Prison overcrowding

Building the alternative

  • The Guardian,
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The level of overcrowding in Britain's prisons has not reached crisis point because there is more crime in our country. Overall there is less than there was. Nor has the overcrowding become worse because we have fewer prisons than before. We have many more. It has become worse because more offenders are being sentenced to prison for longer periods and because new prisons are not being built at a fast enough rate to accommodate them all. Unless this spiral can be stopped, crisis responses of the sort we saw yesterday could become the new norm.

Fourteen years ago the prison population in England and Wales was 45,000. Yesterday it passed 81,000. Such a steep rate of increase and such a staggering total - we now imprison around 150 people per 100,000 of the population, while both France and Germany imprison fewer than 100 - are unacceptable in principle and unmanageable in practice. It was the latter reason that triggered a government early release announcement yesterday, which will ease some of the pressure but may do little to avert another crisis in a few months. The announcement marks a failure of government and a crisis of management. Government willed the end - tougher prison sentences for more offenders - but without willing the means - enough places to accommodate and rehabilitate them. It was a humiliating moment for the government as a whole - as much for the outgoing prime minister who encouraged the strategy and for the chancellor who refused to pay for it, as for successive home secretaries and the new minister of justice. It ought to prompt an extensive rethink. The fear is that it will do no such thing.

There are two ways of dealing with overcrowding and they both have a role. One is to requisition more emergency detention spaces and to build more prisons. Even before yesterday, the government had ordered 8,000 extra places in a £1.5bn programme due for completion in 2012. Yesterday, Lord Falconer signalled another 1,500 places, some of which will come on stream as early as next year, at the cost of a further £240m, new money which will therefore not now be available for other programmes. Even so, it may well not be enough. But emergency use of police and court cells, where facilities are wholly inadequate and rehabilitative options non-existent, can never be anything except a temporary and marginal solution. We will never simply build our way out of overcrowding.

The other approach is to make changes in sentencing and in regimes. To its credit, the government has long recognised that practical alternatives to custody can be expanded without either undermining effective sentencing or putting the public at unacceptable risk. To its discredit, the government has shelved some of the most promising of these approaches for lack of cash. Ministerial eagerness to implement the indeterminate sentencing provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (which have helped to drive up prison numbers) contrasts with ministerial reluctance to pay for the probation service to implement the act's "custody plus" approach to shorter sentences (which would definitely have helped hold numbers down).

Yesterday, Lord Falconer announced a carefully crafted early release programme which would allow around 1,200 prisoners on shorter sentences to serve the last few days under supervision in the community. The scheme offers an easing of the pressure on places in the short-term. Whether it offers a lasting cure rather than temporary sticking-plaster is less certain. Even so, it is a much more hopeful line of approach than just building more prisons. The government will get a terrible press for its action - one reason, perhaps, why it has been announced under Tony Blair rather than Gordon Brown. Yet this new ministerial approach should be supported if sanity and balance are ever to return to sentencing policy.

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