01 November 2002
The effect of Home Secretary David Blunkett's latest attempt to combat Britain's rapidly growing prison population is 'a drop in the ocean' and should be accompanied by wholesale reform of the probation service, a leading penal expert said this week.
Geoff Dobson, deputy director of the Prison Reform Trust, said Blunkett's decision to modify the home detention curfew (HDC) – which now allows electronically tagged prisoners to be released into the community 90 days before the end of their sentence – would reduce the UK's prison population of 72,551 by only around 600.
'It's only a change of 30 days, so far as the early release is concerned, so there's an element of crisis management about it,' Dobson said. 'The prisoner numbers aren't high enough and it should be seen only as part of a wider initiative.'
He claimed that ministers' real 'hallmark for change' should be reform of the probation service. 'We need more ministerial leadership as far as community sentences are concerned. A lot more could be done to make non-penal sentences work more effectively, thus easing the crisis of sheer numbers inside prisons.'
Dobson said, however, that he was 'greatly encouraged' by a speech by Lord Falconer, the criminal justice minister, on October 28 in which he made it clear that the Home Office was 'coming around to the idea that probation reform was the way forward'.
'It's the first sign that Blunkett and his team are seriously committing themselves to what works, and not just endless policy changes,' Dobson claimed.
Reform of HDC, announced by prisons minister Hilary Benn on October 30, followed more stinging criticism of the prison service by two other experts.
Speaking to an audience of judges on October 29, Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, described growing prison numbers as the 'cancer' eating away at the prison service's ability to do its job correctly. 'If you try to take in more prisoners than a prison can hold, without letting the necessary number out of the back door, prisons will explode,' he said.
Woolf's fears were reflected in a critical report on Ford open prison in West Sussex by the chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers.
Owers' team found that living conditions were 'appalling' because of overcrowding, with some prisoners forced to sleep in cupboards previously used to store cleaning materials.
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