Population Explosion?

England and Wales has the highest rate of imprisonment in Western Europe.  Its 83,000 prisoners represent 141 per 100,000 of the general population. By comparison, the rate in France is 102, Germany 78, and the Netherlands 59. Last week the Minister responsible for prisons and sentencing told a parliamentary committee “the likelihood at the moment, unless something astonishing changes, is that our prison population will go up beyond 92,000 or 93,000”.

Although giving evidence to an inquiry on the prison population in 2022, Rory Stewart was presumably looking further into the future than that. His department’s statisticians put the chances of reaching or exceeding a 92,800 population in 2022 at just 5%. And since that estimate was made there has been a large and unexpected fall in prison numbers- there were 3,500 fewer prisoners than anticipated at the end of last week. So things would have to go catastrophically awry if the MoJ’s central projection for 2022- 88,000 prisoners – were to be exceeded by then, let alone Mr Stewart’s apocalyptic figure reached.

But what about the longer term?  Mr Stewart believes that “as we give more voice to citizens and to victims, almost inevitably we are going to face pressure between now and 2030 for longer and more brutal sentences”. He rightly pointed to punitive public attitudes to sex offenders who represent a growing proportion of prisoners. There’s less evidence for his assertion that “there will be a groundswell, probably between now and 2030, of people saying that domestic burglary is an absolute taboo.”

Committee Chair Bob Neill challenged Mr Stewart that the job of any responsible Government is  to lead and shape the conversation, to try to make sure that we have a more informed debate about how to deal with this. While the minister agreed, he added the proviso that “we understand the sea in which we are swimming”.  There's a good deal of research that suggest it may not be as shark infested as Mr Stewart believes.  

What’s crucial is how future governments choose to navigate that sea. Mr Stewart thinks  “an ever-growing prison population is not in the interests of the public” and that “the  victim will be better off, the offender will be better off and society will be better off if we ultimately have fewer people in prison.”

As in so many matters, this reasonable view is not wholly shared in his party.  The new Conservative Party Policy  Commission is chaired by Chris Skidmore MP- one of the co- authors of a book which made the case for restoring public confidence “by seeking longer tougher prison sentences”.  Maybe Mr Stewart’s seemingly defeatist approach to future penal policy betrays a belief that those who wish to “reverse the tide of soft justice “ will prevail within his party at least.

Lets hope not . Fellow Conservative  Bob Neill told Parliament yesterday that we could  “as a society and as a Parliament—seize the bull by the horns and make a determined resolve to reduce the prison population”. “That can be done”, he added  “by releasing prisoners who are not a threat to society in a physical or serious financial sense and by finding robust and credible alternatives to custody that enable sentencers to deal with many more offenders in the community without the need for the extreme cost of imprisonment.” That surely is the way forward.