Hope without optimism

Is it, indeed, possible to do so? Perhaps the system is so broken, the politics so cynical, as to doom criminal justice to endless bouts of short-term crisis management, and long-term managed decline.

“Depressing” is the adjective commonly used, by a range of commentators, reformers, advocates and activists, to describe the latest policy announcement about, the latest news from, prisons, probation, the courts, the police and other criminal justice institutions.

There is a lot in criminal justice to be depressed about, some might argue. A cheerful optimism, in the face of so much that is wrong, arguably borders on the naïve, if not on outright delusion.

The recent government announcement that it intends to end the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence “by the end of this Parliament” is a rare, recent source of hope. Yet this concession to compassion and common sense only came about because of a lengthy and herculean effort by IPP prisoners and their families, supported by those inside and outside parliament.

The House of Commons Justice Committee first recommended wholesale reform of IPP in 2022. Four years on, the current government has finally decided to initiate a process that may result in the sentence’s complete abolition in the coming years. 

If it takes so long to achieve such a small, though important, reform – IPP prisoners account for around 0.1 per cent of the total number of individuals processed by the criminal justice system each year – what hope is there of our politicians tackling the big stuff?

If our politicians can’t rise to the occasion, perhaps the answer is a Royal Commission. This is the call from MPs on the Justice Unions All Party Parliamentary Group, of which the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is one of the founding members.

Highlighting, in a recent letter to the Prime Minister, “squalid and violent prison conditions, with ineffective education and rehabilitation programmes... excessive probation workloads, severe courts backlogs and intolerable pressures facing staff throughout the criminal justice system”, they called for a Royal Commission to help guide “holistic, end-to-end reform, rather than the current piecemeal approach of narrow reviews”.

While Royal Commissions are relatively straightforward to set up, they can take years to report, delaying much-needed action in the meantime. As Harold Wilson once put it, the problem with Royal Commissions is that they “take minutes and waste years”. Wilson, by the way, established ten Royal Commissions during his two periods in office as Prime Minister.

The solutions Royal Commissions come to may also create new problems, as much as they may help to resolve old ones. The last Royal Commission on criminal justice, which reported in 1993, led to the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). Last year, and after a string of failings, the Justice Committee concluded that CCRC had “shown a remarkable inability to learn from its own mistakes”.

Now under new, improved, management, the CCRC is starting to address the injustices of the IPP sentence, having referred 25 cases to the Court of Appeal so far this year, with more to come.

There is no guarantee that the problems of the criminal justice system will be resolved over the next few years. Indeed, there are good reasons for thinking that the problems could get worse before they get better, if they get better at all.

Given this, a cheerful optimism, a belief in the inevitable triumph of progress, is probably misplaced. At the same time, pessimism or cynicism gets us nowhere.

Better, perhaps, is Christopher Lasch’s notion of “hope without optimism”: a realism about the challenges ahead, without being overwhelmed by them. An openness to the possibility of change, without assuming its inevitability. It also means retaining a capacity to identify opportunities where they are, and act on them, whether this is short-term work on specific problems, or longer-term thinking and work to solve general and systemic challenges.