Over 20 years ago, in October 2002, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said that Labour was ‘at our best when at our boldest’.
His comment came in a speech making the case for transformative change to public services. ‘Do we take modest though important steps of improvement?’, he asked. ‘Or do we make the great push forward for transformation?’.
I’ve been around long enough to remember Blair’s speech, and I thought about it while catching up on the new Labour government’s widely-trailed plans, announced by the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to ‘defuse’ the ‘ticking prison “time-bomb”’.
Given the capacity crisis faced by male prisons, the Justice Secretary had to do something, and quickly.
Having invoked the possible ‘collapse of the criminal justice system’ and ‘a total breakdown of law and order’ to justify the measures, what has been announced is modest.
It is also symptomatic of the policy dysfunction at the heart of prison sentencing policy.
Successive governments and parliaments have created a prisons crisis: legislating for ever longer sentences and creating ever more hurdles for released prisoners, making it more likely that they end up back in prison.
In response, government ministers have been left coming up with creative solutions, such as the latest announcement, to ‘fix’ a problem created in Whitehall and Westminster.
Earlier this year, the recently-appointed prisons minister, James Timpson, said that only one third of those currently in prison needed to be there.
As for the nearly 3,000 prisoners serving IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentences, many of them languishing in prison years beyond the sentence of the court, the Justice Secretary’s announcement does nothing for them.
Prisons, and much of the wider justice system, struggle along in a state of permacrisis. The Labour government sits on a huge majority and is untroubled by a shell shocked and disorganised Conservative opposition.
In place of modest tweaks and managerial fixes, the government should seize the opportunity to pursue bold, transformative change.
As a start, it could develop a strategy to manage down the prison population over the medium- to long-term, rather than building more and more prisons. As the outgoing Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk, told the BBC earlier this month:
If the situation is that we haven’t got new money, are you seriously going to be saying that instead of building a new hospital, we’re going to be building a new nick at the cost of £600,000 per cell?
With a majority of more then 150 seats, now is the time for Labour to be bold on criminal justice reform. Indeed, if not now, then when?
