Printer FriendlyReiding between the lines
The prison service is in a deep crisis. But, argues Michael Mansfield QC, the problem is that New Labour (and Tories alike) think prison ‘works’
There is a vacuum. Criminological bankruptcy. A stark lack of vision. Beyond the posturing and the rhetoric there lies a supine fear of tabloid vilification. Sentencing policy has become beholden to the populist response, couched in easy sound bites terms.
Upon assuming the office of Home Secretary, John Reid proudly pronounced that the Labour Government has ‘locked up more people for longer’ than any predecessor as if the prison population is a market commodity whose numbers provide a quality assured marker of a safer society. All this kind of statement achieves is reinforcement of a punitive and thoroughly erroneous belief that ‘prison works’ – a notion purveyed by yet another Home Secretary, Michael Howard.
The facts demonstrate a quite different truth, not that high-ranking politicians have ever allowed the facts to get in the way of the truth. Richard Garside, the acting Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at Kings College, London, observed recently:
"The Government has lost its way on sentencing policy. It continues to unpick a framework it only introduced a couple of years ago. There is no sense of any underlying philosophy, or a clear set of principles that could guide its decisions. It is left lurching from one crisis to another, chasing short term headlines while doing nothing to address the underlying malaise in the sentencing system."
In the 1980s I was involved in two high-profile Prison Riot Trials – Risley and Strangeways. I acted for the main defendant in both. At that time there were a number of other disturbances in prisons throughout the United Kingdom. The complaints were manifold but some were common, longstanding and obvious. The two most serious, and inter-related, were overcrowding and deficient regimes. The Woolf Report which followed these events was a thorough investigation of the causes and made far-reaching recommendations. They have not been heeded.
When Lord Woolf produced his Report in 1991, the prison population was stabilised and falling. Within the passing of a mere decade the situation has been reversed. The population has very nearly doubled, with the Home Office predicting 190,600 by 2010. This is one of the highest pro rata prison populations in the world and the highest in Europe. At the end of February 2004, 85 of 138 prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded and at the end of November 2003, over 16,500 prisoners were doubling up in cells designed for one.
Small wonder that the Home Office is presently in a state of desperation and crisis. Various hare-brained schemes are being activated in the face of saturation – by 6th October it was just 162 short of capacity. Operation Safeguard it is claimed would release 500 police cells at £300 per night per prisoner. Such a measure is both short-lived and expensive: in 2002 it cost over £10 million.
Consideration is also being given to deporting some of the 11,000 foreign prisoners, or alternatively housing some of them in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. The Maze, whose infamous H blocks saw the IRA hunger strikes of the 1980s, was closed in 2000 and demolition commenced in October 2006. Similarly, converting disused Parachute Regiment barracks in Dover is under review.
Even more extreme, conjuring up Dickensian descriptions of prison hulks in the Thames Estuary in ‘Great Expectations’, is the bid to use ships as floating prisons. Ridiculously, the Government is negotiating with an oil firm for the return of HMP Weare at £10 million per year, having only just sold it for oil exploration in Nigeria for a quarter of that cost.
All of this adds up to a blunt instrument for forging a human dustbin. Keeping the lid on is now the only object. Containment is the name of the game.
Forget sensible regimes, rehabilitation, let alone reformation. Prison and Probation Service staffing levels, let alone resources, do not permit such initiatives being successfully implemented. The only way prison works in these circumstances is to sustain the criminal way of life.
Once again, the well-known and long-appreciated cycle of re-offending has surfaced in the Cambridge University study into delinquent behaviour going back over forty years to 1961. This prompted the headline in The Times on Friday 10th November 2006: ‘Two-thirds of criminals sent back to jail within two years.’ The findings suggest that the most prolific criminals start early and have long criminal careers. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the main recommendations of this study to halt the ‘revolving door syndrome’ is a programme of early intervention focussed on important childhood risk factors – criminality in the family, poverty, impulsiveness, poor parenting and low school attainment. An echo of tough on crime and tough on the causes. Mind you, it was only another soundbite so far as Blair was concerned.
In April 2004, Lord Woolf, then the Lord Chief Justice, delivered the Mischon Lecture at University College London entitled ‘Do we need a new approach to penal policy?’ He highlighted those same problems, as he had foreshadowed in his earlier Report:
"The average cost of keeping a prisoner in custody is over £36,000. But prison is ineffective in reducing re-offending… the inescapable conclusion is that unless there is a dramatic change in the way that we deal with offenders there is every likelihood of the position getting worse."
These sentiments have been echoed recently by his successor, Lord Phillips, who spent a day experiencing community service in October 2006:
"It is madness to spend £37,000 jailing someone when spending much less on services in the community you can do as good a job. It is no answer just to put more and more people in prison."
These are simple points that are simply understood. Were there to be a Home Secretary brave enough to suffer the slings and arrows in order to promote reasoned, sensible and effective policy, the public would be better served and better protected. Sir Leon Radzinowitz, the eminent criminologist observed:
"No meaningful advance in penal matters can be achieved in contemporary democratic society so long as it remains a topic of political controversy instead of a matter of national concern."
In place of a meaningful advance, the latest raft of imaginative proposals include a promise to build another 8,000 prison places by 2011, the abolition of an independent and critical Prison Inspectorate and a crackdown on early release. This is being put forward under the banner of a rebalancing of the system in favour of the victims of crime. Were the victims to be given the full picture of a system in which crime is fostered and festers until the point of release and a system in which prevention attracts scant attention, still less the resources, there might be a better prospect of a less punitive and more constructive national community.
Perhaps the most trenchant, and illuminating insight, however, into the Home Office approach to prison regimes, and any real prospect for change, comes in the revelations contained in the Quinn Report on a nine year reign of terror at Wormwood Scrubs. The Guardian [13th November 2006] published the results of the investigation which found more than 160 prison officers were involved in inflicting and covering-up a ‘regime of torture’ between 1992 and 2001. The Quinn review concluded that the findings had such serious ramifications for the prison service as a whole that a Public Inquiry should be held. Needless to say, no Home Secretary, from Blunkett onwards, has been prepared to act courageously and openly on this and establish a far-reaching and fundamental judicial Inquiry to reappraise the workings and objectives of the prison system.
Mike Mansfield QC is the President of the Haldane Society
This article can be found in the print edition of Socialist Lawyer number 45, December 2006.
