Reduced crime, fewer victims, more effective community solutions, less prison – is penal reform in prospect?

Download PRT's July 2010 edition of the Bromley Briefings prison factfile here
 
When the new justice secretary, Ken Clarke, was last in charge of prisons and penal policy, as home secretary, the average prison population in England and Wales (1992 – 1993) was 44,628. That figure now stands at over 85,000 – a number Ken Clarke described after his appointment as “extraordinarily high”. On 15 June he announced ‘a full assessment of sentencing and rehabilitation policy’.
 
It won’t take long to determine how and why things went wrong. The social and economic costs of populist policy, increasingly early recourse to custody and inflation in sentencing have been immense. In the current climate it would be a form of economic madness to allow the prison population to continue to spiral out of control.
 
Despite its exorbitant cost, £45,000 per prisoner per year plus £170,000 to build and maintain each new place, prison has a poor record for reducing reoffending. Half of all adults and almost three quarters of young people are reconvicted within one year of being released. The National Audit Office estimates that re-offending by all recent ex-prisoners costs the taxpayer up to £13 billion a year.
 
More pressing, and more important, is how to put matters right. Solutions can be drawn from thorough-going government reviews of the justice system conducted over the last ten years. The Haliday sentencing review identified fairness and proportionality as cornerstones of the justice system. It recommended sparing and appropriate use of custody and an expansion of the ‘intermediate estate’ including improved bail accommodation and the provision of halfway housing.
 
The Social Exclusion Unit report on preventing re-offending by ex-prisoners pre-figured the ‘rehab revolution’ by calling for improvements in resettlement, supervision and support on release. It recommended removing still-standing blocks to rehabilitation, like the inadequate discharge grant, and proposed amending the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.

The Corston review could still transform the justice system for vulnerable women. Thirty eight ‘one-stop’ women’s centres are up and running with measurable outcomes that should lead to sustained funding. Lord Bradley’s review of diversion is unequivocal about the success of diversion into mental health and social care.

The Justice Committee has outlined how local and national government can draw on lessons from abroad where justice reinvestment and prisoner re-entry programmes, driven by economic necessity in many states in America, have had considerable success at reducing crime and rates of re-offending. Closer to home, restorative justice with young people in Northern Ireland has delivered a reduction in youth crime, a drop in child custody and a 90% victim satisfaction rate. Integrated offender management pilots in parts of England and Wales have achieved impressive results and are waiting to be rolled out nationally.

A breathing space from obsessive concentration on increasing prison capacity at all costs would give the government time to restructure the system. Local authorities, voluntary organisations, police and probation services must work more closely together to develop community solutions to crime that inspire public and judicial confidence. It is not difficult to improve on a flawed system in which 66% of people enter prison to serve less than a year and, after a few weeks or months, leave homeless, jobless, out of touch with their families, further in debt, and ready to offend again.

There is broad public and Parliamentary consensus on investing in getting children out of trouble and nipping youth crime in the bud, diverting addicts and people who are mentally ill into effective treatment as well as informing and supporting victims, transforming prisoner rehabilitation and cutting re-offending on release.

The sentencing review should rationalise the rafts of new offences and mandatory penalties much criticised by judges and magistrates and examine the explosion in indeterminate sentencing – from 3,000 indeterminate sentences in 1992 to 12,822 in March 2010. The high number of recalls for technical breach of license and any unnecessary use of custodial remand must be addressed. Differential rates in use of custody up and down the country should be examined alongside availability of effective community measures.

In a debate on prison policy in June 2007 Ken Clarke called for “a change of culture in which the platitudes about community sentences and making prison only for those who need it are turned into reality by returning proper discretion to the courts and ensuring that prisons are used only for violent, dangerous and recidivist criminals in conditions in which there is some hope that some of them will be rehabilitated”. As a moderate prescription for reforming our overcrowded and underperforming prison system the coalition government could do a lot worse.