“Prison works.” That was the unambiguous message set out by Michael Howard, then Home Secretary in the Major Government, to the Conservative Party Conference in 1993.
John Major himself is no longer quite so sure of that, it seems. In a speech delivered this week to the Prison Reform Trust, he argued that “we over-use prison and under value alternative sentences”, and that “too many vulnerable people ‒ including the mentally-ill – are jailed”.
In fairness to the former Prime Minister, it is much easier to make this sort of argument out of office than in it. As he notes (with concern), the Government’s policy seems headed in the opposite direction: more ministerial vetoes of Parole Board recommendations, longer minimum tariffs, and so on.
Many of his criticisms have also been echoed by ministers from the current era of Conservative government, such as Michael Gove and Rory Stewart, especially with regards to education, rehabilitation, and the condition of the prison estate.
Yet as prison reform campaigners admit, there is a reason the political headwinds against many of their proposals are so strong. Public opinion remains stubbornly wedded to a tough approach to law and order, and calls for more lenient sentencing sit awkwardly alongside regular media reports of people receiving what already seem like very soft sentences for various offences.
However, because prisons are out of sight and mind, this does not translate into political pressure about the inner workings of the system. As Peter Stanford noted in a piece for us: “Ministers calculate that there are few votes to be won by doing prison better.”
The result is yet another manifestation of what John Oxley dubbed “sh*t-state Toryism”.
Our prison estate is both too old and too small. As Gove noted in the above-linked speech, Victorian jails built to house one prisoner per cell are now playing host to two or three.
The resulting overcrowding produces terrible conditions, which either cause or exacerbate many of the issues reform campaigners rightly highlight.
For prisoners, it undermines efforts to rehabilitate and educate, increases the likelihood of their developing criminal networks whilst inside, and – through boredom, if nothing else – surely stimulates demand for narcotics. All of this has obvious costs to society when they are eventually released.
Meanwhile, the awful conditions place huge strain on prison officers, making recruitment and retention difficult and producing the high level of churn highlighted by Stewart; in a given wing, he pointed out, “80 per cent of the prison officers could be there for less than a year”. That makes it extremely difficult to develop detailed knowledge of, or relationships with, their wards.
On the sentencing side, overcrowding is one of the factors that must push judges away from handing down the sort of custodial sentences politicians, and much of the public, expect.
Yet absent wider investment, ministerial efforts to try and brute-force tougher sentencing, such as the 2020 order that serious offenders must discharge two-thirds of their sentence before qualifying for automatic release, rather than half, only serve to further increase strain on the system.
Meanwhile, as Major notes, plans to expand the prison estate have gone nowhere. A 2015 commitment to invest “£1.3 billion to create 10,000 new prison places by 2020” has, according to the Public Accounts Committee, produced just 206 (with 3,500 on the way in some form).
Like housing, like railways, like reservoirs, prisons suffer from the fact that they need to actually be built somewhere, and aren’t popular. More prisons yes – but not here! Building more prisons, and providing proper education and rehabilitation, is also expensive, and prisoners are not a group likely to top the public’s list of deserving recipients when public funding is scarce.
Indeed some ministers have actually made things worse: announcing that Victorian prisons must close, with no actual plan or timeline to close them, just makes it harder for those institutions to justify investment or inculcate a long-term approach from governors and staff.
Most egregiously, Ken Clarke – presumably because (as Stewart reports) he thought he could cut the prison population to 65,000 – actually as Justice Secretary shut and sold off a perfectly serviceable, recently-modernised prison in Lancaster Castle, happily completing a project he had been taking forward under the Major Government before 1997.
(His reasoning, as set out in his autobiography, was more or less that it was a bit old-fashioned having a prison in a castle, and the local authority wanted to turn it into a tourist attraction. No wonder New Labour dropped the plan.)
Read all that, and it must be tempting to agree with Sir John that we jail too many people and more community sentences are the answer. But that invites the question: when we say that prison does or does not work, what – and who – do we mean?
Community sentences might work for a cash-strapped state. They may also work for some prisoners. But what about the public?
By the public I don’t just mean the broad, general population, and the innumerable potential victims of future crime contained therein. I mean those who have to live in close proximity to people we decide not to lock up.
Contra some of the language around prison reform, one does not need to be a “violent offender” to be a deeply disruptive and anti-social blight on one’s neighbours and local community. One of the benefits of a prison sentence is that in such cases, those people are spared, for a while at least, that experience.
Too narrow a focus on the individual criminal risks ignoring this, wilfully or otherwise, just as advocates of banning exclusions in schools neglect the interests of other pupils, or the mental health profession’s dogmatic preference for care in the community sometimes overlooks how people with serious conditions can immiserate those amongst whom they are placed.
And against Sir John’s attacks on ministerial interference in the workings of the Parole Board, we must weigh the fact that, in a democratic country, public and political opinion about sentencing does matter. So too, despite the instincts of some reform campaigners, does the punitive element.
So what is to be done? Read the speeches of ministers and campaigners and the outline of a solution does seem to emerge: build a new, properly-sized prison estate; invest properly in education and skills training, and reward prisoners who engage with such programmes (what Gove called “earned release”); give governors more autonomy in managing their prisons.
A larger role for community sentencing, or transferring responsibility for mentally-ill prisoners to the Department of Health, might be part of the solution too. What they cannot be is an alternative to a proper prison programme because government thinks it too hard to deliver or too expensive to pay for.
That last is, perhaps, the key stumbling block. New prisons will be expensive, so too proper education and rehabilitation programmes. The Treasury would squeal, as would (at least as regards the latter element) sections of the right-wing press, whose good opinion some ministers seem to over-value.
But with justice, as with so much else, you get what you pay for. Conservatives can believe that prison works – but they must accept that it doesn’t work for free.