Cutting the deficit: How about a reduction we could all agree on?

This article was written on the 18 May 2010. A version of this article was published by New Turn on the 24 June 2010.

The new coalition government’s commitment to cutting the deficit could be just the catalyst we need to move towards a sensible, evidence-based criminal justice policy that we can actually afford. And it may work too!

Back when the election was all set to be a seemingly drab and uninspiring affair, before the unexpected advent of the television age in British electoral politics, the debate surrounding deficit reduction and ‘ring-fenced’ frontline services was the hot potato to excite emotions and set pulses racing. Well, not quite. Unsurprisingly, we now know the overriding number one priority of the new Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government is going to be to reduce the structural deficit. The only caveat being that this will happen without a one year delay, as proposed by both the Liberal Democrats and Labour during the election campaign. The main burden is going to fall on ‘reduced spending rather than increased taxes’, according to the preliminary negotiation agreement published this week. Non-front line services will be protected during the projected £6 billion first round of cuts to be made during this financial year. However, in the long term front-line services cannot avoid being scaled back if the government is serious about bringing the structural deficit under control and making public spending remotely affordable once again. There is certainly one spending black hole where a touch of fiscal realism wouldn’t go amiss: our increasingly bloated and lumbering prison system.

England & Wales (both Scotland and Northern Ireland have separately administered systems that escape the clutches of the Westminster government) has the highest per capita incarceration rates in Western Europe: 154 per 100,000. Under the Labour government, the prison population has increased by over 30,000 inmates, and currently stands at just over 85,000. Despite this unprecedented (at least by the standards of democratic Britain) population growth, reoffending rates for offenders leaving prison remain intolerably high: 75 per cent for offenders serving one year or less in prison are returned within two years. In spite of this systematic failure, last year the Treasury all but guaranteed £4.24 billion on new prison building over the next 35 years; and this is before you consider the cost to the taxpayer of imprisoning just one offender is now over £40,000 per year.

The Commission on English Prisons Today, produced by the Howard League for Penal Reform (and presided over by the venerable Cherie Booth QC, no less), argued the government at Westminster could actually do better by doing less. Amongst other things, the Commission argued for a reduction in the prison population, including the closure of some prisons. This could in part be achieved by the replacement of short prison sentences with appropriate community-based sanctions. In 2007, 55 per cent of people admitted to prison served less than six months, putting a considerable strain on a system which is currently at 110 per cent of overall capacity – with some individual prisons bursting at 179 per cent. And all this when the evidence suggests short prison sentences exacerbate the problem of persistent offending. Properly supported community-facing sanctions, that engage with victims and their communities to try to undo some of the damage inflicted by criminal activity, can make a real and positive impact. Victims of crime are listened to, the wider community benefits by employing the productive capacity of offenders on projects the community choose and want, and offenders are given the opportunity to make amends without losing their jobs, accommodation, and (often) family and friends – all factors and vital support networks that help reduce the risk of reoffending. Society is spared the cost of future crime; the taxpayer is spared the cost of supporting a system that is failing.

A systematic change as broad as the one proposed above is neither impossible, nor particularly radical. The fact that prison isn’t working for a significant number of offence-types is near indisputable, and there is broad degree of academic, practitioner, and even political consensus on the issue. In January, the cross-party House of Commons Justice Select Committee published a report criticising the Ministry of Justice for attempting to increase capacity of the prison system to 96,000 by 2014 whilst simultaneously seeking £1.3 billion worth of cost savings. Instead, the MPs suggested the prison population could be ‘safely capped’ at current levels, and then reduced over time to a more manageable level ‘likely to be about two thirds of the current population’. However, it cannot happen overnight; it will take political courage on the part of David Cameron and his Conservative cabinet colleagues, and a degree of pigheadedness from the Liberal Democrats (a trait they are rapidly becoming well accustomed with). Nevertheless, scaling back our Leviathan-like prison system should be a serious consideration within the full Spending Review to be conducted by the Government during the autumn.

The initial signs are positive from the new governing coalition, even if the specifics on reconciling the two parties’ criminal justice policies unsurprisingly did not make the cut for the preliminary coalition announcement. The parties have already committed to ‘a new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences’. Hopefully this ideal will be extended to curtailing the impulse, uncomfortably evident during the tenure of the previous administration, to increase the tariffs for a whole swath of relatively minor offences as well. On this note, the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto was unambiguous: ‘We will introduce a presumption against short-term sentences of less than six months – replaced by rigorously enforced community sentences’. A position David Cameron attacked in the live television debates: ‘when someone smashes up the bus stop, when someone repeatedly breaks the law, when someone’s found fighting on a Friday or Saturday night, as a magistrate, you’ve got to have that power for a short prison sentence’. It would be mischievous and highly-selective of me (although perhaps more fun) not to add Cameron’s caveat: ‘when you’ve tried other remedies’. And here’s the crux of the argument: magistrates should have greater flexibility to impose stringent but suitable punishments that account for the circumstances of the crime, that allow other ‘remedies’ to be tried before prison. It is political interference that has driven the fashion for dishing out of custodial sentences, and it is a luxury we increasingly cannot afford.

Removing short sentences goes against the grain of recent Tory policy, but Cameron and co. may just be able to do it. Nick Robinson’s recent blog noted the Conservative leader does have a radical streak; and it was a Conservative government that last took a controlled approach to penal policy, achieving modest prison population reduction between 1988 and 1992 after (equally) modest growth in the early years. Perhaps it is prophetic, but it was the Liberal Home Secretary, and later Conservative Prime Minister, Winston Churchill who initiated the longest period of decarceration in British history (from 1908 to 1939) during which prison population was reduced by 50 per cent. We need to take a sensible approach to criminal justice policy; part of this is politicians and the media allowing discussion and debate that does not immediately descend into posturing on ‘tough on crime’. The coalition government can take the first steps if it wants to. We keep being told that this is a brave new world of politics. It is time to be brave.

Postscript: 23 June 2010

Very tentatively, I am going to say it: the signs are positive. To the outrage of some Tory backbenchers, Ken Clarke has dared to ask the question, ‘why is the prison population twice what it was when I was the Home Secretary not so very long ago?’. Quite. The National Association of Probation Officers (Napo) and the Howard League for Penal Reform are calling for an end to ‘pointless’ prison sentences: imprisonment of less than six months that actually increases the likelihood of reoffending, and at a huge cost to the tax payer. Alternatives to short term imprisonment are well researched and are not only more cost-effective in reducing reoffending, they are also cheaper. This is not about letting serious or dangerous criminals ‘off-the-hook’, but recognising that what we are doing now is quite simply not working. Demand an intelligent approach to our criminal justice system that reduces crime, remembers that victims and communities have needs too, and actually means fewer people end up in our incredibly damaging penal system – support the Howard League’s Less crime, safer communities, fewer people in prison campaign.