Seven point plan to end needless overcrowding

1. Treat Mental Illness
Stop using prisons as asylums. Sending the mentally ill to prison will only damage their health further and do nothing to prevent re-offending. Instead the NHS and Primary Care Trusts must be required to fulfil their responsibility to provide court diversion schemes and additional investment must be made in community mental health, medium secure healthcare places and halfway houses. Urgent attention must also be paid to the needs of people with learning disabilities and learning difficulties caught in the criminal justice net.

2. Tackle Addictions
Locking up drug addicts and hazardous drinkers almost never breaks the grips of a serious addiction and almost always submerges people further in the world of criminality. Britain is scandalously short of community resources to get people off drugs and drink and the public is paying the price for years of this head in the sand approach. Most acquisitive crime is fuelled by drugs.  Most violent crime and public disorder offences are driven by alcohol. Residential drug treatment places at £35,000 a year will save millions compared to over £40,000 a year for a revolving door prison place. 

3. Avoid Prison for Vulnerable Women
Stop sending women to prison for petty offences. A vast majority of women sent to prison have not committed serious or violent crimes. Two thirds of women entering prison do so on remand, very many for psychiatric assessment. It's time for government to deliver on its promise to develop women only bail hostels. The vast majority of these women are also mothers with dependent children. Their households are broken up and scattered. There are better alternatives in the community that focus on support and supervision with drugs, drinking, mental healthcare and debt recovery that can break the pattern of offending without destroying families.  

4. Deport Many Foreign National Prisoners
Stop ‘supersizing’ sentences for drug mules. Many foreign national prisoners are first time offenders who are given sentences of up to 14 years for carrying drugs into the country. While they have committed a crime, they are the smallest link in the network of drug importation, used by drug barons precisely because they are disposable. It is wrong to treat these people like kingpins of crime and it is putting quite unnecessary pressure on our prison system. It is time to review these sentences which have little, or no, deterrent value. In many cases a pardon followed by deportation would be the humane, just solution.  

5. End Child Imprisonment
Locking up children is the quickest way to create the old lags of the future. Prison is acting as a college of crime for increasing numbers of vulnerable children with re-offending rates soaring over 80% for this age group. Local authority secure care, specialist fostering, intensive supervision and mentoring are all preferable to jail and do less lasting harm.

6. Use Effective Community Alternatives
Call a halt to the courts using prison because they do not have robust enough community alternatives. Prolific offender programmes run by police and probation and community payback schemes are working well but provision is too patchy. Proper bail provision or tagging those thought to have committed petty offences would prevent making unnecessary use of custodial remand. A graduated set of sanctions for technical breaches of license would cut unnecessary recalls to custody. Use local authority agreements and work with local government to ensure that communities have the power to solve non-violent crime.

7. Provide Strong Political Leadership
Act to reduce, not inflame, public fear of crime, telling people the truth about increasing sentence lengths and ever increasing use of prison custody. Enter into a constructive dialogue with the judiciary. Dispel the myth that longer and longer time spent behind bars of itself protects the public when people reach the end of their sentence ill prepared for life outside. Explain the difference between merely doing time in jail and using time constructively to reduce the risk of re-offending and so prevent the next victim of crime. In other words make prison work to cut serious and violent crime