What is prison for? There’s a simple answer to that simple question, isn’t there? To stop people breaking the law. If someone is locked up he can’t be attacking us law-abiding folk in the streets or breaking into our homes, can he?
Obviously it’s a little more complicated than that. We might add another word. Deterrence. If someone knows they might go to prison for breaking the law, there’s a reasonable chance they won’t do it, isn’t there?
And there’s a third reason. Punishment. I suspect very few of us believe in the Old Testament stricture of an “eye for an eye”. It’s sixty years since the last hanging in this country and even longer since corporal punishment was used in prisons. But if someone deliberately causes us pain or grief, shouldn’t that person pay a price in return – almost certainly loss of liberty? Should they not go to jail for a long time?
So far … so good. Or so bad, depending on your point of view.
The more liberal approach holds that hanging or flogging or even imprisonment is not guaranteed to be the most effective way to protect us from those who do us harm. Far better surely to prevent that harm in the first place. So here’s another key word: rehabilitation.
The liberals will argue that one way of virtually guaranteeing that the wrongdoer will continue his life of crime is to lock him up with others of his ilk for a very long time. By the time he is finally released, they say, he may very well be an even greater threat to society than he was when he went in. There’s statistical evidence for that. Government records show that between a third and a quarter of prisoners repeat their offences when they are released.
All of this theorising has preoccupied criminologists and sociologists ever since the first prisoner was flung behind bars. But we are way beyond theorising now – and that’s because of the state of our prisons and what the government is planning to do about it. They are preparing to release tens of thousands of prisoners early because our jails are simply too full to cope. A Ministry or Justice source told the Times demand for prison places “comes roaring back” immediately after the August bank holiday and it was incumbent on the government to ensure it has implemented measures in plenty of time beforehand. “We’ve got to have enough headroom for the Tuesday after the bank holiday because you tend to have lots of pent-up demand, it’s always a monster week with loads of people flowing into prisoners. Officials have told the justice secretary Shabana Mashmood ‘you’ve got a big problem’.”
Sir Keir Starmer himself has described the crisis in our prisons as “shocking… even worse than we feared”.
The knee-jerk reaction from many of us will doubtless be horror that some prisoners, now locked behind bars for years to come, will soon be free to walk the streets and we shall be at even greater risk than we are already. Sir Keir has sought to put our minds at rest on that at least. He says prisoners convicted of violent crimes will not be released early, nor will sex offenders or those convicted of terrorism.
It’s worth remembering that very few of those sentenced to prison actually serve the term the judge pronounced at their trial. Under the present system most will be set free – assuming they’ve been reasonably well behaved – when they have served 50% of their sentences. Under the new proposals that will be reduced to 40%. Whitehall sources have said this could lead to the release of more than 20,000 inmates over the first months of the scheme coming into force.
To those who say the government is behaving recklessly, Sir Keir says the exact opposite is true. He told reporters travelling with him to Washington that the Conservative government had been reckless in letting prisons come within a fortnight of reaching overflow.
It’s “shocking” he said, “for our country to have got into a state where we have too many prisoners and not enough prison places…. To a point where any government is now in a position where it has to release prisoners early. That is a total failure of government.”
In fact, prisons have been operating at 99% capacity for 18 months and 100 new prisoners have been added every week. Endless scare stories are being reported. One senior police source told the Times they are within weeks of entering “uncharted” territory because police forces have nowhere to lock up suspects when they arrest them. Criminals would take advantage by committing crimes they would not usually do such as looting and former prisoners released on licence would be more likely to reoffend because they knew they would be less likely to be recalled. The Ministry of Justice has warned that this could lead to “unchecked criminality on our streets”.
But is the early release of prisoners the right thing to do? The Tory MP Neil O’Brien says no. He claims more than 10,000 of the country’s 87,000 prisoners are foreign nationals and more effort should be applied to their home countries to take them back. He also says another 10,000 are remand prisoners awaiting trial and magistrates’ courts should be given the job of helping to clear the backlog. And his third proposal is the rollout of “rapid deployment cells”: portable buildings that can be placed within existing prisons.
But even if all that worked – and O’Brien’s critics say it won’t – no one disputes that our prisons are in crisis. Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the Prison Officers’ Association, says: “By the end of July, prisons will be full. So no matter what people’s opinions are, or how unpalatable the announcement may be, there is an urgent need to decrease the prison population and give our members some breathing space so we can start to reverse the chaos of the last 14 years.”
So is that the solution? Instead of desperately trying to house more prisoners should we instead be sending fewer people to jail in the first place? Starmer has given us a pretty clear view of what he thinks about that by appointing James Timpson as prisons minister.
It’s entirely possible that you have had some – albeit distant – contact with Mr Timpson over the years because he’s the owner of the very successful firm that cuts keys and takes in dry cleaning and mends phones. But what he has also done for many years is help ex-offenders. Until last week he was the chairman of the Prison Reform Trust charity, which campaigns for a reduced prison population and better conditions for inmates. He has said only a third of Britain’s prison population should be behind bars but the country is “addicted to sentencing” and “addicted to punishment… locking people up far too long. And we’re sending people to prison when actually all the evidence suggests prison is not the right place for them.”
He has put his money where his mouth is. A lot of it. More than 10% of his firm’s workforce are former prisoners who get help in different ways. One employee told the Times he believes in giving people a second chance “to help them believe that they can actually be good and decent people, and to be able to help out the community and just be seen as a normal person without having to worry about all their past dealings. It’s a great thing.”
As Libby Purves wrote in the Times: “Timpson admits to encountering problems and reoffences at first, but now says hardly any ex-offenders in his stores get into trouble. They are, he finds, ‘usually more honest, more loyal, stay longer and are likely to get promoted’”. Not that he is a starry-eyed sentimentalist: “In crude terms, we don’t recruit men under 25 from prison because they’re not mature enough, won’t stay, or get back into their old ways. But meeting people in prison, you see how they get to a point where they just want a job and don’t want to disappoint their families again.” Women, interestingly, are different, and he employs them from age 19.
Andrea Coomber, the chief executive at the Howard League prison reform charity, welcomed the appointment. She said: “Having seen the system up close, James understands that prisons are unable to rehabilitate or hold safely and decently the huge numbers of people within them”. There must be, she says, “an urgent review of population numbers and of sentencing…. We look forward to sound, evidence-led policy from the new government that prioritises rehabilitation, productive sentences and the use of prison only where absolutely necessary.”
So where do you stand? Does it worry you that so many prisoners will be released even earlier than they might have been? Or do you take the view that a convicted criminal should serve the sentence handed down by the judge? And if so, what should be done, given that we simply don’t have enough cells to accommodate all of them?
Or do you believe that the problem lies much deeper than that and we are simply sending too many people to prison? In which case, is it time to rethink our whole approach to criminal justice? And are you confident that this government’s approach is the right one?
Let us know what you think.
