Why prison reform is too complicated for Twitter

On Wednesday night on Twitter, I had a discussion with Tim Montgomerie about Ken Clarke’s proposals to reform the prison system. I promised Tim that I would write an article on this, as it’s too complicated to distil into tweets of 140 characters; ideally I would have done so yesterday but I do have a job, and we got rather overtaken by the student protests and tuition fee votes.

The main points on which Tim and I disagree are these:

1)      These reforms will NOT ‘leave the public unprotected’ or allow ‘serious and repeat offenders [to] escape jail’ – they are not about indiscriminately releasing violent offenders because there isn’t room for them. They are about taking out of prison a number of people for whom custodial sentences are not appropriate, and giving them a push and a poke to try to reset their life path;

2)      The reforms are not ‘uncaring’ of victims, the public or offenders. Quite the opposite. They are about trying to solve the problem of crime, which makes for a better society for us all. Merely postponing it, and trying to keep a lid on it, does not fix the underlying problems – could we draw an analogy with the Coalition’s radical and widely-admired approach to welfare reform? I think we could.

3)      Incarceration does not cut crime; it defers it. While someone is in jail, they (obviously) commit no crime, but half of prisoners reoffend within a year (and it’s higher still for those sentenced to less than 12 months – over 60 per cent of them reoffend within a year), rising to three-quarters of young offenders within a year and 70 per cent reoffend within two years.  Reoffending rates for those sentenced to under 12 months detention are almost double that for those who are sentenced to unpaid work.

I think we’re at a decision point for our crime rate and regarding the costs of both crime and prison, and the government is trying to take radical steps to resolve that for the long-term.

In July, Ken Clarke made a speech which Marcus Booth wrote about here. In it, Ken made a number of suggestions for reforms he felt need made to the prison system.

This week, he published his Green Paper. Now, I know that many people who read this website are political obsessives but I think it would be useful to remind ourselves that a Green Paper is not a law. It’s a discussion paper, open to consultation and amendment, but setting out the direction that a government is thinking of heading in.

I’m not going to go through the proposals one by one (there are loads) but grouped together, the highlights are:

-          Creating what is effectively a ‘working week’ for prisoners, allowing them to earn but requiring them to pay back their victims, support their families and possibly pay for their board and lodging;

-          More, tougher, more intensive community sentences;

-          Holistic approach from institutions and to problems;

-          Six programmes to incentivise private providers to change behaviour, and allow frontline staff to innovate;

-          Give greater discretion to judges to decide on sentences;

-          Prepare for local police commissioners by giving police greater responsibility for ‘turning offenders away from a life of crime’;

-           Neighbourhood Justice Panels.

I think we can agree that if these initiatives are agreed and work as they are intended to, we should see the following:

1)      Reinforcing localism and encouraging responsibility, local police would be given greater discretion over how to deal with (particularly low-level) crime and disorder, depending on both their own judgement and the priorities that their local communities have voted for – for example, through the new Neighbourhood Justice Panels;

2)      Social problems would be treated properly in prison and during community sentences – this can only be of benefit to individuals and communities. Trying to keep families together, helping people with mental health problems, getting people off drugs, into a routine, into good shape to get a job – these are all good things. In the same way as many welfare to work providers are intensive life-changing programmes, this is a valuable (if rather intrusive) ambition for individuals and for our wider society;

3)      It’s likely that there would be some significant costs for the local, intensive programmes designed to fundamentally change behaviour. I don’t think that the ‘saving money’ case is necessarily the right one to make for these reforms, as I could see them being in the short-term, very expensive. In the long-term, in both direct and wider societal costs, the reforms should save money though.

4)      Something I am not wholly sure about is the proposal to give judges greater latitude in sentencing. On the one hand, it’s devolving power to the person with the capacity to make the most informed judgement; on the other, are we handing too much power to an unelected, unreformed judiciary?

These are hugely ambitious ideas. The government has opened them up to consultation for 3 months, and has given itself another 3 months before publishing any proposed legislation, on which no doubt there will be further negotiation. But something has to be done. We cannot go on postponing the problem.

Since mid-2005, David Cameron has (relatively) consistently advocated an enlightened prisons policy. I would be disappointed and not a little surprised if his government suddenly abandoned it. So much of this is about preparing for and explaining the policy properly, not being spooked off by rabid tabloid-like headlines, and actually looking at the facts.  I’m hopeful that perhaps the experience of the tuition fees process will have allowed the machinery to learn a few lessons here…

To end, I’d like to, perhaps tritely, quote Sir Winston Churchill:

“The treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.”

Related posts:

1. Progressive Conservatism – Can It Exist In Prison Reform?
2. Prison works – just not in every case
3. Is it only politicians that think prison works?
4. Achieving equity requires a liberal conservative reform agenda
5. The Telegraph’s Twitter Trauma