An editorial I came across recently captures well the crisis currently engulfing the prison and wider criminal justice system.
Prison population levels are “unacceptable”, with “no signs that a ceiling has been reached”. Given the difficult economic times, there is “no money available for the construction of expensive new prisons”. Indeed, “many worthwhile schemes to improve the lot of both staff and inmate have had to be postponed or cancelled”
Perhaps if we rethought our priorities, the editorial suggests, we might develop better solutions to social problems, “without spending vast sums of money” on prisons.
The editorial, written at a time when “unacceptable” meant 42,000 in prison in England and Wales – less than half the current number of around 88,000 – was published in the January 1977 edition of Prison Service Journal.
An echo from a bygone age, it could have been written yesterday.
History may not repeat itself in the literal sense of the same events recurring. Yet prisons policy does appear locked in something doom loop.
Two years after the Prison Service Journal editorial, the 1979 report of the May committee inquiry into prisons across the United Kingdom recommended that effective policies “to reduce the populations should receive urgent examination”.
Twelve years after May, the 1991 Woolf report recommended diversion from custody, to reduce the unnecessary use of prison. Twelve years after Woolf, the Carter report in 2003 found “no convincing evidence that further increases in the custody rate or sentence length will significantly reduce crime”.
In 2010 the House of Commons Justice Committee warned of a “crisis of sustainability” in the criminal justice system, and criticised an “unthinking acceptance… of punishment… for its own sake”. In 2019, the Committee observed that “a series of political and policy choices by successive governments and parliaments” has been “a significant contributor” to the rising prison population.
And now the Gauke review into sentencing, published last week, proposes a series of reforms intended to reduce the current prison population by around 10 per cent.
While welcoming Gauke’s report, the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, also recommitted the government to building an additional 14,000 prison places by 2031, “the largest expansion since the Victorian era”.
How do we get out of this doom loop?
I don’t think it is as simple as saying that politicians just need to be ‘brave’, or ‘do the right thing’, or follow the evidence, or spend now to save later. Perhaps if there was a simple solution, it would have been found by now.
Today’s politicians are, though, dealing with the weight of the decisions of all the previous generations: the physical infrastructure of our prisons, courts and other buildings; the institutional arrangements, which are often highly resistant to change; the inherited common sense of how to do policy in this area.
They are also, though, haunted by imagined futures: the judgment of history, or, more prosaically, the judgment of the voters at the next election.
Even if there were an ambition to try something different – and it is far from clear to me that there is – the fear of future failure weighs heavily. Far easier to stick with tried and tested policies, even if no one really believes they will be successful.
History may not repeat itself mechanically. But today’s politicians are making decisions burdened by the past, fearful of a future they appear unwilling to shape for the better.
Far from building a better future, they risk rebuilding a dismal past.
I am going to be exploring the way that past, present and future combine in the making of criminal justice policy at our event – Echoes of tomorrow – on 24 June.
I hope to see you there.
