In response to the publication of Lord Carter’s review of prisons and the Justice Secretary’s statement to Parliament, Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said:

Pouring money into jumbo jails will engulf any sensible plans to reform the justice system. Everyone knows that giant institutions don’t work, whether they are schools, hospitals or prisons.

Looking at prison overcrowding as a storage problem is as flawed as adding an extra lane to a motorway to ease congestion. The last decade has shown that any relief that building more prison places brings is expensive and temporary. 

The government has a history of good intentions but poor delivery on justice reform. Much of what has been welcomed by government needs more detail and, crucially, funding to happen.

Unanswered questions include:
• When will the government publish a timetable for decommissioning decrepit jails?
• When will it establish a national network of diversion schemes from police stations and courts for the mentally ill?
• When will it invest in community-based drug and alcohol schemes to cut addictions and reduce offending?” 

Notes
1. In an interview with The Times (12 July, 2007), Jack Straw stated that “the government will not be able to build its way out of the prison crisis” and indicated that “the only way the pressure could be relieved was by sending fewer people to jail and using more non-custodial sentences.”
2. In Lord Carter’s 2003 ‘Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime’ report, he called for more effective use of custody, concluding:: ’Given the current level of the prison population, there is no convincing evidence that further increases in the custody rate or sentence length will significantly reduce crime.”
3. Every year, over 130, 000 people are received into prison.
4. Every year an estimated 70,000 school-age children enter the youth justice system.
5. According to the Department for Children, Schools and Families, during their time at school seven percent of children experience their father's imprisonment.

The Prison Reform Trust December 2007 prison factfile is available here

You can read the Carter review here