By David Williams
20 January 2010
There is a swelling chorus of voices calling for urgent reform of the UK’s criminal justice system. Since 2008, a series of studies from across the public policy spectrum have come to the same basic conclusion: that piling more and more people into prisons is expensive and ineffective in reducing repeat offending.
Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment was published on January 14 by the Commons’ justice select committee, the fruit of a two-year inquiry. It is the latest study to recommend diverting money away from imprisonment and towards alternative community sentences and education and rehabilitation programmes.
The extensive report warns of a ‘crisis of sustainability’ in the prison system, and expresses ‘grave concerns’ about the effect that salami-slicing budget cuts could have on already overstretched services. It points out that the average prisoner costs the taxpayer £41,000 a year, and that international trials to reduce repeat offending by other means have paid for themselves within five years.
The report cites figures showing the proportion of the population in jail is around a third higher for England and Wales than for France or Germany. It recommends a reduction in the number of prisoners, starting with those whose criminality is tied to addictions and mental health problems.
Last year, the government-commissioned Bradley Review concluded that too many people with mental health problems were churning through the prison system, to neither their own benefit nor that of society as a whole. And Lord Bradley’s findings – accepted by ministers – in turn echoed a study by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health. There were also publications last year urging criminal justice reform from the liberal Centre Forum and the Right-wing Policy Exchange think-tanks.
The situation could almost be described as a consensus, were it not for the Ministry of Justice’s commitment to building five new 1,500-place prisons, as part of a £4.2bn programme to increase total capacity to 96,000 by 2014.
With the MoJ having to find savings of £1.3bn over the next three years, no ‘costly mistake’ – as the committee described the prison-building programme – can be allowed. So is it time for an about turn?
That 2010 will be an election year might give reformers reason to be cautious. The justice committee report identifies a ‘toxic cocktail’ of factors, such as media sensationalism, that distorts prison policy into a contest over perceived ‘toughness’. The tendency for serious debate to degenerate into posturing is likely to be amplified in an election year.
Rick Muir, the Institute for Public Policy Research’s senior researcher on criminal justice, sees a number of possible barriers to reform. The biggest is that, while voters are interested in crime rates and repeat offending, there is little to suggest that they care that more and more people are being jailed in increasingly overcrowded prisons.
Another is that there is little faith in community sentences from either the public or, crucially, magistrates. Muir points out that many magistrates and judges will feel under as much pressure as politicians to appear ‘tough’ on criminals.
‘Alternatives to custody are not seen as robust enough,’ he says, ‘so victims won’t be satisfied.’ He argues that serious investment in alternatives to prison will be needed before those giving out sentences will be confident enough to divert offenders away from prison.
But the former Conservative chief secretary to the Treasury, Jonathan Aitken, who led an inquiry into the issue for the influential Centre for Social Justice – and spent seven months in 1999/2000 as a guest of Her Majesty following a conviction for perjury – remains optimistic.
He tells Public Finance: ‘I think the tectonic plates of the old law and order political attitudes are shifting. I was talking on this very subject to Slough Conservative Association… not a hotbed of radical liberal thinking, but they seemed to be enthusiastic about the idea we should shift the emphasis. Rehabilitation doesn’t ring a party political bell, but what does is reducing the reoffending rate.’
Aitken condemns Labour’s prison plans as ‘stuck in a timewarp’ – perhaps one evoking the Tory government of the 1990s, which he served in, whose approach was typified by the then home secretary Michael Howard’s doctrine that ‘prison works’.
But Aitken says that Tory thinking on prisons is itself being rehabilitated by the shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve.
‘There’s a great interest in rehabilitation if it reduces reoffending and if it costs less money – which will interest the Treasury no end as well.’
The overall Tory position on criminal justice appears to be, at best, in transition. Grieve has recently dropped a pledge to extend prisons by another 5,000 places. But the party is still promising to stop offenders being released early and enforce minimum jail terms instead, which is bound to put more pressure on the system.
The Conservatives are also planning to make prison governors responsible for keeping their ex-prisoners out of the criminal justice system, rewarding them financially for each success. Whether that is a visionary bit of decentralisation or little more than passing the buck would depend on whether it worked if enacted. If nothing else, it acknowledges the need to integrate prison and probation services.
Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, is also arguing that real reform cannot only happen within the MoJ. Reducing reoffending rates will require co-ordinated spending from housing, health and local government budgets, she says, warning that a 2002 report recommending just that sank because officials were resistant to collaboration.
But she believes the momentum is with the reformers, underlining the importance of a heavyweight report produced by a respected cross-party group of MPs. Far from being a potential obstacle to reform, the coming election, combined with the recession, could force change, she says.
‘But economic constraints are potentially a really good catalyst for change,’ she says. ‘Everyone knows there are going to be draconian cuts. There’s more appetite now because needs must.’
Or, must not? The MoJ appears impervious to the rising clamour. Justice Secretary Jack Straw told the MPs’ enquiry that over the past 11 years the prison population has risen by a third, while overall crime dropped by the same proportion. ‘It is not a direct linkage, but I am not in any doubt that it is there,’ he said.
Responding to the committee’s findings, an MoJ statement reaffirmed the department’s promise to expand prison provision, while simultaneously boasting of increased investment in successful community punishments. Commitment to imprisonment remains deeply entrenched among voters, ministers and officials. An impressive cross-party report will have bolstered the cause for change, but reform is far from a done deal.
