Throwing Good Money After Bad

 

The Wellcome Collection exhibition Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights has among an eclectic mix of items on display an elaborate slide rule used to set daily targets for the number of steps on the treadmill each prisoner should take per hour. 

While no doubt useful to standardise the diverse working practices across the mid-19^th century prison estate, I wondered whether any of the administrators who created the device or the Governors who applied it stopped to ask themselves: What is the fundamental point of what we are doing here?

A similar thought struck me reading the National Audit Office Report Increasing the Capacity of the Prison Estate to Meet Demand. Of course there are benefits to charting forensically what turn out to have been woeful and often wasteful attempts by Government to deliver a prison estate fit for purpose.

Failures to maintain existing prisons, unbridled optimism bias about timescales for building new ones and the expensive short term fixes dreamt up to stave off total collapse all provide lessons, I suppose. Whether they will be learned is another matter. The most important of the NAO’s recommendations could have been cut and pasted from their 2020 report on Improving the Prison Estate.

What’s missing though is any engagement with the bigger questions. Why on earth are we spending what’s now £10 billion on more than 20,000 new prison places? And in what universe is this considered good value for money?

The NAO’s job is to tell us if resources have been used economically, efficiently and effectively to achieve intended outcomes. Sure, their role is not to question government policy objectives. But in the case of the Ministry of Justice, their relevant objectives have been protecting the public and reducing reoffending. Should the NAO not have at least raised a question about whether the biggest prison building programme since Victorian times is the best way of meeting those objectives?

Last week three former Lord Chief Justices not only asked the question but answered it with a resounding “no”.   One told the Howard League that the relentless rise in the length of prison terms had led to an “appalling” and unnecessary use of money and the prison population should be about 50,000 not the 85,000 we have today let alone the 100,000 we may end up with. Another described the increasing numbers of people recalled to prison as “completely insane”.

Not the language of auditors perhaps but not normally of judges either.  If leading judicial figures conclude that funds spent on prison would be better used in other ways, the body charged with assessing value for money should at least engage with the argument.  

Had they done so they could have looked at whether at least some of the money earmarked to lock up more people for longer might be better used to strengthen the range and quality of alternatives to prison- through more hospital beds, drug treatment or probation hostels. Or to fund properly activities which can prevent serious youth violence - like mentoring and therapy – or those which can deal more constructively with crime- like restorative justice.

But they didn’t.  Perhaps David Gauke and his colleagues undertaking the sentencing review will do so. We know from the NAO report that there is a need to cut demand for prison places by 12,000 because the MoJ does not have any contingency plans to increase prison capacity beyond the current target “as it views it has limited options left to do this”. Let’s hope Gauke doesn’t simply get a slide rule out but takes the opportunity to fashion a genuinely more effective response to crime and justice.