reform Archives - The Longford Trust

Reduce Demand for Prisons, Not Meet It

Author: LongfordBlog | 22 Oct 2023

Longford Scholar Chris Walters (currently working at the Trust’s Fundraising Manager) shared some reflections on October 22 with readers of the Independent in a personal Comment article for the paper about the plans the government has announced to cope with the overcrowding crisis in prisons. Drawing on his own experiences, Chris questioned whether the proposals will actually ease the problem. We are sharing the article here, with thanks to the Independent.

With the government’s latest plans to address our prisons crisis – the jail population is at an all-time high, with as few as 550 spare places left in the system – justice secretary Alex Chalk asks us to believe the unbelievable. He cites Covid-19 and industrial action as the significant pressures filling up our prison estate. But even in 2015, 60 per cent of our jails were overcrowded.

Again, Mr Chalk lauds his government’s efforts to return offenders on parole who breach their licence conditions to prison, even if it contributes to overcrowded jails as if this didn’t happen before, and isn’t indicative of wider failures in the criminal justice system

Criminals are “dangerous” – except for the ones the government has earmarked under its proposals to free up capacity: those convicted of less serious offences who warrant early release, and those minor offenders being spared a jail term altogether. It is a plan that belies a wilful misunderstanding of the criminal justice system.

‘I’ve witnessed swarms of rats, tried to keep clean in filthy showers, and in 2018, during the freezing Beast from the East, I worried I wouldn’t survive the night as icy wind blew in through the broken window.’

I served two years in prison, from 2018 to 2019 – first at HMP Wandsworth, and then at HMP Ford. Despite what Mr Chalk may believe, there aren’t spacious single cells just waiting to be transformed into doubles. Shoving more prisoners into a cell is hardly a solution to an overcrowding issue. The bleached bones of the UK prison estate have long been picked clean by ambitious ministers just like him who demand that prison governors find more capacity.

And what are these non-essential maintenance works which Mr Chalk says have now been stopped, thereby opening up more cells for use? From all accounts, our prisons are run-down and unhygienic. I’ve witnessed swarms of rats, tried to keep clean in filthy showers, and in 2018, during the freezing Beast from the East, I worried I wouldn’t survive the night as icy wind blew in through the broken window.

All the while prisoners and staff are battling for survival, they don’t have the capacity to work on rehabilitation. And so, when prisoners are released, they often return – and so the prison population rises, and the government responds with a vow to get tougher on crime and builds more prisons.

Meanwhile, there is a growing number of prisoners on remand, not yet convicted of a crime, which is an indication of a wider problem in the criminal justice system. There is a severe backlog of criminal cases – some people are now waiting five years for a trial date – and the government’s insistence on locking people up for longer will not help.

Mr Chalk crassly described the proposed growth in the prison estate as meeting demand, but it’s more apt to say it is feeding a fire. Until there is ground-up radical reform, we will have this same conversation again and again and again.

People on remand are held in prison conditions so poor that two separate European nations have recently refused to extradite people to this country if they face imprisonment. The justice secretary has proposed to increase the sentence discount for people who plead guilty. He said this is to “[…] encourage people to plead guilty at the first opportunity”. Those on remand are presumed to be innocent, and when held in such poor conditions, it is especially unjust and immoral for him as the Lord Chancellor – upholder of our legal system – to coerce them into pleading guilty.

‘It doesn’t matter how good your education programme is if prisoners are confined to their cells for most of the day in overcrowded jails’

The government has given some ground, it seems, almost begrudgingly. Mr Chalk has described Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences as a “stain on our justice system”, and yet only pledges to implement one of the 22 recommendations found in the report by parliament’s Justice Committee, which examined IPP sentences. Further use of community orders and a reduction in short custodial sentences are welcome, but don’t “grasp the nettle”, as Mr Chalk puts it. Most prisoners are serving custodial sentences of over a year and won’t be affected. Moreover, these plans put further strain on services inextricably linked to the prison system such as probation, healthcare and housing. It will inevitably be charities who pick up the slack.

Actual long-term reform gets short shrift from Mr Chalk. He has pledged that prisons will be “geared to help offenders turn away from crime, to change their ways, and become contributing members of society”. But he says nothing about how that is to be achieved.

Prisons minister Damian Hinds has rightly recognised the importance of education in reducing reoffending, promising a brand new Prison Education Service. This is a great move, but meaningless unless the issue of offending is addressed holistically. It doesn’t matter how good your education programme is if prisoners are confined to their cells for most of the day in overcrowded jails.

‘We can reduce the demand for prisons by meeting the needs of our people’

The government is well aware that the most important factors in reducing reoffending are education, employment, housing and maintaining family ties. Yet it seems they are more concerned with increasing the quantity of their prisoners than the quality of their prisons. A quality prison should reduce the prison population, as we have seen in Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands.

The justice secretary should seek to reduce demand for prisons by lobbying in cabinet for wider reform. Prison staff and Legal Aid solicitors’ pay must reflect the important role they play in our society. Prisons must meet minimum basic standards to ensure prisoners re-enter society with dignity. The National Health Service must expand and receive more funding to better address mental health issues in the community. The government must do more to prevent homelessness and poverty.

Overcrowded prisons do not exist in a vacuum separated from the other pressures on society. They are the result of inadequately addressing those pressures. We can reduce the demand for prisons by meeting the needs of our people.

Prison doesn’t work. But prison education does.

Author: LongfordBlog | 2 Nov 2021

Better prison education means less reoffending, less crime, and less cost to society. Our Director Peter Stanford makes a fresh plea for the virtuous circle of education in prisons.

Current projections are that the number of prisoners in our jails will rise by 2026 from the current 78,000 to 100,000 – a huge increase when we already have the largest percentage behind bars per head of population anywhere in western Europe. To accommodate such an expansion, the government has set aside £4 billion to build more prison places to cope with the consequences of its own policies of tougher sentences.

There remains in Westminster and Whitehall an abiding belief that prison deters both offending and reoffending. The facts suggest otherwise. In many categories crime is now on the rise, despite the repeated ramping up of sentencing guidelines. Meanwhile just short of 50 per cent of current prisoners will be convicted again within 12 months of release – more in the younger age groups.

Such a list of statistics, I know, is too often a prompt for readers to look away. For decades the prison reform lobby has strained every sinew to highlight such figures to create a public mood to tackle what by any standards feels like a pretty poor return for the £44,640 per year that it costs to keep each prisoner behind bars in England and Wales.

But for all their efforts, and the evidence they provide, as a society we remain emotionally addicted to the comforting old mantra that “prison works”, coined by Michael Howard while Home Secretary in the 1990s.

My own tiny part in this debate is around prison education. For the past 20 years on a part-time basis I have worked with a trust, set up in memory of the late Lord Longford, that provides scholarships of money and mentoring to encourage young serving and ex-prisoners to go to university.

Numbers helped are small: around 500 scholarships handed out over the period, currently at the rate of between 30 and 40 each year. But our results, I would suggest, provide a practical and human glimmer of hope.

Just short of 85 per cent of those we support go on to graduate and use their degree to begin careers that mean they never offend again. Fewer than 4 per cent return to prison.

My day job is as a journalist and writer – so I could now give you countless uplifting and inspiring stories of those young men and women we have supported and how they are now thriving members of their communities. But in the limited space I have to argue for a new direction in prisons policy and public attitudes to what goes on in our jails, I’d like to focus not on anecdotes (check out our website for these), but on facts.

Research shows that, among those in prison who engage with education, reoffending rates on release are closer to a third than the more general 50 per cent. In other words, “prison education works”.

That is the argument I have been making in recent years to various official enquiries, including in 2016, as a panel member on Dame Sally Coates report on prison education, commissioned by Michael Gove when Justice Secretary.

I was there at its publication launch, on the other side of Parliament Square from the Palace of Westminster, when the man who remains a senior Cabinet minister accepted the findings with words Nicholas Parsons had made famous – “without hesitation, deviation or repetition”.

Since when, very little has happened to enact even the most basic of the reports’ recommendations:

That education be given a higher priority in prisons because we know it changes outcomes;
That every prisoner have a personal education plan (just as every learner in school does) as part of their sentence planning that carries some force and travels with them from jail to jail;
And that prison education provision continues to be inspected by Ofsted, but when it is judged to be inadequate or failing, something changes as result. At the moment, prisons can rack up half a dozen damning Ofsted verdicts and carry on as before. Just imagine if a school failed its Ofsted five times in a row and there were no consequences. Or if the prison inspectorate judged the prison hopeless at security.

The problem with the lack of follow-through since the Coates report, I must stress, is not simply money. The panel very carefully came up with a core set of recommendations that could happen within the existing tight prison education budget. The reason there has been no progress, I believe, is lack of interest. Ministers calculate that there are few votes to be won by doing prison better. What electoral benefit there is, they believe, comes with doing prison more.

Hence the planned prison building spree. The scheme hardly counts as leadership in the face of the challenge of reoffending by released prisoners that the Ministry of Justice’s own figures say costs to society and tax payer £18.1 billion. If you start making education more effective in prison, you will have less reoffending, less crime, and less cost to society. That is the virtuous circle.

Indeed, there could hardly be a better place to be investing resources in education than a prison. Almost two thirds of prisoners have the literary skills of an 11-year-old – four times the level in general society. Some 42 per cent have been expelled or excluded from school, as against just one per cent of the total school population in England. So many young men and women, when they find themselves behind bars, have a light-bulb moment. They realise the opportunity school offered them for a better life, how they spurned it, and are now desperate for a second chance.

So where in particular should any new investment go? Two suggestions-

First, into a better-trained, better-paid, and better-equipped cohort of education staff in prisons, up to and including the equivalent of a Teach First scheme to bring new energy to a group that is too often at the bottom of prison officialdom’s rigid hierarchies.

And second, a rule change to allow limited and supervised access to the internet for studying for those prisoners who have demonstrated real commitment to education as a means of changing their lives.

The argument against such a change from the prison service (which instead has invested millions in the Virtual Campus, an internal intra-net system, closed off from the internet, that prison learners hardly use such are its inadequacies) is that any digital concessions will be used by prisoners to stalk victims or control criminal networks.

They may be right in some cases, but under suitable supervision, and if treated as a privilege to be earned which will be lost if misused, there are plenty of technical fixes to ensure such pitfalls could be avoided.

The need for such a reform has been made even more urgent by the pandemic, which has created a boom in digital education courses at all levels. As it stands, prison learners can have no access to them. So much potential is going to waste as a result. All those hours stuck in their cell with nothing to occupy them when they could be studying and getting qualifications.

The most compelling argument, though, is that, taken together, these two reforms would require a fraction of the budget set aside for building more prison places. And the facts tell us they would deliver much better results. For us all.

This article was first published on Conservative Home. All figures used come from the winter 2021 edition of the Bromley Briefing, produced by the Prison Reform Trust