The prime minister, in his speech to Labour conference, ticked off some of the government’s biggest achievements by talking about problems that were acute in 1997 and were now historical memories. He said that the last NHS winter crisis was six years ago. For all that, there is one annual crisis that is building in intensity. Every year we have the same problem of overcrowded prisons. Every year the crisis is handled – just – and then the same solution is offered: build more.
Building and overcrowding have walked hand in hand for more than a decade. Despite Labour’s extra 17,000 prison places, costing £100,000 each to build, overcrowding is now worse than ever. Moreover, prisons are increasingly doing little more than containing people, with little effective rehabilitation. The re-offending rate within two years of release has risen from half at the beginning of the 1990s to over two-thirds now. Prison is failing to stop the next crime and so prevent the next victim.
There are two main reasons for the growth in numbers. One is year-on-year sentence inflation. The other is ‘prison creep’, the gradual extension of prison for lesser crimes. Two per cent of shoplifters went to jail 10 years ago. Now one in five do. This increase reflects both the effects of government legislation to build up minimum sentences and a reaction by sentencers to the political and public climate. Crucially, while 15 years of this approach by Tory and Labour home secretaries has filled the prisons as fast as they are built, it does not seem to have brought about public confidence or serenity. And the remorseless rise of the re-offending rate suggests that while we have longer sentences for prisoners, less is achieved in them.
The home secretary announced a series of measures yesterday to cope with the immediate crisis. Anyone visiting a prison over the last few months can see the extent of it on the faces of the staff, and on each wing and landing stretched to breaking point. Many of his measures are not new, and some, frankly, have a reheated air to them. But we can only hope that they bring some relief.
However, this is not going away. In the summer, Reid announced the building of another 8,000 prison places by 2012. That will take us from the leading imprisoner in western Europe, up beyond Bulgaria into the middle of the eastern European league. This will be achieved at a huge financial cost, with the additional task for government of persuading local communities that it is a good idea to build a prison in their backyard. Even more pertinently, there simply won’t be enough places. The Home Office’s own prison population figures, which came out a few days before Reid’s announcement, clearly show that 8,000 places will only match the very lowest of their forecasts. Not only will the 8,000 places not be enough, they will be full before they are built.
What needs to happen now is a clear-eyed look at who we lock up. Prison is an institution designed to punish and rehabilitate serious and violent offenders, it vital that it be left to do that job. The Lord Chief Justice, in Sunday’s Observer criticised the use of jails as social dustbins. The Chief Inspector of Prisons has estimated that the healthcare centres of our prisons contain some 500 people who should be immediately transferred to the NHS. We know that almost three-quarters of men in prison have two or more mental disorders – against a figure of one in twenty in the outside world. I have visited prisons in big cities where staff say 100 per cent of the people coming in are intoxicated on drugs or alcohol at the time. We are using our prison system to cover up the fact that we have not, as a society, worked out how to deal with mental illness, addiction and drinking in the community. Only leadership on these challenges will take us off the path we are on.