Defund Prisons?

 

With prisons literally falling to pieces, presenting serious risks of fire and struggling to retain staff, it may seem perverse and even dangerous to argue that the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) should spend less on them.

And so it might be if funds were being earmarked to replace Victorian relics like Winchester where monitors report control room staff exposed to “unpalatable smells” from corpses of poisoned rats, or Wandsworth, rated unsafe, inhumane and “totally unfit for purpose.”

But the £3.8 billion capital spending announced by the Chancellor last week won’t fund new for old modernisation of a crumbling and unsuitable estate but simply increase its overall capacity by 20,000 places, adding 25% to a prison population whose rate exceeds that in every other western European country.

The Spending Review claims the programme “will support the transition towards a more efficient, safe and environmentally sustainable prison estate” but unless prison numbers undershoot the projection of  98,700 by 2026, there will be no scope for reducing overcrowding across the system as a whole, let alone closing the oldest and most brutalising prisons.

The bigger question of course is whether such an eye watering sum of money could be better used in other ways. Did anyone in the Treasury ask it? Their Green Book says “appraisal of alternative policy options is an inseparable part of detailed policy development and design”. It would not take any official long to find the latest US meta research study confirming that “custodial sanctions have no effect on reoffending or slightly increase it when compared with the effects of noncustodial sanctions such as probation”.

Such evidence may count for little given the current political capital behind punishment and prison expansion but what’s disappointing is how little debate there’s been about other ways at least some of the prison funds could be used.

Two years ago former Met Chief Ian Blair proposed that the police should recruit half the promised 20,000 extra officers with the remaining resources used more creatively on measures recommended by a Royal Commission or People’s Panels. These might want other kinds of police staff (such as analysts dealing with cybercrime) or, “of even more importance, other services which help prevent crime in the first place”.

Sadly, this Justice Reinvestment approach has not been taken up in respect of policing, but as for prison spending it hasn’t really even been put forward- apart from in the campaign to abandon the  plans to build 500 new prison places for women, which so obviously fly in the face of the government’s own female offender strategy.

The MoJ’s current ideas in large part involve new and expanded Category B and C prisons. Back in 2010, the Coalition agreed to “explore alternative forms of secure, treatment-based accommodation for mentally ill and drugs offenders” but went nowhere. Residential rehabilitation has diminished over recent years. Such options are among the community based and institutional measures which should be funded with the Treasury’s billions. Prisons are a dead end- and a costly one.