This morning’s Times reports that ministers have quietly signed off on yet another round of early release for prisoners after extending an emergency scheme to try and bring overcrowding in jails under control:
“The move comes in response to internal Prison Service forecasts which have estimated that space will run out in male prisons from June without further measures to free up cells. Violent offenders, including domestic abusers, sentenced to less than four years in prison are eligible for the scheme, as are burglars, thieves and fraudsters.”
Inspiring stuff. I wonder how that Labour poll lead on law and order is coming along.
Prisons aren’t a new problem. Ian Acheson wrote about the decay of the high-sec estate for us last month; David Gauke painted a bleak portrait of the current spending settlement in December. A year ago, I examined the abject failure of the Government’s promise to have delivered 10,000 new jail places by 2020 (actual number delivered at that point: 206).
But it is remarkable the way ministers have allowed the situation to reach the point where the Ministry of Justice is simultaneously refusing to release any details about how many prisoners have been released or what they were inside for whilst battling the Prime Minister over the Sentencing Bill, which will ease pressure on places by scrapping short sentences altogether. In a general election year!
(Typically, the only way the Government seems to have been able to rustle up some extra places is where it can do so by not spending money through cancelling renovation work.)
Yet the MoJ has a point. There are two ways to overcome any shortage: increase supply, or reduce demand. If you’re sufficiently spreadsheet-brained that you think one of those solutions is as good as the other, so long as you end the ‘crisis’, then just no longer sending lots of criminals to prison certainly works.
Of course, it also means lots of criminals, who we currently jail, no longer serving time and being left in the communities they disrupt and prey upon. There are probably some downsides to that. But the MoJ won’t pay them.
The other option would be building more prisons. Ministers could have started by reversing Ken Clarke’s criminally bad decision to shut HMP Lancaster, a recently-refurbished small prison with some of the best recidivism rates in the country, because it was housed in Lancaster Castle, which wasn’t very modern, and anyway he’d wanted to do it in the 1990s.
Like everything else, however, there has been no political will to do it. Not just on the part of the Government, either: more than one right-wing backbencher has reportedly talked big on law and order before writing to ministers in a fury when a prison was proposed for their constituency. Nor has there been any programme to try and build new prisons in urban areas that don’t vote Tory; indeed, the failure to build new capacity elsewhere is the only reason some of our inner-city Victorian prisons are still open.
Tory rebels are already pressuring Rishi Sunak to abandon the early release reforms in order to avoid looking soft on crime. But on its own, all that means is hitting the breaking point, where the jails are actually full, that much faster.
It was just the same when the Government extended the point at which prisoners qualify for early release from half the sentence to two-thirds; absent more capacity, it just made a whole bunch of lights on the Prison Service’ dashboard turn red.
As mentioned, it’s an election year. What are the voters supposed to make of this? How long can the party continue even to strike plausible poses about being tough on lore and order if, even now, it pulling out all the stops to deliver new prisons, by hook or by crook?
Elsewhere in the same paper, Michael Gove warns his colleagues against political “comfort eating”, by which he means advocating policies which “make us feel good about ourselves”.
It’s a fair warning, albeit a bit rich coming from a minister who’s housing policy is heavy on political e-numbers itself, shaking down pantomime villains and sternly setting expectations for how other bodies should use their powers whilst making scant mention of Westminster’s own.
But it would surely help restive Tory MPs stick to a healthy diet of political moderation if the Government’s existing policy offer, on this and so many other areas, were at least a little bit appetising. Just because releasing prisoners early makes us feel bad, doesn’t mean it’s sensible..