Our latest eBulletin, sent out to subscribers on Friday, 31 January
Some of the most significant exchanges in parliament happen not in the House of Commons or House of Lords chambers, but in the Committee Room corridor.
Take, for instance, last Monday, when the Public Accounts Committee heard from some of the most senior civil servants in the Ministry of Justice. They included the Ministry’s top civil servant, Permanent Secretary, Dame Antonia Romeo, and Amy Rees, the Director General of the Prison Service.
The Committee is conducting an Inquiry into the government’s plans to build more prison capacity. As the Chair of the Committee, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, explained in his opening remarks, things have not been going well:
In 2021, the Government committed to build 20,000 new prison places... this is not expected to be delivered until 2031, five years later than planned, and at an increased cost of £4.2 billion. In response to extreme pressure on available prison spaces, the Government have enacted emergency measures, taking a reactive and costly approach to try to urgently increase capacity.
One of the most striking exchanges, for me, came over what might appear to be a rather dull matter: prison maintenance budgets. The Prison Service has £220 million to spend in this financial year and £300 million next year on prison maintenance.
Is “£200 million a year on maintenance enough?”, Sir Geoffrey asked Dame Antonia. She was refreshingly candid in her response:
It is not enough. As HMPPS has revealed, we need £2.8 billion to totally remediate. In the current SR, we were given, specifically, £220 million and £300 million. We can all do the maths. We are going to need a lot more money in the next spending round to begin to make inroads into the maintenance.
One problem here – something that a number of MPs and Peers have been raising over recent months – is the outsourcing of prison maintenance to private contractors, something widely seen to have delivered poor returns at an inflated cost.
Were prison maintenance to be brought in-house, the argument goes, the current maintenance budget would go a lot further. I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. I also wonder whether there are more fundamental issues at stake.
When it comes to prisons, governments have, over many years, been living beyond their means. The result is miserable, decaying buildings, impoverished regimes, too many prisoners and not enough staff. New, expensive capacity only compounds the problem: pushing up the running and maintenance costs of the prison estate over time.
Politicians across the political spectrum do the easy work: talking tough and passing legislation pumping up demand for more prison capacity. But they fail to do the difficult work: thinking about what an appropriate level of imprisonment is, how the prison estate should be organised, and how it should be paid for.
Back in 2019, the House of Commons Justice Committee estimated that, were the government to close the gap between the money available to prisons, and the actual costs of running and maintaining them, the prison population would have to be reduced by some 20,000.
This is, perhaps, one of the few areas in public policy where budget cuts might serve a progressive function.
I hope that the Public Accounts Committee makes some strong recommendations about how the government can live within its means. I also hope that ministers and MPs are paying attention.
Richard Garside
Director
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies provides evidence
January began with a flurry of call for evidence deadlines. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has submitted evidence to the Independent Sentencing Review (you can read our submission here), the Justice Committee inquiry on rehabilitation and resettlement, and the Public Account Committee inquiry on prison estate capacity (you can download our submission here).
In two weeks, our Head of Programmes Helen Mills will be giving evidence to the Westminster Commission on Joint Enterprise (we are also working on a podcast on Joint Enterprise, more information to follow next month).
In the news
This month our Director Richard Garside appeared on Talk TV to discuss terrorism and extreme violence and on NTD News to talk about IPP (you can view the video here). Meanwhile, in print, Richard was quoted in this Politico piece on Labour’s approach to low-level crime.
Working Paper series
In the latest paper in our Working Paper series, our Research Director Roger Grimshaw examines the contexts and challenges of indefinite sentences. The purpose of the series is to provide a vehicle for research and analysis of an exploratory and innovative nature. Please do take a look at our guidelines for more information on the series and how to propose a working paper.
Commentary and analysis
This month, Lord Timpson mentioned plans to close one women’s prison. Former prison governor, John Podmore wrote a piece for our website explaining why the real answer is to keep just one open.
In advance of a new report we are publishing on Offensive Weapons Homicide Reviews — written by Dr Susie Hulley and Dr Tara Young — our Policy and Research Officer Daisy Lutyens and Head of Programmes Helen Mills set out the context for the report and highlight some of its observations.
Meanwhile, our Policy and Research Officer Liat Tuv comments on the use and limitations of ethnicity data.
Interested in submitting a comment piece? Drop us a line.
What’s what in The British Journal of Criminology?
For more than sixty years, The British Journal of Criminology has published some of the most significant research in the field.
A number of open-access advance articles have been published this month:
- Kevin Hearty on the criminology of war
- Kathy Hampson and Anne-Marie Day set out the case for abolishing detention and training orders in England and Wales
- Monique Moffa, Asher Flynn and Kate Hutton Burns on female defendants who have been misidentified as primary perpetrators in domestic and family violence contexts
- Alexandra Ridgway, Gemma Hamilton, Anastasia Powell and Georgina Heydon analyse the disconnection between crisis intervention for family violence and long-term therapeutic support for sexual harm
- Sarah Turnbull examines the British government’s recent concern around ‘vulnerable detainees’ and reforms to immigration detention
- James Rosbrook-Thompson, Chris Greer, Eugene McLaughlin, Jonathan Ilan, Gary Armstrong, Carrie-Anne Myers, Emmeline Taylor and Chris Rojek explore how actuarial models can predominate multi-agency initiatives like the Integrated Gang Team.
Prison Service Journal 276
The latest edition of the Prison Service Journal features contributions from some of the speakers at the annual Perrie Lectures series. It also includes articles by Helen Downham on prison libraries and David Adlington-Rivers on hope. To read all the articles, and discover the winner of the 2024 Bennet Award, check out the edition page here.
Mike Guilfoyle essay prize
Submissions for the essay prize in memory of Mike Guilfoyle, organised jointly by Napo and us, close later this month. A long-standing friend of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, and a Napo stalwart, Mike wrote us regular articles on probation practice based on his vast experience. You can see the whole back-catalogue of these here.
This year’s essay question is: What does professionalism mean in probation?
It is open to all serving and former probation staff, as well as those in training to become probation officers.
The closing date is 28 February 2025, 11:59pm. You can access the guidelines and submission page here.
News from our partners
This week, the Alliance for Youth Justice released a new briefing: Adultifying Youth Custody: Learning lessons on transition to adulthood from the use of youth custody for young adults. The briefing is supported by the Transition to Adulthood (T2A) Alliance, a Barrow Cadbury Trust criminal justice programme building the case for a distinct approach to policy and practice relating to young adults in the criminal justice system. Membership of the T2A Alliance consists of leading criminal and social justice organisations, including the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
Also this month, our friends at StopWatch published an article on police pay and held the first of their monthly RISE! REPAIR! REBUILD! forums in Leeds to discuss ways of helping each other stay safe from harm and violence, and providing support for those in need. Next month, StopWatch Policy Advocacy Lead Jodie Bradshaw will take part in a panel, hosted by Bristol Cop Watch, which will focus on section 60, why community police monitoring matters and community intervention projects as non-policing solutions to serious violence/youth violence.
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