Many commentators have been attempting to hold the very public funeral of political ideology for years now, claiming that all parties hold essentially the same views. Their obsequies are made more difficult by the fact that the corpse won’t ever stop moving for quite long enough. But there is one area where the proverbial Martian visitor would be hard pressed to see a difference: prison. Prison numbers started to rise in the early 1990s and have continued to shoot up since, untroubled by changing governments or home secretaries.
Since 1997, the Labour government has increased the number of prison places by around 18,000 and rising. The cost alone is quite eye-watering. Each place costs roughly £100,000 to build and £37,500 a year to run. Nor is this a one-time adjustment. The prison population through the 1980s and 1990s had been reasonably stable at around 45,000. It reached over 77,000 at the last seasonal peak before Christmas. Home Office predications reach 90,000 by the end of the decade. Of course, any government has to do what is necessary to keep people safe.
If the rise in prison numbers were due to more people being found guilty of more serious crimes, the government would merely be reacting to circumstances. But the rise is being caused by more punishment, not more crime. People now get sent to prison for offences that did not attract custody before. For example, shoplifting, the most common offence before magistrates’ courts, now leads to prison for a fifth of offenders, as against 2.6 per cent a decade ago. Also, sentences are getting ever longer for more serious crimes, with no evidence that this cuts reoffending. In fact, the reoffending rate has risen remorselessly over recent years. Sixty-seven per cent of those released from prison in 2002 reoffended within two years.
In addition, as has been well reported recently, the incredible growth in imprisonment has led to a system that is both chronically and acutely overcrowded. Thousands of people eat and sleep in a shared cell with a toilet in the corner. People are moved around the country to accommodate the pressure of new entrants, even if it disrupts the very education and training designed to rehabilitate. The average distance a prisoner is kept from their family is over 50 miles – an epic trip with children in tow. It is no wonder that almost half of people in prison lose contact with their families. And yet we know that family contact, along with training, education, employment, drug treatment and mental health care are the keys to reducing reoffending.
Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of prison as a solution to crime than the fact that overcrowding has become, in effect, institutionalised. Prisons have been overcrowded every year since 1994. It is impossible to imagine any other public service that would be allowed to continue indefinitely with gross overcrowding. The fact that they are overcrowded shows that we don’t really know what they are for. They have become a catch-all; an ever-growing social service and a despairing reaction to crime and the fear of crime. As David Blunkett said in 2002: ‘We have had an increase from 40,000 to 71,000 over the last seven years in the number of prison places, and a fat lot of use it has been in reducing crime and disorder.’
However, we did not arrive at this point by accident. Political parties across the world seem to have sensed a hardening of public opinion about crime since the 1990s. In 1990, at the outset of his national political career, Bill Clinton signed up to the New Orleans declaration of the New Democrats, which stated: ‘We believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals, not in explaining away their behaviour.’ He distanced himself from the old ‘liberal’ approach to crime associated with the Democrat Party. Tony Blair has always been at pains to state that the tide of liberalism may have risen too high in the 1970s. In that sense, it looks as though the ‘third way’ found some compromise on home affairs to be the price for government. But this analysis misses out the fact that other parties have shifted ground, too.
Douglas Hurd was the last home secretary to make a serious effort to reduce imprisonment, which he called an ‘expensive way of making bad people worse’, before John Major, in 1993, called for us to ‘condemn a little more and understand a little less’. Both parties shifted more or less from one consensus to another. But where has over 10 years of tough language and prison growth taken us? Crime was falling before the growth in prison numbers was established, and the prime minister’s strategy unit has estimated that the vast growth in prison numbers since 1997 only accounted for five per cent in the fall of crime.
Less tangibly, has it brought about that sense of ‘civil serenity’ that Neil Kinnock called for in the summer edition of Progress? Not only do the public and the newspapers have trouble believing that crime is falling, they also have trouble believing the courts are getting tougher, so what is the policy of mass imprisonment achieving? We know that it is not cracking the cycle of crime and reoffending. In the US during the 1980s and 1990s, many states passed ‘truth in sentencing’ laws to end parole, and ‘three strikes’ legislation to toughen up sentencing. As the prison net grew, and more and more people were caught in a cycle of returning to prison, many states reached the point of bankruptcy.
Now, across the US, states are pioneering decarceration policies. New York City, which saw such a signal drop in crime, actually reduced its prison population at the time of zero tolerance, diverting people into drug treatment. California passed Proposition 36 by popular vote five years ago, against the frantic opposition of much of the law enforcement community, to divert non-violent drugs offenders from prison into community treatment. It not only proves that community alternatives can work, but that public opinion is often far ahead of where politicians imagine it to be, especially when given workable alternatives to the despairing option of prison.
Even if it were possible to ignore the consequences of mass imprisonment once, now the sheer cost of it will greatly restrict other public policy choices. If the US example teaches us anything it is that prison can soak up as much money as you throw at it. Prisons are part of the criminal justice toolkit: they can punish serious and violent offenders while protecting the public from them. But they neither work as a social service nor as a symbolic punishment of ‘toughness’ for people with chaotic lives. They will continue to soak up an endless stream of public money and compound the problems of crime and poverty unless something changes. That ‘something’ can only be political leadership coupled with wide-ranging, evidence-based policies to attack the causes of crime. That really is ‘tough’ – but essential. Nothing else will do it.