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PRT director, Juliet Lyon's editorial from the latest issue of prisonREPORT
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| Penal policy is littered with contradictions. Government has given a firm commitment to reserve prisons for serious and violent offenders giving hardpressed prison staff the chance to work intensively to reduce re-offending. But, instead of sticking to this plan, following the Carter review it now seems intent on pouring unspecified billions of pounds of public money into ‘titans’, giant prefabricated institutions, each holding up to 2,500 people. On current form the end result is going to be armies of ex-offenders released homeless, jobless, out of touch with their families and ready to offend again. | | | 
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Our prisons have become a dumping ground for those failed by other public services and the scale of the problem is now immense. Each year over 132,000 people go to jail and 70,000 children enter the youth justice system. According to the Department for Children, Schools and Families, during their school years a staggering 7% of children will experience their father’s imprisonment. Last year more children were affected by the loss of a parent through custody than by divorce. Our reliance on prison is such that it appears difficult for politicians to present a clear, authoritative case for alternatives to custody.
Too often we get dragged back into retrogressive, or sterile, debate when things could be moving forward. The Children’s Plan, just published, shows how work to support children in need, and in trouble, can be integrated across government departments. Yet at the same time consultation responses are being sought on pain control and the use of child restraint in secure training centres and extraordinary proposals to arm prison staff with batons for work with under 18 year olds. This, when policy makers’ and practitioners’ attention could, and should, be on achieving some consistency of care and management, and improvements in staff training, and supervision, in young offender institutions. Above all, they could be working to reduce the numbers of children entering the justice system in the first place.
The long-awaited government response to Baroness Corston’s review of vulnerable women in the criminal justice system, while positive, speaks more of a ‘direction of travel’ than a properly funded programme of change. Yet a recent ICM opinion poll, commissioned by SmartJustice, shows a heartening 86% public support rate for local centres for women in the community, where they can address the root causes of their offending and take responsibility for their lives.
Prison overcrowding is not a storage problem. Rather than dredging up ships or panic building, what is needed is a long, hard look at how we use prison and the very many instances when imprisonment is not the best way to cut crime. Investment in treatment for addicts would lead to a dramatic drop in offending. Most acquisitive crime, shoplifting and theft, is driven by drugs. Binge drinking fuels violence and public disorder offences. It is welcome news that government is at least prepared to consider diverting the mentally ill from police stations and courts into the healthcare so many badly need. The fact is so many of the solutions to crime lie outside prison walls.
We have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope for far too long. The expression ‘alternatives to custody’ probably does not help. ‘Community solutions to crime’ better describes the wide range of options available. Years of inflation in sentencing, years of political tough talk on crime and years of the media deriding restorative justice have made prison an early port of call. Concerted, disciplined work, and the re-introduction of proportionality in sentencing, could drive down the use of imprisonment. Custody would then be the alternative for the comparatively few people whose offending is so serious, or so violent, that the courts decide they cannot be dealt with in the community and must lose their liberty. |
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