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The justice secretary denies there is a prisons crisis, but what else should one call it? Assaults, self-harm and suicide have risen alarmingly over the last year: Nick Hardwick, the chair of the parole board and former chief inspector of prisons thinks that violence behind bars is at its worst ever level. None of this is surprising given the sharp decline in staff numbers and loss of expertise since 2010, leaving 18,000 officers overseeing 86,000 inmates and dealing with new challenges presented by the influx of “legal highs”, mobile phones and use of drones to smuggle in other contraband. The good news is that Liz Truss has carried through some of the more practical of her predecessor Michael Gove’s bold promises on reform in today’s white paper on prisons. Stressing that the system’s purpose is safety and rehabilitation, not just containment, the justice secretary promised to recruit 2,500 more officers and build 10,000 modern prison places – including five small women’s “community prisons” – so decrepit Victorian jails can close. Such change is welcome; and it is needed urgently.
Prisons have been used as dumping grounds, the last resort for dealing with social policy failures, as their population shows: around a quarter have been in care as a child, at least a third have a mental or physical disability, and half have the literacy levels of an 11-year-old. It is hard enough to tackle complex and deep-rooted problems at the best of times; it is impossible to do so under current conditions. It is pointless to talk about rehabilitation when there are too few prison staff to let inmates out of their cells for longer than an hour or two or ensure even the most basic levels of hygiene, let alone engage constructively with them as the new strategy demands. Even with today’s boost, there will be 4,500 fewer officers than in 2010. And no one has yet built their way out of a prison crisis. Yet while ministers’ rhetoric has changed, in reality they are still on the course set by Michael “prison works” Howard and David Blunkett: the sentence inflation that they oversaw – for theft and drug offences, as well as violent and sexual crimes – has doubled the prison population since the early nineties. Real reform demands the courage to address sentencing, as former home and justice secretary Ken Clarke pointed out, and redirect resources to credible community alternatives, found to have significantly lower reoffending rates than short sentences in the government’s own research.
Recidivism costs the country £15bn a year, Ms Truss warned; almost half of prisoners are reconvicted within a year of release. She maintains that the solution is to cut reoffending, as well as increase early intervention to prevent people from committing crimes. In truth, to be viable, such a reduction needs enough officers with the opportunity to build relationships with a smaller prison population in a better estate.
The alternative, as Mr Clarke pointed out, is simply condemning more people to “overcrowded slums”. Nowhere is more deserving of this name than Pentonville, where an inmate was stabbed to death last month. Back in 1938 it was described as long overdue for demolition, yet here it is still, almost 80 years later, now condemned as “the grimmest of the grim”. Mr Gove was right to single it out when he first proposed his “new for old” building scheme; Ms Truss must make sure it is one of the first to go.
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