiru is a tenth planet, it is the twelfth member of our solar system - and thus the book's title, The 12th Planet," Sitchin said.

The pace of discovery in the quarter of a century since Sitchin published his first book has provided corroboration for virtually all aspects of what he has asserted about the sophistication of ancient knowledge. In 1990, therefore, when he published his Genesis Revisited, he gave it the subtitle: "Is Modern Science catching up with Ancient Knowledge?" The answer is a very big YES! However, it does seem that both Sitchin and Kramer were mistaken in thinking that the Sumerians were the first people to use wheels; these were already in use on the land that is now Malta for at least a thousand years before a Great Flood destroyed all three temples at Ħaġar Qim:

THE MALTESE CONUNDRUM

Hitler seems to have believed that the Mediterranean Sea did not come into existence until fifty thousand years ago, when the Atlantic first broke through what was then a high land-ridge connecting Gibraltar with Morocco, so flooding the Algerian Basin, the Sardinian-Balearic Abyssal Plain, the Algerian Tyrrhenian Trough, the Tyrrhenian Abyss, the Malta Trough, the Ionian Abyssal Plain, the Herodotus Abyssal Plain, today's Black Sea area, and much else besides.

Colin Renfrew, Joseph S. Ellul and Professor Vere Gordon Childe agree that Malta's ancient cart-rut and temple culture is enigmatically unique and, according to their calculations, the island's oldest on-land prehistoric temple at Ħaġar Qim appears to have already been standing for seven thousand years (and serving the needs of a wheel-using population acquainted with the Moon's Major Standstill as well as with the Sun's Solstice and Equinox, and also knowing quite a lot about acoustics long before Sumer was established) when it was overthrown by a huge tidal wave sweeping in from the West some five thousand years ago now.

Andrew Collins broadly agrees with Otto Heinrich Muck that Plato's Atlantis was destroyed when an asteroid devastated the Caribbean to the West both of Malta and the Straits of Gibraltar, not however, as Doctor Alan H. Kelso de Montigny has suggested, at some time in 3,000-4,000 B.C., but at or about 8pm on June 5^th, 8,498 B.C.

Is Ħaġar Qim's oldest temple, which would then have been standing for well over a thousand years, in such a poor state to-day because it has been destroyed by a tidal wave from the West not just once, but twice? And who restored the Gibraltar-Morocco high land-ridge after its first destruction?

Zecharia Sitchin has, moreover, brought together a great deal of documentary evidence which suggests that Noah's Flood had occurred some time earlier, in or shortly after the commencement of our most recent Age of Leo in 10,860 B.C., when what NASA calls Planet-X came close enough to Earth to cause the Antarctic ice-sheet to slip into all the adjacent seas, so that the whole known world was inundated by a huge tidal wave from the South. Għar Dalam may have been flooded at that time but, as far as we know, there would have been no cart-ruts nor temples nor, indeed, any other buildings then on what is now Malta. But the problem of rebuilding the Gibraltar-Morocco high land-ridge will still have had to be faced if life in the "Apsu" or "Abyssal Plain" was to go on. Perhaps Enki was responsible, since one of his jobs before the Deluge had been that of securing "the bolt" or "bar" of the sea... Ancient Egyptian civilization, we are told, only became possible after the land there was reclaimed from beneath the waters of some Great Flood - and Plato reports that there have been many floods.

Despite royal use of the Tower of London and feudal Lords' use of dungeons for their own purposes, imprisonment was not common in the Middle Ages, and the preferred way of dealing with criminal elements was by declaring them outlaws.

As prisons came into use it was natural to regard inmates as, like outlaws, outside the protection of the law and without rights. It was not until the reign of Elizabeth I, for instance, that they were deemed to have an actual right to be fed.

The main punishment for criminals during the 17th century was transportation overseas.

By 1700 it had become hard to make any realistic distinction between brideswells for the destitute and local prisons.

By 1776, although execution and transportation (which was then running at a thousand a year) were the main forms of punishment for crime, the use of local prisons was quite common.

Transportation was brought to a halt by the American War of Independence and the Hulks Act was passed by Parliament to deal with the problem of how the Nation was to deal with its criminals. The first two hulks or moored ships used to accommodate them were moored at Woolwich.

This was meant to be a temporary measure, and in 1779 a Penitentiary Act was enacted to provide for the building of a national penitentiary. Although the new law was the result of quite a lot of discussion, it remained a dead letter, because, with the discovery of Australia, transportation to that country provided an alternative solution to the problem of disposing of the criminal element. The first prisoners were transported to Australia in 1787.

From 1779 onwards central Government shouldered the burden of financing the new hulks.

In 1784 and 1791 Prison Acts were also passed with a view to improving conditions in local prisons. However, Local Authorities resisted even the minimum of reform, and these laws were never enforced.

The war with France posed the problem of what to do with French prisoners of war, and a prison 1500 feet above sea-level was opened at Dartmoor in 1806. It was meant to accommodate 5000, but in 1812 it was already overcrowded, and held 9000 prisoners, many of them Americans.

The first national penitentiary was Millbank, built between 1815 and 1821. Hence, it was in 1821 that central Government entered the mainstream of English prison administration. From that date there were two English prison services - a national one comprising Millbank and the hulks, and a local one controlled by the Justices and supported by the rates.

Education in prisons seems to date from this period, though before this one or two chaplains may have helped inmates to read the Bible. Later developments would be largely inspired by Benthamism, Humanitarianism and Evangelical Christianity.

Prison-visiting also became fashionable among ladies of the day, but though such people as Elizabeth Fry aroused social comment, they had little real impact. In one religious service organized in prison, for instance, that 23 visitors took part in, only 28 prisoners participated.

The first real reform was the Gaol Act of 1823 passed when Peel was Home Secretary. Justices were to report to the Home Secretary every three months. There were to be systematic inspections. Gaolers were to receive salaries instead of depending for their livelihood on what they made out of the prisoners. Private trading or trafficking by gaolers was abolished. Accommodation was improved. Female supervision was provided for female prisoners. Gaolers, surgeons and chaplains were obliged to keep work-journals and present these to the Justices at the Quarter Sessions.

Unfortunately no machinery was established to enforce these reforms, and no inspectors were appointed. Moreover it was a law that even in theory applied only to the prisons of London, Westminster and 17 provincial towns; it did not deal with 150 gaols in small towns, nor did it apply to the London debtors' prison.

Accordingly, in 1835 a further Act was passed in the interests of uniformity, and this time five inspectors were appointed to give advice and to make reports. Although central Government was still not empowered to force the local Authorities to act on the advice they were given, the publication of the Inspectors' reports led to some quite effective results.

Then, in 1839, the Secretary of State was given powers with regard to the design of new prisons and the renovation of old ones. Imprisonment was now the main way of dealing with criminals. Transportation to New South Wales ceased in 1840. A new model prison was opened at Pentonville in 1842. A Surveyor General was appointed in 1844 and 54 new prisons with 11,000 separate cells were built in the six years 1842-1848.

The Convict Service was established in 1850 to manage the hulks Warrior and Justitia at Woolwich, the hulks York and Stirling Castle at Portsmouth, and the penitentiary at Millbank, Pentonville Prison, a public-works prison at Portland which had been opened in 1849, Dartmoor which was reopened as a public-works prison in 1850, a juvenile prison at Parkhurst, and two invalid depöts - Shorncliff Barracks and the Defence. The first Chairman of the new Service was Joshua Jebb.

In 1850 a Select Committee on Prison Discipline was also set up to consider the relative merits of the 'silent' and 'separate' systems.

Transportation to Tasmania ceased in 1852.

In England, the local prisons still gave cause for concern, and the Prisons Act of 1865 laid down that each prison must have a gaoler, a chaplain, a surgeon and a matron to attend to women prisoners. It also required prisoners not to be employed as prison staff. Central Government, which since 1850 through the Convict Service had been renting and controlling all the cells for separate confinement in the local prisons of Wakefield, Preston, Leeds, Leicester, Northampton, Bath, Reading and Bedford, now threatened to withdraw all grants from local Authorities that did not comply with the new law. Moreover, the Secretary of State was given powers to close inadequate prisons.

Although official secrecy about prisons largely dates from 1865, it is known that in that year a school-master in Wakefield Prison was earning about £150 a year.

Transportation to Western Australia ceased in 1867 and England's last convict hulk, the one at Gibraltar, was not used after 1875. Instead, about 2000 convicts a year condemned to penal servitude had to be accommodated somewhere in England.

The local administration of prions came to an end with the Prisons Act of 1877 - the first example of nationalisation. Supporters of the Bill said it would ease the burden on the local rates and facilitate the achievement of a uniform system of discipline. The opposition claimed that costs would rise, that patronage would increase, that central Government was incompetent, and that the Authorities of the local administration should be inviolate.

The kernel of the new Act was the transfer of every aspect of prison administration to the Secretary of State. Five Prison Commissioners were appointed as effective organisers and administrators under the Home Secretary to whom they were to report annually. Judges were to be Prison Visitors. It was, therefore, the Judges' duty to decide which prisoners got education in reading and writing and to what extent they received such education. The new Act ended 800 years of local control over prisons, but left discretion regarding matters educational in local hands.

The first Chairman of the Commissioners was Du Cane, a soldier, an engineer, already distinguished as organiser of the Great Exhibition and as the man responsible for the great fortifications at Dover and Plymouth. Du Cane is the greatest figure in the history of the English prison system.

His aim, like that of the men who framed the 1877 Act, was economy and uniformity. Although also using silence, he preperred separation to it as the method with which to protect prisons from contamination by obstructing the formation of a prisoners' sub-culture, and also as a method of control. It is a method that works.

The 120 prisons were consolidated into 60.

Whereas in the past warders had sold goods to prisoners or made money by hiring out male prisoners as workers and female ones as prostitutes, by 1877 all prison staff were receiving a salary.

In the past there had been times when prisoners had even acted as warders. Without going to that extreme, they commonly like to work alongside staff, if this is allowed, and find such an arrangement more pleasant. This approach is seen as therapeutic by some authorities. It also saves money and can be a way of coping with staff shortage. In practice, it is something that cannot be eliminated entirely.

Since 1877 prison staff are supposed to be appointed and promoted on merit, and not for political reasons. The new set-up permitted more job mobility and provided, in theory at least, a better career structure. Du Cane gave Prison Governors power and expected them to exercise it. His was a paramilitary and efficient regime. In each prison the chief officer served as a bridge between the Governor and his staff. Du Cane got rid of any unsuitable staff. He put a stop, too, to the practice of using prisoners as clerks, and this change led to the development of a new clerical department.

Each prison also had a school-master (there were 50 of these throughout the country in 1877), often one of the warders, functioning on the same footing as any regular elementary-school teacher of the day.

One of the drawbacks of the new system was that Visitors and Commissioners (other than Du Cane himself) had no real authority or practical power. Prison officers also had many grievances, but were forbidden to be in a union, and felt worse off under the new system than the prisoners themselves.

As a result of the Ramsey Report of 1891 some attempt was made to reduce the number of hours officers had to work, to improve their job prospects, and to provide them with superannuation.

The Gladstone Committee (1892-95) examined in detail such matters as accommodation, treatment of young prisoners (special prisons for the under-16's date from 1854), prison labour, visits and communications with prisoners, prison offences, staff behaviour and training, the number of ex-servicement employed, and appointments to posts of responsibility.

In considering any organisation it is possible to distinguish: (1) the manifest situation as formally displayed and described; (2) the assumed situation relatively to any individual concerned; (3) the extant situation as revealed by systematic exploration and analysis, and even then only gradually and incompletely; (4) the requisite situation as it would need to be to suit the real properties of the field in which it exists.

The Prison set-up as manifested in official reports seldom resembles the real extant situation, and both are commonly quite different from either the desirable requisite situation at that point in history or the situation erroneously assumed to exist by all the individuals concerned, whose varied and vastly different assumptions may share little more than their common failure to match the facts.

Prior to 1895 the primary task of the prison system manifested itself as deterrence, but the effectively extant primary task was really control and security - though control is not, of course, incompatible with deterrence. Education was restricted to literacy tuition for the under-40's and for those serving sentences of at least 3 months. Moreover, education was not provided during the first month of imprisonment.

Organised confusion was introduced to the prison service by the report of the Gladstone Committee which declared: "We start from the principle that prison treatment should have as its primary and concurrent objects deterrence, and reformation." This confusion has bedevilled the prison service ever since.

The Gladstone Committee believed the risk of contamination had also been exaggerated; it approved of association and played down the need for either silence or separation. As regards the method of reformation, it promoted what became known as the 'gold-dust' theory of the Governor's influence: therapy by contact!

Consequently, Governors came to be appointed for their character, rather than for their administrative capacity. Such Governors, being now agents of 'reformation', were also alienated from the officers, since the latter were responsible for 'control'.

Moreover, at Home Office headquarters new departments were evolving controlled by civil servants and independent of the Commissioners and Inspectors. It was these new departments that controlled patronage and were responsible for the Annual Reports. They also appointed various local officials in each Prison who effectively eroded what was left of the Governors' authority. This made it increasingly difficult for prison officers to have any sense of identity within the service.

When Du Cane retired in 1895 he was succeeded by Ruggles-Brise, a professional civil servant with a flair for political expediency. He was a close friend of Gladstone. Like Du Cane he ranked the purposes of imprisonment as (1) retribution, (2) deterrence, (3) reformation. Also like Du Cane he took it as obvious that control or security was an even more important priority, so much so that it hardly needed mention.

Ruggles-Brise resisted the Prison Officers' attempt to form an Association. He also established the Borstal System. Concerts for prisoners were introduced, and libraries were improved. There were also occasional lectures by visiting speakers. The Prison Act of 1898 allowed local prison inmates to earn remission of sentence. Probation was introduced in 1907. Juvenile Courts were set up in 1908. The Mental Deficiency and Lunacy Act 1913 allowed the Courts to certify certain offenders instead of committing them to prison. As a result of the Criminal Justice Administration Act of 1914, time was allowed for fines to be paid as an alternative to imprisonment.

Meanwhile, as a result of the Gladstone Committee's findings, talking was allowed in prisons, separate confinement was reconsidered and association was fostered. The Commissioners resisted these changes, but with little success.

Accordingly, a new method of control was called for. Coercion was no longer feasible, so a reward system of privileges was introduced. These included conversation and remission.

Naturally enough, there was an increase in prison unrest, in violence, and in the number of escapes.

The end of the Boer War in 1902 had been followed by an incease in unemployment in country areas. As a result, applicants for relief in city areas had been sent to farm colonies outside London. Tramps became a major problem and drunkenness was common. All this conspired to produce an increase in prison receptions, which numbered 184,901 in 1908-9.

The Prevention of Crime Act 1908 (which was not abolished until 1967) introduced Preventive Detention as an extra, if milder, possible punishment for recidivists. New categories of prisoners round about this time were suffragettes, conscientious objectors, and Irish. The prison situation was becoming increasingly complex, and the Great War of 1914-18 exacerbated problems of staff shortage.

The red-band system had been in general use since 1910.

In 1915 an underground Prison Officers' Federation was formed.

Ruggles-Brise retired in 1921 and the Chairmen who succeeded him were not great men. The important figures were rather reforming Commissioners, in particular Alexander Paterson, who was more of a missionary than an administrator. Borstals had been set up by the Borstal Act of 1908, but it was Paterson who introduced to the Borstals the public-school house-system. Borstals were meant to be Juvenile Adult Reformatories, but they have never even to this day really sorted out what exactly is meant by reformation and training. Prisons still have similar problems to sort out, some of them being hinted at by the expression: going to prison as, not for punishment.

As in Evening Institutes, education in Prisons was believed to improve the quality of life. Such success as Paterson had, presupposed faith in the value of paternalism, personal charisma, and the cult of the hero. It is possible that in the 1930's inmates were suitably impressed by this display of middle-class concern for their welfare. By 1937 400 voluntary teachers were working in prisons, and Archbishop Temple urged that the control of prison education should be in lay hands.

This expansion had been made possible by the 1930 Prison Rules which had abolished separate confinement. Reform was in the air, and even the Dartmoor mutiny of 1932 did not stem the tide of change. According to official statements, humane treatment of prisoners at Dartmoor had had nothing to do with the subsequent mutiny. In fact, of course, prisoners never really accept the authority of the Authorities. Moreover, the fewer restrictions on personal freedom become, the less tolerable the individual finds such restrictions as remain.

The first open penal establishment in England was a Borstal, Lowdham Grange in Nottinghamshire, which dates from 1930. Hollesley Bay was opened in 1938. Things were changing. In 1895 escapes and attempted escapes were only 0.6 per thousand per year; in 1938 the figure was 21.2. The general public tend to admire successful escapees, which doesn't help prison officers' feelings.

Prison officers, incidentally, have sometimes exaggerated the danger attached to their job. In a typical year in the 1920's, for instance, 2.13% of railway workers suffered fatal or serious accidents; for workers in mines and quarries the figure was 7.41%, and for the Metropolitan Police it was 10.87%. However, the corresponding figure for prison staff was 1.97%, not much different from the figure for the generality of workers in factories and workshops - 1.66%.

At long last, in 1939 the Prison Officers were officially allowed to be members of a Union - the POA. The Whitley Council, established in 1919, first met in this new form in 1941.

The average daily prison population, which had dropped in the first World War, rose during the second; in 1945 it was 12,910.

Paterson died in 1947. Seventeen new prisons were opened between 1945 and 1952. The system of 'threeing-up' was also introduced, and by 1948 it applied to an average of 2000 prisoners.

The 1948 Criminal Justice Act brought new problems in the shape of remand centres and detention centres. The borstals, too, were overcrowded because of restrictions having been placed on the imprisonment of the under-21's.

By 1958 an average of 6000 prisoners were threeing-up.

Not on rational grounds, but to cope with overcrowding, Borstal training was cut from 3 to 2 years by the 1961 Criminal Justice Act.

In the early 1960's the primary extant task of imprisonment was custody, which prisoners interpeted as a means of deterrence that didn't work, while specialist social agencies took it to be instrumental towards some unspecified sort of reform. The warrants issued by the law-courts referred only to security, and never mentioned reform (this is still true). On the other hand, the 1949 Prison Rules placed correction before custody and coercion, though these latter retained their place: "The purposes of training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to establish in them the will to lead a good and useful life on discharge, and to fit them to do so."

Among the prison population, spies and professional criminals were at this time on the increase. Grendon Underwood was trying to be a therapeutic community. In 1961 there were 228 assaults on prison officers. The Prison Commission was dissolved in 1963. Meanwhile, the specialist departments were proliferating. Education in prisons was placed under the LEA's in 1946, and since that time it has been an integral rather than a parasitic feature of the Prison Service. The first prison social worker was also appointed in 1946.

In 1964 escapes and attempted escapes were 72.0 per thousand, though an attempt was made to mask this increase by making a distinction between escaping and absconding. In August 1964 a group broke into Birmingham prison to release Charles Wilson, a mail-train robber then serving a 30-year sentence.

The average daily prison population in 1965 was 29,580. In July that year a gang got Ronald Biggs out of Wandsworth Prison.

In June 1966 five prisoners escaped from Wormwood Scrubs, to be followed in October by George Blake. A little later, Frank Mitchell, serving a life sentence for robbery with violence, escaped from Dartmoor.

In 1967 corporal punishment in prisons, already reported to be a rarity, was officially abolished. Ever since 1937, it should perhaps be mentioned as important, privileges had ceased to be things to be earned - instead they were given automatically unless forfeited.

The Mountbatten Report of 1967 recommended the building of a new maximum security prison, the classification and allocation of prisoners according to their security risk, the establishment of an Inspector General, a new grade of Senior Officer intermediate between Officer and Principal Officer, television scanning, guard dogs, Security Officers, and night patrols. In effect, he recommended a return to the pre-1877 system. like the obsolete post of Superintendant, that of Security Officer tends to erode the authority of the Chief.

The post-Mountbatten conversion of Hull cost £1,000,000. At Wakefield it cost about £200,000. Prisoners' activities were curtailed. Classes were reduced. Outside working parties were restricted.

Mountbatten's big mistake was to fail to take the Senior Civil Service into account. The top administrative and executive at Head Office continue to neutralise the efforts of those with field experience. Moreover, although maximum security escapes have dropped, others still rise. If association is allowed, one must have either condoned escapes or a mutiny. Serious disturbances in prisons are likely to increase in the next few years. [These lecture-notes were first compiled in 1979; many circumstances may nowadays be somewhat different.] What, if anything, do we choose to do about it?

Education in U.K. Prisons (2)

SOME QUESTIONS AND PROBLEMS BEARING ON THE ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION WITHIN INNER LONDON PENAL ESTABLISHMENTS

(An information and discussion paper prepared by Doctor Colin James Hamer early in 1978, when he was employed by the ILEA as a full-time sessional teacher at Wormwood Scrubs Prison, was the Chairman of Wormwood Scrubs Education Department's Training and Education Board, and when he also served as the convenor-coordinator of meetings of remedial teachers in Inner London penal establishments generally.)

A 'question' in the sense relevant here exists when there are compelling reasons for both affirming and denying one and the same propoposition. The term "problem" is also used to indicate that the questions referred to are neither insoluble mysteries nor mere puzzles on which to exercise one's academic ingenuity.

By education is meant initiation into human community; its purpose should be the advance of the human Good. The education process is the strategy from rudimentary apprehension and modes of choice towards apprehension and commitment at the level of our present age in this contemporary context.

Essentially the education programme is: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, develop, and, if necessary, change. Its organization should not depend on a traditional authority maintaining the historical procedures of existing institutions, nor on the stereotyped maintenance of the familiar machinery, nor on the spontaneous intuitions of gifted personalities, nor even less on the blind following of the developing interaction patterns of evolving, intra-group, relational networks; instead, it ought to be consciously organic, a living system continually adapting itself to the environment that supports it, acting for maximum relevance in its complex and changing circumstances, knowing what it is about, capable of rapid adjustments and adaptation, displaying expert initative in the correction of its goals, able to preserve its living unity despite experienced threats to its own non-survival.

Because we share one world, the organization of education within Inner London Penal Establishments can never be utterly divorced from the individual problems of the persons who serve it or who it exists to serve. Indeed, they cannot be divorced from the present problems of Britain as a whole, nor from the problems of the whole world.

It is a sobering thought, then, that there are reckoned to be 7444 world problems. 3300 international agencies and associations are working on some of them. Thinkers and researchers are studying 1845 different subjects in an effort to solve some of them. 931 multilateral treaties and agreements have been made to overcome some of the difficulties they create. 704 different human values are involved in any attempt to reach a thorough agreement about methods of solving them, and about these values themeselves there is a very great deal of disagreement. 1197 international periodicals are published to try and iron out some of the difficulties. 228 human development concepts have been worked out and put forward as a contribution to some sort of progress. Another 421 interdisciplinary concepts have been invented to connect together the ideas and ways of thinking of specialists in different fields. The problems to be tackled include 775 human diseases.

606 multinational corporations exist that have lots of problems of their own and also create problems for the rest of the world. The annual turnover of General Motors is greater than the Gross National Product of Belgium. Standard Oil's GNP is greater than Denmark's; Ford's is greater than that of Norway and New Zealand put together; Chrysler's is the same as that of Greece; and eight British companies account for more than a quarter of the British GNP.

When we talk about the problems of the world economy today, we are talking about 132 industrial sectors, 241 traded commodities and 739 different sorts of jobs. It is within this very real context that the questions and problems specific to the organization of Education within Inner London Penal Establishments arise.

Now, when from any chosen point of view we compare two events, two things, two persons or two points of view, our brain, at its best, can only comfortably decide the two are not significantly different, or else that one is slightly, considerably, very much or extremely different in some way from the other. The human brain is a glucose-powered, 25-watt computer with ten thousand million logical elements and an output of 3.2 bits that is just not good enough to cope with the problems of complexity throughout the contemporary world situation. We need, therefore, the help of a better computer.

In each sector and at every level of the production process we call education actual performance tends to fall below productive capability, and even when it does not, learning or teaching capability usually lies well below optimum educational potential - in output, in avoidance of waste, in the wise use of human resources.

Within Inner London Penal Establishments the picture changes from day to day, but we cannot, by ourselves, tell at once if the changes that occur are (a) random variations, (b) explicable but passing phases, (c) expressions of a steady upward growth or downward decline, or (d) sudden yet permanently significant leaps forward or unfortunate downfalls.

According to Stafford Beer and in the light of his concrete experience as a working cybernetician (cf his Decision and Control - The meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics, John Wiley & Sons, 1966; Cybernetics and Management, 2nd edition, English Universities Press, 1967; Platform for Change, John Wiley & Sons, 1975. Because of my then responsibilities as a tutor in a London prison this reference to Stafford Beer's important work was, like everything else within this paper, related to that specific and relatively narrow context, but, of course, until the CIA undermined President Allende's and the University of Sussex's cooperative application of his ideas for the benefit of all, and especially the poorest inhabitants of Chile, their practicality and timeliness was transparently evident to all who had eyes to see. I am indebted to John Wren Lewis for first drawing these facts to my attention.), help can be provided by a real-time control-system founded on: a cybernetic model of any viable system; a cybernetic analysis of the real-life systems appropriate to each level of recursion, and their iconic representation; a design of a large number of interlocking homoeostats; the provision of a prison-service and education authority communications network capable of operating on the basis of continuous input; variety engineering throughout the system to incorporate filtration on the human brain's scale and safeguard security; and the Cyberstride computer-program suite capable of monitoring inputs, indexical calculations, taxonomic regulation, short-term forecasting by Bayesian probability theory, autonomic exception reporting, and algedonic feedback - this whole NOW system to be linked up with a compatible FUTURES system.

He offers a strong argument for concluding that such a system would enable us effectively to resolve the oustanding problems not of education only, nor of London only, nor of the prison service only, but, if we so wish, of the nation as a whole, indeed, of the entire international community.

He denies that only the United States has the money and knowledge needed. He denies that the introduction of such a system would erode freedom. He denies that it would take too long to be feasible. He denies it is science-fiction. He denies it would open the door more to corruption than the present system. He denies that it would cause management to over-react to change even more than it does at present. He denies that it would result in our having too much data to handle.

Without being a cybernetician, I found his arguments sufficiently convincing to feel it worthwhile referring to his position - and also to his ideal of a total education system to be promulgated independently of all surrogate systems of education, a total system envisaged as coming in two parts, each with five units.

Part the First contains a basic knowledge of the systemic universe, Its first unit deals with the concept of system. The next three units expound respectively a contemporary understanding of the physical, biological and social aspects of the world. These divisions make necessary the fifth unit, which integrates the first four. [Editor's note, added in August 2001. Peter Plichta's work is crucially important both here and also in Part the Second, to which, indeed, all pages within this websites are, I believe, also highly relevant.]

Part the Second would begin with a restatement ab ovo of mathematics adequate to deal with these concepts. It would be close to Spencer Brown's Laws of Form. The second unit would encompass the systems approach to management, at every level (by a logical recursion) from the community to the world entire. Thirdly, one would tackle aesthetic, design, and the quality of life. This unit would invent new systems for living - including a new kind of house and a new kind of city. The fourth unit would consider man's heritage, history and the classics, not with a nostalgic scholarship that clearly has a surrogate existence within the ages under discussion, but with a forward orientation that projects us onward. The fifth and final unit would put together a new philosophy, comprehensible only to students of this total work.

If senior management within the spheres of culture, politics and economics choose to devote their energies to preparing the ground for a revolutionary but peaceful innovation of the sort envisaged, they will find it necessary to devolve totally to selected subordinates the necessary task of meanwhile maintaining the present structures in operation.

Both the innovating senior management and the subordinate maintaining-the-fort management may be helped by the contributions of thinkers and researchers and, in this connection, I would draw special attention to chapter six "The Question of Evidence" in my book, Voice In The Darkness (to be published on 26 May 1978), in which I endeavour to show, in detail and with reasoned argument, what it ever means for anything to be evidence for anything - a question in fundamental metholodology to which I have devoted considerable attention these twenty years past, and which I happen to believe to be of crucial importance, and yet often sadly neglected.

Pending the organizational changes envisaged above, can anything be usefully said here about the interim arrangements of education with Inner London Penal Establishments? Yes.

• (1) Economic freedom is controlling your own craft - political freedom is caring for your own region - cultural freedom is the state of mind to do these wisely.
• (2) Economics should be subordinated to politics and politics to culture, not vice versa; to be is more important than to have or to do.
• (3) Remedial education should be defined as comprising an adquate grasp of English and basic mathematics together with a sufficient range of essential social skills and, as so defined, it should be given priority in all establishments.
• (4) Teaching should be on a professional and not an amateur basis.
• (5) Vocational training should be given substantial priority in the allocation of resources beyond the remedial stage, and recreational education should be related to an informed costs-benefits analysis. Such an analysis, defining costs and benefits in the widest and not in a narrow financial sense, should, in the present writer's view, be the basis for deciding that education in penal establishments in London should (a) continue to be managed by neighbouring AEI's; (b) be amalgamated into a single autonomous tertiary college; (c) be administered direct from the Home Office as part of an integrated prison department national college; or (d) be made the subject of some other arrangement.
• (6) Convicted persons opting for full-time day classes should at least 3 times a year assemble together for a joint discussion with teaching staff of their needs and aspirations. Inter-departmental discussions and teach-ins should be as broadly based as possible in the interests of increased mutual understanding and support. In each establishment a detailed prospectus should be available for reference and consultation by education staff and others with a legitimate reason for having access to it.

The Prison Service was the first service in Britain to be nationalised, and its Educational endeavours have pioneered and contributed greatly to the cause of remedial education. It would be sad if international crime were to use cybernetics to acquire world-control, or even move more closely to that goal, because established government had failed to recognise the signs of the times.

Education in U.K. Prisons (3)

TEACHING MODERN HUMANITIES IN A REMAND PRISON (BRIXTON)

(46a Bellefields Road, Stockwell, 17 February 1976)

The existence of an Education Department within the prison expresses in a concrete and tangible way a general agreement that education is an important and valuable way of improving the prisoner's quality of life.

This does not, of course, in any sense imply that the Education Department is the only or even the chief educational influence on any particular prisoner. All Departments within a prison have specific röles and functions to fulfil, and in discharging their several responsibilities collaborate with one another without any confusion of boundaries being occasioned by this cooperative effort in the best interests of the prisoner. If the work of each Department has, as is certainly the case, its own educational dimension and value, it is even more true that the inter-Departmental example of mutual sympathy and friendly team-work is an outstanding lesson in social education.

The educational interests of the prisoners and, indeed, of all working within the prison are, however, the specific concern of the Education Department. It is therefore appropriate that from time to time a Tutor within the Department should pause and consider possible ways and means of improving the effective education of his students within the context of the available resources and structures.

THE REMAND PRISON AS A PARTICULAR EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE

In a Remand Prison there is relatively little scope for the provision of O-level or A-level courses, Degree work, preparation for City and Guilds examinations, etc. The reason for this is clear. The population is migratory. Many are in the prison for a very short period indeed; of the others it is, for the most part, uncertain how long they will remain in the prison and in what circumstances they will leave it - to transfer to another prison after trial and conviction, or to leave prison altogether as free men.

At Brixton Prison the experience of those working within the Education Department has suggested that the main focus should be on the individual immediate needs of each particular prisoner.

What does this mean in practical terms? An answer to this question is quite simple, but takes a variety of forms:

No prisoner is obliged to make use of and benefit from the existence of the work of the Education Department, but it is probably true that most, if not all, of the men take up and read from time to time one or other of the many educational books which, together with other books directly acquired by the Library Officer, are made available to them via the prison library system.

A fair proportion of prisoners, on the other hand, are either totally or almost illiterate, and the Education Department provides both class and individual tuition to remedy this situation. Similar assistance is available for those who have difficulties with simple addition and subtraction.

There is also an increasing number of foreign nationals within the prison population, and the Department has been able to provide immediate assistance to prisoners needing to learn English as a Foreign Language.

Apart from such pressing basic needs, there is an even more ugent human challenge facing a majority of the men, and the Education Officer and his Tutors do all that they can to facilitate a creative response. In a Remand Prison a man who has not yet stood trial is often worried and uneasy about this personal ordeal; a man who has been tried but not yet convicted is anxious about the outcome; a convicted man is wondering what other prison he will be moved to and in what circumstances. In other words, in a Remand Prison the level of anxiety is high, and a creative use of otherwise unoccupied time is particularly desirable. In addition to their distinctive intrinsic merits, this is the value of Art classes, Foreign Language classes, General Education classes, Social Affairs classes, Craft courses, etc. within a Remand Prison.

THE RÔLES OF A PERIPATETIC TUTOR IN BRIXTON PRISON

There are limits to the amount of relevant information a prisoner can absorb in the course of his official reception into the life of the prison. Hence, although all the prisoners are aware in a general way of the existence of the Education Department, it can be an extremely useful procedure to have one Tutor go the rounds of the prison, as it were, in order to recruit students for the available classes of interest to them. Such, in fact, was the first duty assigned to the first part-time Tutor in Brixton Prison appointed to teach outside the Classroom situation.

Almost immediately, however, this peripatetic Tutor was able to combine direct individual teaching with his recruiting duties. For reasons of security, for instance, certain prisoners were unable to attend classes of interest to them because of the location of the classroom within the prison. The peripatetic Tutor was often able to draw upon his own knowledge in order to provide the individual prisoner within his cell relevant tuition, books and exercises.

In other instances, a number of men might manifest interest in some branch of education for which no specific class had been arranged in the prison - where the resources of classrooms, time, personnel, etc., are, of course, limited. The peripatetic Tutor sometimes found it possible to give ad hoc tuition in the relevant subject. Where to do this was beyond his capacity, he was often able at least to refer the prisoners to relevant books and courses, and sometimes correspondence courses proved a suitable way of meeting the need. Tape-recorded cassettes were also extremely valuable aids in specific instances.

It is pleasant to record that these varied educational endeavours of the Tutor concerned have enabled an increasing number of prisoners to participate more widely and profitably in the educational side of prison life.

SCOPE FOR EXPANSION

Reference has already been made to the problem of coping with anxiety. It is a valuable feature of the developing Tutor-Student relationship that it provides a context of a least relative trust in which a prisoner may feel free to externalise some of his anxieties and may be helped both indirectly and directly to work towards his own personal solution to his own personal problems. The Chaplain, the Doctor, the Psychologist, the Welfare Officer, the Social Worker, and so many others may, of course, find themselves in a similarly valuable relationship with a prisoner; when a Tutor is in this situation, his qualities as an Educator have a Golden Opportunity.

It would appear useful to arrange the Education programme in such a manner that this Tutor-Student relationship can be directly helpful to prisoners as possible, as a result of its being placed within the secure context of an appropriate short course of study.

TEACHING MODERN HUMANITIES IN A REMAND PRISON

Priests, mystics, poets, philosophers, playwrights, composers, jurists, psychologists, storytellers and men and women generally have for millennia occupied themselves with the questions of the meaning and value of human life. However, within the English Educational System it was until not too long ago primarily to the study of the Classics that students were directed in order to encourage and inspire them to hammer out for themselves some sort of valid personal answers to these perennial questions.

Late, as the so called monolithic structures of classical culture finally collapsed under the strains of two World Wars, it was increasingly realised that in an Open and Democratic Society the Public System of Education should encourage pupils to commit themselves unambiguously to a system of meanings and values that was open-ended enough to allow for the development of such obviously necessary social virtues as mutual tolerance and dialogue. In passing, it has to be noted that the Northern Ireland situation is a severe reminder of the difficulties that stand in the way of securing a healthy form of social pluralism.

There is no need in this paper to discuss the details of curricula in Modern Humanities adopted in various schools to respond to this clear social need. It will be simpler to turn at once to consider the situation at Brixton, where many prisoners are anxious and confused, many are foreigners struggling with an alien culture, many are in conflict with real or imagined values and meanings of their relatives, cell-mates or associates in life generally. Instead of trying to analyse these various crises in the abstract, why not provide one or two simple courses to make it easier for the individual prisoner to work through his own crisis for himself?

SYLLABUS A - HOW TO CHOOSE A CAREER

A course of this sort could help many who have drifted through life and into crime to make a new start. It would be practical and brief as a class, but could be supported where necessary by individual educational counselling. Its main features would be:

• (1) Deciding that being in charge of your own future is your own responsibility.
• (2) How to obtain objective personal assessment.
• (3) Discovering the full range of your opportunities.
• (4) The setting of realistic goals.
• (5) How to develop your 'marketing plan'.
• (6) Understanding yourself effectively and conveying that understanding to others.
• (7) How you can establish the broadest possible contacts.
• (8) Presenting yourself effectively.
• (9) How to carry out confident, appropriate and successful negotiations on your own behalf.
• (10) How to evaluate offers of career openings.
• (11) Deciding on your actual career.
• (12) Enjoying a new life.

SYLLABUS B - UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF AND YOUR WORLD

This course could interest men already enjoying job security and whether or not they were themselves suffering any immediate crisis. It would cover:

• (1) The possibilities you have of behaving, thinking and feeling differently than you actually do, and the bearing of freedom on your present condition.
• (2) The neutral existence of psychological energy, your use of it subject to motivation and choice; the difference between your inner world and the maps you can make of it.
• (3) What you want? What you need? What you are? - What does all this do for you? How does it limit you? What would your life be like without it? Are you willing to let go of it?
• (4) One possible map of your Inner Space: the Lower Unconscious, the Middle Unconscious, the Superconsciousness, the Field of Consciousness, the 'I', the Higher Self, the Collective Unconscious.
• (5) Human living as a process of psychic evolution.
• (6) The complexities of human development - sub-personalities.
• (7) Body - mind - feeling; the importance of symbols.
• (8) The existential crisis of pragmatic achievement and the transcendent crisis of meaning and value.
• (9) Will in relationship to body-mind-feeling. Identification and disidentification.
• (10) Meditation (concentration, reflective meditation, receptive meditation, contemplation).
• (11) Purpose - deliberation - choice - affirmation - planning - direction of execution.
• (12) Self-awareness.

RATIONALE BEHIND THE PRESENT PROPOSALS

Syllabus A and Syllabus B both take into account that in Brixton Prison a Tutor is called upon to cater for the educational needs of men at risk in society - whether or not they believe in G-d, Christ, Buddha, the Koran, the English way of life, etc. The prisoners are assembled, as it were, from every nation under heaven and from every walk of life, and most of them, whether they express it or not, are in a situation of educational need. The problem is how to meet this need with available resources within the provisions of the present Educational System. It is suggested that one or more classes based on Syllabus A and Syllabus B would be helpful.

THE INDIVIDUAL FOLLOW-UP

On most landings within the Prison it will always be possible for a peripatetic Tutor with the agreement of the Landing Officer to speak privately with a prisoner in a cell that otherwise is not immediately in use (because, for instance, certain prisoners are away at court for the day). It might also be feasible for such a Tutor to have a small office within the Educational block for conducting more important interviews (if Escort facilities were available when necessary). An office would in any case enable him to keep together his various teaching-aids, questionnaires, work-sheets, reference books and records, etc.

Individual Tutor-Student meetings, wherever they occur, will help the prisoner (A) work towards an effective and satisfactory Career decision to give meaning and value to his life, and (B) explore within the limits of normalcy those aspects of his present personal crisis clarified by the course in self-understanding.

TEAM-WORK

In keeping with the tradtions of referral and mutual support already flourishing among the various workers in Brixton Prison, the Tutor will wherever appropriate help a prisoner contact the Chaplain, Doctor, Welfare Officer, Psychologist or other qualified person. In other words, his work will be that of an educator in an educational community of co-specialists, and his function, though varied, will remain specific and unambiguous...

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