Not a Great Year for Prison Reform

Prison reformers are nothing if not optimists, but 2021 won’t be remembered as a great year.

Dismal projections in November suggested prison numbers could reach 98,500 over the next four years. The Treasury confirmed funds to continue the biggest prison building programme in more than a century.  G4S will open HMP Five Wells for business in February although plans for two of the further six proposed new establishments, in Lancashire and Buckinghamshire, have aroused local opposition.

With a prison population rate already well in excess of our Western European neighbours (Scotland aside), surely £4 billion should be spent more productively than locking up more people for longer. Prison building seems increasingly justified on grounds of local economic development and even levelling up rather than penal effectiveness or crime reduction.

The new jails are unlikely to replace unsuitable old ones – indeed the Prison Service appear to have signed yet another new lease with the Duchy of Cornwall to keep HMP Dartmoor open 212 years after it was built to house French PoWs.

Conditions in many prisons remain poor or even unsafe. It will take at least seven years to install automatic cell fire detection across the estate.  The pains of imprisonment have been exacerbated of course by the restrictions caused by the pandemic, back in place at years end as they were at its start.  

Youth custody is in a mess following the closure of Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre and serious problems at Oakhill. The Medway Secure School, heralded five years ago as a brave new world is reportedly delayed yet again, possibly not opening until 2023. Efforts to better meet the developing needs of young adults have stalled.

Glimmers of hope may lie in an expanding and newly reunified probation service, notwithstanding Prime Ministerial nonsense about chain gangs. 2021 saw the launch of the first new Probation hostel for, extraordinarily, thirty years – a period which has seen 19 new prisons built.

A new generation of problem-solving courts could divert more people from custody and sensibly implemented new arrangements for Out of Court disposals could reduce prosecutions. These initiatives could help ensure that 23,000 new police do not inexorably bring about 20,000 more prisoners.  

A relatively small part of the projected increase in imprisonment will directly come about via the longer custodial terms for serious offenders contained in the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill which has been wending its way through parliament this year. Their impact could be greater if they have a knock-on effect on the length of terms imposed by courts for less serious crimes.

Stopping that happening will be a job for the Sentencing Council. Promisingly, it has decided to give overdue priority to considering evidence on the effectiveness of sentencing and enhancing ways to raise awareness of the relevant issues.  

Back in 2008, when in Opposition a Conservative Shadow Prisons Minister told MPs “the rise in the number of prisoners from 60,000 to 83,000 should not be a point of pride. It should be a point of shame.” He was right. Going up to almost 100,000 would be even more shameful.

So as we go into 2022, lets hang on to the thought that while a future with more and more prisoners is looking likely, it isn’t inevitable.

 

 

Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

 

As someone said about Russian novels, today’s Prisons Strategy White Paper is something of a loose baggy monster.  It contains the usual mix of broad assertions - “having an effective prison system is central to the Government’s mission to level up the country” and detailed info (594 staff, 154 drugs dogs and over 200 archway and handheld metal detectors are involved in enhanced gate security).

The strategy covers action over the next two years and a longer-term ten-year vision. Despite its range, there are some curious omissions: nothing on youth custody (something of a mess at the moment), and very little on countering violent extremism. Nor is there much I can see on tackling racial disparity. On the plus side, comments are invited by February on a set of questions. The Ministry of Justice seem happier to consult on how people are managed in custody than on how long they should stay there.

Reading through the White Paper provides a fair bit of déjà vu.

There’s yet another outing for prison league tables, proposed back in 2016 “to show which prisons are making real progress in getting offenders off drugs and developing the education and skills they need to get work”. And a further plan to empower governors, more than five years after PM David Cameron vowed to give them “unprecedented operational and financial autonomy” trusting them to get on and run their jail in the way they see fit. Will these old chestnuts come any closer to implementation than last time round? The plans seem a bit more granular than before – (yes, the strategy includes that ghastly term) - but no mention is made of why earlier efforts didn’t get off the ground.

There is something new in terms of ideas (or perhaps just labels) – Resettlement Passports which sensibly collate the documents prisoners need on release; a Prisoner Education Service to try yet again to breathe life into a poorly structured and long under performing part of the system; and an innovation task force to identify and pilot new ways of reducing violence and self-harm. There are promising suggestions of more IT access for prisoners and staff which is way overdue.

By contrast, an ambition of the purported new approach to women’s prisons, should surely not be to introduce “smaller, trauma responsive custodial environments for women on short sentences” but to develop the necessary measures in the community to keep these women out of prison altogether.

It’s encouraging that the strategy borrows from the women’s estate the idea of providing trauma informed training for staff in men’s prisons and a welcome acknowledgement of  the scale of neurodiversity.  It's still jarring to read that "around half the prison population have suffered a traumatic brain injury." 

Borrowing the idea of employment advisers and hubs in prisons could help make a difference to job prospects on release.

It’s less clear whether fast track adjudications – for which the strategy prays in aid the concept of procedural justice- will in fact be perceived as fair by prisoners who find “their case diverted straight to the punishment phase more quickly". It will also be worth watching closely how prisons apply the lessons of lockdown. It may be true that “mass unstructured social time can make some prisoners feel unsafe and can inhibit the ability of staff to manage risks of violence and bullying”. But this shouldn’t mean more time behind the cell door becoming a norm.

What’s blue? Depressing certainly is the £4 billion investment in 20,000 new prison places. Yes, six new prisons will serve to modernise the estate. But there is no mention of "new for old". These are additional to not replacements for a crumbling set of buildings, needed because of a policy choice to lock up more people for longer. 

Back in 2016, Cameron thought “politicians from all sides of the political spectrum are starting to realise the diminishing returns from ever higher levels of incarceration”. On that, sadly, he was wrong. Where he was right was to pose the question: "wouldn’t we be better to focus our scarce resources on preventing crime in the first place and by breaking the cycle of re-offending"? 

That’s not answered here, nor even properly asked.