Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s proposals for penal reform have landed him in hot water with some of the self anointed ‘tough on crime’ brigade. In a speech to the Centre for Crime and Justice recently, Clarke challenged conventional wisdom stretching back over two decades. Eschewing the ‘prison works’ rhetoric of one of his predecessors Michael Howard, the new Justice Secretary called for greater use of community service to reduce both prison numbers and re-offending rates.
Let us be clear, there is a role for prison both to protect society from some of its most violent individuals and also to act as a deterrent.
I subscribe to the view that a prison sentence should be something to fear – there should be no toleration of drugs in jail, no perception that you are met with a stay full of life’s little luxuries and life sentences for murder should mean just that. There also needs to be an equally strong phase of rehabilitation and re-education prior to any release. Recent examples have shown the perilous potential results of premature release.
Over-crowded prisons and high re-offending rates however characterise the British penal system. Whilst we haven’t quite reached the dramatic US level whereby almost 1 in 100 adults are in jail, the prison population in the UK is now one of the highest in Western Europe and the highest it has been in British history. The number of inmates has more than doubled since 1993 from 40,000 to over 85,000. 20,000 inmates share cells designed for one and since 2007 80,000 criminals have been released early to ease over-crowding. That we can’t focus our energies to imprisoning those that actually should be there and instead are releasing violent criminals early due to financial pressures is scandalous. We could learn a lot from the Dutch model which has seen both a deliberate fall in prison numbers (and an emphasis on community sentencing) accompanied by a fall in crime.
Driving the astronomical rise in the prison population in the UK is the proliferation of custodial sentences and especially short sentences. Two thirds of those in prison are there for less than a year and the majority of those are there for less than three months. Many of these inmates leave prison for a life of unemployment, homelessness, and crime.
Many argue that prisons are increasingly no more than ‘criminal training academies’, solidifying rather than breaking the cycle of crime. Re-offending rates in this country are alarming. Over 40% of inmates will re-offend within twelve months of release or 60% of those serving short sentences. This is the so-called ‘revolving door’ syndrome as the same people pass through jail several times. Despite New Labour’s pledge to be ‘tough on the causes of crime’, rehabilitation remains frustrated by a lack of funds and prison over-crowding.
The wider social impact is a serious if under-publicised issue. An estimated 160,000 children have at least one parent in prison and are three times as likely to engage in anti-social or delinquent behaviour than their peers. 65% of boys with convicted fathers go on to offend themselves.
Clarke blames the ‘bang ‘em up’ mentality of the past two decades which if allowed to continue will see the prison population rise to near 100,000 in five years. While he acknowledges that the prevailing wisdom is not completely misguided he does challenge a key underlying assumption, namely that a correlation exists between prison numbers and crime rates. While it is true that from 1993 prison numbers doubled while crime rates halved, from 1951 to 1971 prison numbers also doubled and crime rates trebled. Not unreasonably Clarke argues there are more important factors influencing crime rates.
This clears the way for greater use of community service to deter, rehabilitate, and reduce prison numbers. This approach has senior judicial support. The former Lord Chief Justice Woolf argued in 2007 that custodial sentences should be reserved for ‘violent criminals’. Otherwise sentences should be reduced and tough community punishments applied in far more cases.
Nearly two decades since Michael Howard fired the starting pistol of a rampant rise in the prison population, and with mounting evidence that conventional ‘wisdom’ is no longer working, Ken Clarke’s considered, evidence-based intervention is highly welcome.
Marcus Booth is a former Co-Chairman of the Conservative City Circle Law Panel
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I am not sure what you are trying to say since you use the ‘some say’/'it has been said’ protocol. For instance there is no evidence of violent people being released unless they are at the end of a sentence imposed by a judge.
Much is said about the prsion system by people who have no ideas of the realities. You just rehash the old chestnuts and keep reading The Mail.
Prisons run by co-operation between prisoners and staff. That relationship has to be preserved and nurtured; we have seen what happens when it breaks down. The ‘ living in the lap of luxury’ is a tabloid line created to ensure the government toe their line.
A recent example was The Sun quoting Venables as ‘watching CBeebies’. This is impossible since CBeebies is on Freeview and prisoners don’t have access to it.
Ken Clarke must resist the tabloids’ and Cameron’s instant tabloid knee jerks (as in ‘Prisoners’ Parties’) but his hands are tied by budget cuts which will undermine any hope he might have of reform. All politicians are scared of the tabloids, which some say run the country, and no politician will ever get the funding to make the penal system work.
The only answer is early intervention to try to prevent young people turning to crime and that means opportunity and equality – something the Tory’s find distasteful, does not get votes and is expensive.
Prisons, of course, are an industry and in order to keep shareholders happy the prison numbers, crowded into private prisons, must be kept to a maximum.
Many prisoners are now, effectively, political prisoners; kept in prison as part of the party politics of proving you are all stronger on crime than the others, and, of course, to appease the tabloids, and to make profit for your friends like Serco who make great profits out of imprisoning people.
Why not bring back hanging for the very worst premeditated murders? Terrorists, homicidal paedophiles and serial killers should die. It’s what most Tories and the majority of the public want – and it’s morally right.
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