Taking the Politics Out of Punishment

 

If the new government’s most urgent task on prisons is to navigate an immediate way through the current population crisis, they should also be considering ways to avoid a repetition in the future.

When last in power, Labour ministers reviewed how to improve the balance between the supply of prison places and demand for them.  Despite the 2007 recommendation for an effective, integrated and transparent planning mechanism that reconciles penal capacity with criminal justice policy, the institution which emerged after three years of wrangling – the Sentencing Council - has not been willing or able to fulfil that role.

Since then, Parliament and the courts have been busy willing the ends of more and longer prison sentences but not the means of enforcing them. Hence the recent flurry of measures to release prisoners early which Labour accepts it will have to keep in place in the short term if they form an administration. 

In the long term they should consider two options. First, the modest idea recommended by Parliament’s Justice Committee that policy proposals on sentencing should be subject to independent evaluation, so that the resourcing implications are recognised before they are enacted.  

When it’s introduced, most but not all criminal legislation is already accompanied by an impact assessment which estimates any need for additional prison or probation resources to implement it. The future prison population is projected annually.  So legislators know what’s coming. But knowledge of impending pressures in prisons have not stopped governments adding to them, rendering them unmanageable over the last year.

So something more is needed.  

Ten years ago, the British Academy argued that penal policy needs to be insulated from the short-term political and media pressures which so often prioritise populist initiatives over a principled and sustainable approach.  A Presumption against Imprisonment  recommended the creation of a Penal Policy Committee (PPC), accountable to Parliament, comprising wide representation and expertise. Distanced from party political competition, the PPC would develop and formulate the approach to who should go to prison and for how long.

Such an approach would take full account of the financial, social and ethical costs of prison as well as its practical availability.  The British Academy suggested that the Sentencing Council, working to a revised remit, would then be able to implement the policies on sentencing outlined by the PPC.

The Sentencing Council currently takes the view that “absent an explicit statutory remit” were it to seek, artificially and unilaterally, to raise or lower sentence levels without good cause it would rapidly lose the confidence of sentencers, the public and MPs.   Arguably within its current remit, the lack of prison places provides a good enough cause to lower sentence levels. But a new mandate would certainly be helpful    

Is this an idea whose time has come?

Within a week of winning the 1997 election, new Chancellor Gordon Brown announced the transfer of the task of setting interest rates to an independent body of experts in the Bank of England. Few now question the role of the Monetary Policy Committee. If such a body can determine fiscal policy, why not something similar in criminal justice? It should certainly be explored in Labour’s promised sentencing review.