Cell Therapy: Could Shortage of Space Inject a Dose of Reality Into Prison Policy?

Wednesday’s announcement by Prisons Minister Damian Hinds that he had requested the use of up to 400 police cells came as something of a surprise. It’s true that last week, his boss Dominic Raab told the Justice Committee that “there is a very significant capacity issue in our prisons.” But nobody followed it up with him.

Maybe that’s because five weeks ago Hinds’ predecessor, Rob Butler had told the Justice Committee

  “ the important thing is for people to know that there is the capacity, if someone is remanded in custody, that there will be a place for them and it will be the right place”.  

Quite why Butler gave such a hostage to fortune isn’t clear – he’s admitted that the sudden growth in the adult male custodial population started during his brief tenure in the Ministry of Justice which ended just two days after his unwise words of reassurance in Parliament.

Hinds tried to convince MPs that this week's statement did not reflect a failure to plan ahead but a response to “a highly unusual acute short-term surge.” He was unable to explain the reasons for the timing of this, other than implausibly blaming the aftermath of the barristers’ strike. 

A good part of the problem lies with supply rather than demand. Hinds said that the additional capacity was needed “to ensure the smooth running of the prison estate”. Given existing pressures in many local jails, a sharply rising population could make prisons unmanageable without some form of safety valve.

Take HMP Bullingdon in Oxfordshire, where 45% of prisoners are on remand. The Independent Monitoring Board who publish their annual report today say the prison continues to be chronically overcrowded, with 521 cells designed for single occupancy, mostly occupied by two prisoners. “Overcrowding also puts great pressure on communal spaces and facilities. It is incompatible with the fair and decent treatment of prisoners”.

The IMB also worry that “chronic staff shortages will begin to have a greater impact on the safety and stability of the prison”. Levels of violence, they say are still far too high and despite the introduction of an airport style scanner, the quantity of drugs coming into the prison remains high. 

So good on Prison Service chiefs for confronting ministers with uncomfortable and no doubt unwelcome truths about the quality as well as quantity of prison capacity and its ability to absorb more and more people at present. Their plans to increase that capacity through more use of “identified contingency spaces” and postponing all non-essential maintenance work are not quite so welcome.

If the crisis continues, Ministers will have to consider more radical measures. They could encourage courts to make greater use of recently introduced GPS tagging to place more defendants on conditional bail rather than in custody. Or introduce an End of Custody Licence along the lines of the scheme that ran from 2007-2010, allowing eligible prisoners serving sentences to be freed up to 18 days before their release date.

More fundamentally still, the Sentencing Council could be asked to look at their guidelines to align the demand for prison places with supply. After all that was its original though long since diluted purpose. 

Moderating sentence lengths wouldn't go down well with former School Standards Minister Jonathan Gullis who is keen to see "scumbags locked up for a longer period of time". Raab too told the Justice Committee last week that he “could fill the prisons 50% higher than they are today".

But Raab went on "the reality is that we cannot keep exponentially increasing the prison population”. Hinds said that for types of crime other than the worst “it is important that we utilise alternatives to custodial sentences”.

Is it possible for some good to come from the current crisis?