On his appointment as justice secretary, aware of the need to make cuts, Chris Grayling made clear that he saw a stark choice between reducing the number of people in prison and reducing the costs of each prison place. He, of course, chose the latter – an approach laden with wishful thinking that is in turn counterproductive to the government’s supposed ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’.
Focusing on the unit cost of custody may make sense in theory, but the results have been devastating across the prison estate: fewer staff, fewer purposeful activities and more prisoners lying around in bed all day with nothing to do. Time and again, inspection reports from across the country tell a story of a counter-revolution in rehabilitation. There are significant knock-on costs to this, as the lack of behaviour-changing courses can leave people languishing behind bars when they might have otherwise been released – a factor that will be ever more common as legal aid is curtailed. That is not to mention the costs of continued reoffending by people leaving prison on society at large.
An incoming Labour government in 2015 would face similar problems – and the £3bn spent on prisons each year will strike many progressives as an appealing place to look for savings when compared to schools, the NHS, sure start or policing. The new Titan prison in north Wales, for instance, comes with a price tag equivalent to 18 new secondary schools.
But making effective savings in the prison budget necessitates a degree of political leadership that seems absent from our political debate. It is interesting to note that in the United States, where the problems of mass incarceration are far greater than our own, a discussion around the purpose and scale of prison has started on the Republican right. Newt Gringrich wrote in an article with ultra-conservative Pat Nolan that jails are ‘for people we’re afraid of – but we fill them with people we’re just mad at.’ If any other public service cost the taxpayer £37,648 per user and had a failure rate of 58.5 per cent (the reoffending rate for short-term prison sentences), we would start to question its use.
For the vast majority of people, more cost-effective and more humane approaches exist. The reoffending rates for community sentences stand at 35.9 per cent, which, while by no means perfect, sits far below that seen for the kind of custodial sentences dished out for comparatively minor offences. Community sentences can come in the form of unpaid work, drug treatment, restorative justice or a whole host of other measures tailored to tackle the reason why someone is committing crime. They also come at approximately a tenth of the cost of custody. What is also clear, as we have seen in the Howard League’s national awards programme for community sentences, is that successful schemes are hugely popular in their local areas.
In a time of ongoing economic uncertainty, all spending decisions are fiercely political, from social housing to schools, the armed forces to the NHS. But it just so happens that in justice policy, the progressive and proven effective approach is also the most economically robust.
It is time for Labour to lead that debate and begin a national discussion to cut the size of our bloated prison population.
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Frances Crook is chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform
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