Labour Law

 Did this week’s Party Conference tell us any more about the criminal justice and prison policy we might get from a Labour government? Last year’s election manifesto retained that most Blairite of slogans “Tough on Crime Tough on the Causes of Crime” and though the words weren’t used in Liverpool, Jeremy Corbyn continued to express the sentiment. For the leader, 10,000 extra police officers will play “a vital role in tackling crime and making people safer”. But “more police are only part of the solution” alongside investment in young people and communities.

Corbyn parts company from New Labour on the role of the private sector arguing that the G4S Birmingham debacle and a privatised probation service "on the brink of meltdown" shows that what has long been a scam is now a crisis. It’s a scandal, he promised that “Richard Burgon, the next Secretary of State for Justice will end.”

Mindful perhaps of how Jack Straw’s pre-1997 moral repugnance about prison privatisation came to haunt him, Burgon himself pledged only to scrap plans to build new private prisons.  Whether this includes Glen Parva, where work is due to start later this year or future builds yet to be announced will all depend what contracts have been signed in the event that Labour come to power.  The same is true of probation, but here Burgon has suggested that it will all be brought back into the public sector. Lord Ramsbotham’s task force is about how not if. But the key question may be when. Buying CRCs out of newly signed contracts may simply be too costly.

In the here and now, Burgon’s five-point plan to tackle the prison crisis also has pounds signs written all over it- in particular the recruitment and retention of more prison staff. There’s a lot of sense in the demands to tackle overcrowding and end short sentences but Labour are targetting only "super short sentences" of three months or less. That they are  more timid than other parties should not be a surprise. Since 1945, prison numbers have on average risen twice as much under Labour administrations than Tory ones. 

Whatever their magnitude, these changes require concrete proposals to make them  happen. Labour's plan offers the chance of a cross party consensus.  I’d like to see the law changed so that prison sentences can only be imposed when the offending is so serious that a sentence of 12 months or more is justified. That might take prison numbers down towards the 75,000 uncrowded places in the system.

A radical Labour government should go further than that . Four years ago, - it seems a good deal more- along with others I gave evidence to a sparsely attended Justice Committee hearing on Crime Reduction Policies. Two of the five MPs who turned up were then backbenchers Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Corbyn showed himself to be a fan of the Justice Reinvestment approach promoted by the Committee some years earlier.  “ If the crime rate falls", he observed,  "the prison population falls and there are greater resources available for reinvestment in crime reduction policies-a wholly virtuous circle. It was a great idea”. He was right, and it still is.