Close to 20 years ago, in December 2007, the Labour peer Lord Carter presented a report to the then Labour government on how to resolve the prisons crisis.
Among the recommendations in his report, Securing the future, I mention two.
First, Carter argued that “the current building programme has to be accelerated and expanded”, in order for capacity to keep up with demand.
Second, he called for changes to sentencing to reduce the imprisonment of low risk offenders, “reserving custody for the most serious and dangerous offenders“.
Few ideas are entirely new in politics and, faced with another prisons crisis, the current generation of Labour ministers have come up with much the same answers as the previous generation did.
On the one hand: build thousands more prison places, on an accelerated timetable, to try to keep up with the rising demand parliament has manufactured through successive legislation.
On the other hand: change sentencing and other practices (recall, for instance) to reduce the number being unnecessarily imprisoned.
The prison building programme is badly behind schedule, as the National Audit Office pointed out just before Christmas. It seems unlikely that the Labour government will be able to get it back on course in time to meet projected rising demand.
This is good. We lock up far too many people as it is.
This leaves sentencing reform and improved resettlement arrangements as one of the few big levers that ministers can pull.
This is a complex area of policy and I was delighted that a number of colleagues in other criminal justice organisations took up our invitation to share their ideas on what needs to be done.
You can read all the articles here. We'll be publishing further pieces in March.
