By Vivienne Russell
16 July 2010
Spending on prisons and probation increased by 36% in real terms over five years despite a major service reorganisation that was intended to save money, researchers said today.
The National Offender Management Service was established in 2004 to merge prison and probation service functions into a single executive agency providing end-to-end management for offenders. It was expected that efficiency would be increased and costs reduced.
But areport from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has found that spending rose in real terms from £3.6bn in 2004/05 to £4.9bn in 2008/09.
Despite this significant increase in expenditure, frontline resources became increasingly overstretched, the researchers said. Public prisons experienced successive annual real-terms cuts in expenditure per prisoner, while overcrowding increased.
In the probation service, staff numbers have declined since 2006 despite a rise in the number of people needing probation supervision.
The report also found significant gaps in the information needed to establish a full picture of prison and probation costs and spending trends. The researchers said this made an informed debate on penal expenditure very difficult.
Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said the report documented the Labour government’s ‘audacious agenda’ to extend the size and scope of prisons and probation.
‘[Labour’s] legacy is record expenditure, an overstretched workforce and an overburdened system. The current financial crisis offers a rare opportunity to rethink some basic assumptions about the size and scale of the prison and probation services and the demands we place on the staff working in them,’ said Garside.
Last month, JusticeSecretary Ken Clarke announced a review of sentencing policy and an increased focus on rehabilitation, condemning current arrangements as ‘costly and ineffectual’.
‘We spend vast amounts of public money on prison – but no proper thought has been given to whether this is really the best way of protecting the public,’ Clarke said.
Commenting on today’s report, a Ministry of Justice spokesman said: ‘As the justice secretary has said, spending more public money, locking up more prisoners for longer is an unsustainable strategy which does nothing to enhance public safety in the long term.
‘We need an enlightened and an effective penal system that the public can both trust and afford to pay for. The government's programme, which includes a review of sentencing, the rehabilitation revolution, along with prison and probation reforms, aims to deliver that goal.’
