Postponements or Cancellations?

 

Along with others, I was due to give evidence to the Justice Committee on Tuesday about prison estate capacity. The hearing was called off because the Committee could not muster a quorum of three MPs to take part. It’s not clear if it’s postponed or cancelled.

Most of the committee members probably preferred to enjoy the yah- boo politics that followed the King’s Speech in the main chamber. Conservatives may have thought that a day about pre-election messaging wasn’t the right time for a serious look at what amounts to something of a public policy fiasco. Labour MPs may not have known what line to take. The hearing would have asked whether the government could have done more to prevent the current overcrowding crisis, its consequences for safety, and for mental health and what recently announced measures will do to fix the problem.  

With hindsight, it was daft to schedule the meeting for the first afternoon of the new Parliament, not least because of the raft of relevant measures announced that very morning. But putting off the hearing symbolises how legislators’ seemingly boundless enthusiasm for a greater use of imprisonment often sits alongside a studied indifference to whether and how it is carried out.

It wasn’t the only postponement this week. The decision on whether to grant planning permission for new builds next to existing prisons in Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire were due to be announced by DLUHC on Wednesday.  We’ll seemingly have to wait another month to find out how helpful Michael Gove will be to his old department. It’s a potential further delay or worse to the achievement of the 20,000 new places hitherto deemed necessary to accommodate the estimated growth in the prison population.

Perhaps it’s the recognition on the part of Justice Ministers that the 20,000 target is unachievable which has led them to temper their tough policy with a more twin track approach. The result could well be a revision downward of that projected growth in the number of prisoners.

Yes, perpetrators of the very worst offences will serve longer periods in prison but the numbers are thankfully small. Plans for those convicted of rape to serve every day of their sentence behind bars will affect more. It brings in  for this offence at least the so called “honesty in sentencing” approach first proposed by Michael Howard almost 30 years ago in the Prison Works era.

But for many other categories of offences, extending the range of prisoners who can spend up to the last six months of their sentence at home with an electronic tag and encouraging the suspension of short jail terms will bring down demand for places, maybe substantially. We’ll have to wait for the impact assessments when the Sentencing Bill is published to see what the net outcomes might be.

In the longer term much will depend on whether it's the more punitive response to the most serious offenders which will pull sentencing levels up more widely or if the more lenient approach to less serious ones will push the "going rate" down.   

Despite the short term reduction in demand for prison places, it is likely that continuing concerns about running out of space led to the cancellation of plans floated recently for automatic prison sentences for repeat shoplifters and those convicted of various other crimes. These would almost certainly have wiped out the gains in prison space from tagging and suspension and made the government's penal policy look impossibly incoherent. 

But it's distinctly possible that these measures have merely been postponed until next year’s Conservative election manifesto.