Sixty years ago, Carl Aude, the then principal of the Danish training school for prison officers, attended a training seminar in Wakefield, England.
“It was my first meeting with the English prison system”, he later wrote, “and my expectations were great”. He continued:
England has always been ahead in prison reform. John Howard and Lionel Fox are the first and the last names in a long line of world-known reformers. From the annual reports of the Prison Department I was informed of the heavy problems connected with overcrowding in outmoded buildings and the endeavours to solve them. England has been characterized as a land of contradictions in the prison system
I came across Aude’s fascinating observations, buried away in a half-forgotten edition of Prison Service Journal (PSJ), from 1966, while working with colleagues on the digitisation of the entire back catalogue of PSJ, starting with the first edition in 1960.
Change a few names and it could have been written today.
If anything, though, the problems Aude referred to have only got worse. The current version of “heavy problems connected with overcrowding in outmoded buildings” has the feeling of a runaway train, with our dilapidated prisons forecast to run out of space by early 2026 by the latest.
And it is not just our prisons. The justice system, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee argued earlier this month, “faces total gridlock in 2026”.
But if the crisis has the feeling of a runway train, it is ministers who are in the driving seat. It is in their power to apply the brakes.
Earlier this month I was speaking to a senior Ministry of Justice official about what the government planned to do. They were waiting for David Gauke’s review of sentencing, they told me, after which they wanted to move quickly.
How quickly, I asked. Legislation would be laid before parliament before the summer recess, the official told me.
These comments came a few days before the confected row over so-called “two-tier justice”, occasioned by the publication of new Sentencing Council guidelines on pre-sentence reports.
If government ministers are to be serious about applying the brakes to the runaway train, and addressing the general crisis in the justice system, they are going to have to get better at making the case for systemic reform, and at facing down spurious criticism.
