Watch our Director giving evidence the House of Commons Justice Committee
Our Director, Richard Garside, gave evidence yesterday to the House of Commons Justice Committee, as part of its inquiry into the future prison population and prison capacity.
Also appearing before the Justice Committee with Richard were former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, and independent prisons consultant, Rob Allen.
Among the subjects discussed was the government’s plans to send prisoners overseas, to reduce the pressure on places in the prisons across England and Wales. Richard said:
If I was trying to find 300 or 400 places in the British prison system, I could certainly think of better ways, and more cheap and more effective ways of doing it than trying to offshore prisoners in Estonia.
Richard pointed out that there were more than 1,000 prisoners on the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence who were five years or more over-tariff, of which 600 were ten years or more over-tariff. He argued that if the government were ‘more energetic’ in expediting the release of IPP prisoners over-tariff, this could ‘make quite a big impact on the prison population quite quickly’.
He also highlighted the problem of recall of released prisoners back to prison, often for petty breaches of release conditions. He pointed out:
Back in 1993, there were under 100 prisoners in custody under recall; it’s now in the thousands.
He also talked about reducing the number of people remanded in prison pre-trial, and being more ambitious with the early release scheme.