The Council of Europe condemns British inaction on prisoner voting rights

A version of this article will appear in the September 2010 edition of Around Europe.

Well, actually they haven’t condemned British inaction, at least not recently. However, if past meetings of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers are anything to go by they will do when they meet next week. The British government has persistently failed to implement the rulings of a 2005 European Court of Human Rights case that found the continued political disenfranchisement of all British prisoners illegal. But why should prisoners be allowed to vote at all?

‘Imprisonment is by the deprivation of liberty a punishment in itself’, so state the 2006 European Prison Rules. Whether the ‘deprivation of liberty’ includes the freedom to vote in democratic elections remains contested ground.

At least, it remains contested ground in some quarters. In its 2005 ruling Hirst v. the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights was quite emphatic: ‘Such a general, automatic and indiscriminate restriction on a vitally important Convention right must be seen as falling outside any acceptable margin of appreciation’. The ‘Convention’ in question is the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. Let’s not mince our words: the UK’s blanket ban preventing all prisoners from voting irrespective of the nature of offence committed or length of sentence is both unreasonable and illegal.

The UK is not, however, the only Council of Europe member state to disregard international treaty obligations and European case law. As the table indicates, the international picture varies quite dramatically, and no clear pattern is discernible by either geography or political tradition: the UK and Russia both exclude all prisoners from voting; Ireland and Ukraine do not.

Countries that allow prisoners to vote (without restrictions):	Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Kosovo, Monaco, Norway, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine
Countries that allow prisoners to vote (under certain conditions):	Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Malta, FYR Macedonia, Moldova, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey
Countries that do not allow prisoners to vote:	Azerbaijan. Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, United Kingdom
Countries that do not allow prisoners to vote and continue to impose restrictions after release:	Armenia, Belgium, Luxembourg, United States (differs among states)

The issue remains contentious, and some judge saying somewhere that prisoners should be given the vote is just not going to cut it with the naysayers. Fair enough. Proponents of penal reform need to win the intellectual (and emotional) argument. I hope to put down a few markers in what follows.

The British government’s argument in court that ‘removal from society means removal from the privileges of society, amongst which is the right to vote for one’s representatives’ may not hold legal sway, but there is certainly some emotional logic to the defence. However, it is in society’s interest to reintegrate offenders back into the community upon release from prison; to encourage ex-prisoners to become productive members of said communities; to reduce the likelihood of reoffending, ensuring there are fewer victims in the future. Social exclusion is a key driver of criminality and continued reoffending. Political inclusion can play a part in countering the perverse effects of this exclusion.

The European-based AIRE Centre argued convincingly that the Committee of Ministers’ recommendations regarding the management of ‘lifers’ provide a justification for allowing prisoners to vote.

Recommendation Rec(2003)23 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the management by prison administrations of life sentence and other long-term prisoners
General principles:
3. Consideration should be given to the diversity of personal characteristics to be found among life sentence and long-term prisoners and account taken of them to make individual plans for the implementation of the sentence (individualisation principle).
4. Prison life should be arranged so as to approximate as closely as possible to the realities of life in the community (normalisation principle).
5. Prisoners should be given opportunities to exercise personal responsibility in daily prison life (responsibility principle).

The justification is not explicit. However, the ‘individualisation’, ‘normalisation’ and ‘responsibility’ principles support ‘the extension of the vote to prisoners by fostering their connection with society, increasing their stake in society and taking into account their personal circumstances and characteristics’. The psychological impact of involving prisoners in the ‘normal’ workings of society should not be underestimated. To take the even more seemingly mundane example of bank cards, the reaction of an ex-offender to being symbolically part of society is telling: ‘I know it seems a bit trivial but sometimes it seems important also [because] you just feel like everybody else. It’s been years and years since I ever imagined using a card in a shop’. The research evidence suggests that this emotional dimension is part of a matrix of reasons (both practical and psychological) that explain why assisting prisoners in accessing basic financial services has a positive impact on the rate of reoffending experienced.

Hopefully the Coalition government will not drag its feet in the way Labour managed to for five years. At the very least, denying convicted prisoners the option of fulfilling their democratic obligations serves no purpose in either protecting the public or reforming the offender. At worst, it damages our democracy. In the words of a Canadian high court judge, the limiting of the franchise ‘undermines the legitimacy of the government, the effectiveness of the government, and the rule of law’. That’s not a particularly favourable outcome either.

The article is based on research undertaken for an upcoming report investigating the social reintegration of ex-prisoners in across the Council of Europe.

'Nobody should face expulsion just for being Roma'

A shorter version of this article will appear in the September 2010 issue of Around Europe.

Throughout the summer months, amidst a growing furore and international condemnation, France has expelled over a thousand Roma from the EU Member States of Romania and Bulgaria. Surely in this age of European cooperation we can do better than this?

President Sarkozy’s ‘war’ on delinquency (read: deportation from France of thousands of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma) has brought widespread criticism from human rights organisations, government ministers, the Catholic Church, the UN. Figures from across the political spectrum, in both France and beyond, have thrown in their two cents.

The French government intends to dismantle at least 300 illegal Roma and travellers’ camps. The deportations are not new (10,000 deportation took place last year and already as many as 8,000 in 2010), but following riots in July – including an attack on a police station by members of a Roma community in the Loire Valley - the political rhetoric has been cranked up to boiling point.

Since late July, about a thousand Romanian and Bulgarian nationals have been repatriated. Just over 150 of these were forcibly removed. Many accepted €300 resettlement payments to quit the country quickly and quietly (payments that cannot prevent a hasty return to France a few weeks later).

The measures are raising eyebrows (which comes under the category of decisive action) in Brussels. Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship (a mouthful even before you add ‘and Vice-President of the European Commission’), issued a statement reminding ‘all Member States [to] respect the commonly agreed EU rules on free movement, non-discrimination and the common values of the European Union, notably the respect for fundamental rights, including the rights of people belonging to minorities’. The Commission has yet to establish whether French policy contravenes EU regulations, but if ‘solid proof’ of illegality emerges action through the courts is a real possibility.

French ministers have played a straight-faced defence thus far. The Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, cited skyrocketing crime rates as the primary cause; in the last 18 months crimes committed by Roma people have increased by 259 per cent in Paris, the minister stated. The government is concerned that the camps are ‘sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and crime’. ‘This is not about stigmatising this or that population’, added the immigration minister Eric Besson, ‘but we cannot close our eyes to reality’.

Monsieur Besson is not wrong. Europe’s Member States have all too often had their eyes firmly shut, ignoring the plight of the continent’s ‘largest minority’. Europe’s ten to 12 million Roma are disproportionately affected by discrimination, violence, unemployment, poverty, bad housing and poor health standards. However, discrimination and abuse in the countries people have left is no excuse for replicating it whilst slapping on a return to sender note.

Roma from Bulgaria and Romania are EU citizens with the same fundamental rights to free movement and residence within all Member States. There are caveats to this. Transitional agreements are in place which allows Member States to introduce the full rights of EU citizenship gradually. Freedom of movement and the right to seek employment without requiring a permit will not fully apply to workers from Bulgaria and Romania (both of whom joined in 2007) until 1 January 2014.

In fact, the right to move freely and reside anywhere in the EU is not unconditional, irrespective of where you are from. EU citizens staying for more than three months must be economically active, have comprehensive medical insurance or have sufficient resources not to become a burden on the state. A Member State has the right to remove an individual after three months if they fail to meet these conditions. Restrictions can be legitimately imposed based on public policy, security and public health. Reasonable enough, it seems.

However, proportionality cannot be discarded on a whim (nor, for that matter, because an increasingly unpopular president is facing re-election soon). The decision must be made exclusively on the grounds of personal conduct; conduct that represents ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society. Justifications that are isolated from the particulars of the case or that rely on consideration of general prevention shall not be accepted’ (Directive 2004/38/EC Article 27).

Expulsion based on a greater statistical likelihood of someone from your particular social group or ethnicity committing a crime does not fall into this criteria. To put it bluntly, in the words of Viviane Reding: ‘Nobody should face expulsion just for being Roma’.

France has friends. In 2008, Italy led the way – expelling Roma mainly of Romanian extraction – in a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly widespread. Last year Northern Ireland hit the headlines as Roma faced brutal attacks from members of the public; Copenhagen has requested Danish government assistance to deport 400 Roma; the police in Sweden have expelled Roma, in breach of both national and EU laws; and Germany is continuing the repatriation of thousands of Roma children and adolescents to Kosovo, amidst warnings from UNICEF of appalling living conditions and the Council of Europe’s protest that Kosovo is not able to receive refugees ‘in a way that protects their rights’.

Western European Member States are exacerbating a problem the roots of which lie in the economic and social exclusion Roma communities face in their home countries. France should not have to pay for the national policy failings of other Member States. The European Union is not meant to be a charity. At the same time, a more cooperative position towards a Europe-wide ‘problem’ would be more conducive to development and change. challenging the causes rather than acquiesing in the effects. In 2005, Europe kicked off the ‘Decade of Roma Inclusion’. From the halfway point, it would be helpful if Member States started by at least not being so openly exclusionary.

The EU is trying to build a consensus to improve the social integration of Roma across European society. Significant sums have been committed from the European Social Fund. This would be to the benefit of France, as well as the Member States where the money is being spent. Many of the great benefits of European integration – such as the free movement of people and labour – also create difficulties. Cooperation and coordination is needed. European countries, big and small, would do well to remember Commissioner Reding's words: ‘Europe is not just a common market – it is at the same time a Community of values and fundamental rights.’

Protecting the Human Rights of Prisoners: Promoting the Health of Everyone

A shortened version of this article is to be published in the July-August edition of Around Europe.

At the end of June, I attended the second CONNECTIONS Conference focusing on drugs and alcohol in the criminal justice system. The Conference drew delegates and speakers from across the European Union and beyond, and a great diversity of experience, both the successes and the failures, was shared over the course of two jam-packed days in London. Despite differences between jurisdictions, two constant themes proved pervasive: that drug and (particularly) alcohol rehabilitation and harm reduction services can and should be delivered more effectively (both in and out of prison), helping more people turn around their lives; and that impending budget cuts offer both an opportunity to think again, but also pose a great risk.

The right to health care for everyone, including prisoners, is well established in international law. The provision in Article 12 of the 1966 United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights firmly stated ‘the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’. The UN (1990) Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners outlines how the aforementioned right to health shall be delivered: ‘Prisoners shall have access to the health services available in the country without discrimination on the grounds of their legal situation’. The principle of equivalence may be firmly established, but considering the high health risks associated with prison – overcrowding, lack of sterile needles and poorly cleaned living space all dramatically increase the risk of contracting infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and tuberculosis – it can be argued that states have a heightened responsibility to those they take into their custody which is not limited to provision of health care, but extends to enabling and promoting healthy living.

Dame Anne Owers, who has just stepped down as head of the prison inspectorate in England & Wales, warned the Prison Reform Trust on Tuesday that it will be ‘challenging to maintain progress [in the prison system], never mind continue it’ in the years ahead. The examples I heard at the CONNECTIONS Conference – from Moldova, Portugal, Hungary, France, Hungary, Lithuania and others – showed some of the real progress being made in promoting health and harm reduction services in prisons across the continent, but also revealed the staggering health inequalities that remain and the significant risks faced people in prison. In Lithuania, for example, 76 per cent of HIV patients had been injecting drug users, and 71 per cent of all drug-dependent people have spent time in prison at some point in their lives. The nature of imprisonment seems to further increase this risk, as studies from across Europe suggest that between seven and 24 per cent of the prisoners who do inject, started doing so once they were committed to prison. Needle exchange programmes, although available in the community, are often not available in prison – security concerns are cited as trumping the right to equivalence of health provision. Moldova’s experience highlights the danger of not addressing the health implications of this approach. A local NGO – Innovative Projects in Prisons – found one-in-five inmates had been or were injecting, using needles (sometimes little more than ball point pens) that were being shared by up to ten or 12 prisoners. As a consequence of their research, the Moldovan government agreed to allow the organisation to pilot needle exchange and condom distribution in prison on a peer-to-peer basis, significantly cutting rates of HIV transmission. In the ten years since, similar projects have sprung up in 24 prisons across Moldova.

Prison presents an opportunity to reach some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of the community, and even to readdress some of the health inequalities in society. A high proportion of people with multiple health problems are incarcerated in prisons: for example, in England & Wales, 72 per cent of male and 70 per cent of female sentenced prisoners suffer from two or more mental health problems. Problems that the reality of prison life, more often than not, simply exacerbates. In the case of communicable diseases, diagnosis and treatment alongside the implementation of effective harm reduction schemes has benefits not just for the individuals concerned, but the communities to which prisoners will return upon release. Moldova, for example, is one of the few Eastern European countries that has managed to halt the spread of HIV throughout the entire population. Furthermore, good health and physical well being are crucial to the successful resettlement and social reintegration of ex-offenders after release from prison.

Good prison health is good public health. It is important that people do not come out of the prison system in a worse state of health than when they entered, more dependent on the public health and social services, less able to rebuild their lives. Ultimately though, it is only through a reduction in our overreliance on the use of imprisonment – over half of Council of Europe member states have larger prison populations than they did five years ago – that will limit the damage to individuals, families and communities that prison creates and perpetuates. The current budgetary constraints being experienced in many European countries is no excuse to demure from our responsibilities, or the broader social aims of criminal justice systems: the rehabilitation and social (re)integration of former offenders.

'A numbers game'? England & Wales's prison population: a European perspective.

Ken Clarke said in a speech last week to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies that, ‘for as long as I can remember, political debate on law and order between rival parties has been reduced to a numbers game’. Since then the press has been just full of ‘numbers’, including comparisons between England & Wales and our European neighbours. What can these statistics tell us, if anything? And is a European perspective meaningful at all on a continent with such diverse approaches to criminal justice?

Since the Coalition’s Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke stated last week that England & Wales prison population of more than 85,000 is, ‘quite an astonishing number which I would have dismissed as an impossible and ridiculous prediction if it had been put to me as a forecast in 1992’, all we have heard about is numbers.

The prison population has ‘doubled’ since 1992, the Secretary noted. ‘It costs more to put someone in prison for a year than it does to send a boy to Eton – on average £38,000’ he quipped (by the way, the Prison Reform Trust puts it at £45,000). Clarke told us reoffending has been rising in recent years, up 8 per cent for adults between 2006 and 2008. The shadow (and former) Justice Secretary, Jack Straw’s pre-emptive strike in the Daily Mail used a different rubric: adult reoffending down by 20 per cent since 2000; juvenile reoffending down by nearly 24 per cent over the same time period (Incidentally, at the beginning of Straw’s tenure at the Ministry of Justice he sounded far more like Clarke). Both agree that reoffending rates are ‘significantly higher’ – about 60 per cent within two years – for the 60,000 prisoners serving short sentences each year: Straw argues this is because ‘they are the hardest nuts to crack’, and community sentences have failed; Clarke, that ‘it is virtually impossible to do anything productive with offenders on short sentences’. Following?

On Sunday it all got a little bit more confusing. We had been told that the Ministry of Justice needs to cut £2bn from its current £8.7bn budget[1], with the prison system accounting for £4bn of the total spend. However, the Mirror reported the Government intends to plough ahead with the building of nine new jails, providing 14,000 further prison places by 2012. The following day Serco announced it had won the £415 million contract to build and manage a new prison at Belmarsh West in London.

I think we may have to wait and see what course the Government is going to take with regards to prison, probation and its ‘rehabilitation revolution’. As Straw noted in his Mail article, David Cameron did explicitly back short sentences in the television debates before the election (when attacking the Nick Clegg’s position). David Davis was forthright in his opposition to Clarke’s proposals, arguing his slogan as shadow Home Secretary had been to ‘Make Prison Work’. And it is fair to say that the Conservative back benchers are not overly chuffed with Clarke about this one. Moreover, Clarke did not make clear how exactly paying ‘independent organisations by results in reducing reoffending’ would work. Would organisations have to wait two years for payment? Would a reduction in the severity of the crimes committed be a factor, or would any parole violation, however petty, lead to non-payment? How do you avoid the ‘best’ offenders (i.e. those most likely not to reoffend again anyway) being cherry picked by organisations, who then receive their payment, whilst the individuals posing the most risk to society fall through the net, increasing the danger to us all?

‘The failure of the past’, argued Clarke last Wednesday, ‘has been to use tough rhetoric and to avoid taking tough decisions that might be unpopular.’ These tough decisions are still to come, although there is some room for cautious optimism. What I am interested in for the moment is how we, as an informed public, help shape those ‘tough decisions’.

I recently attended the European CONNECTIONS conference on drug and alcohol interventions in prisons, which concluded that you learn so much by simply comparing different experiences. If we look at the experience of England & Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland both have separate prison administrations) over the previous 15 years or so, and compare it to the other five largest European Union Member States, England & Wales increasing dependency on prison is clear:[2]


If you compare the prison population rate per 100,000 inhabitants of a country, the differing approaches of England & Wales and Spain, as compared to Germany, France and Italy becomes clearer still:

The mean and the median results in the second graph show the respective average for the number of prisoners per 100,000 of population for all 47 member states of the Council of Europe. The difference between the two numbers reflects the greater reliance on prison of some of the much larger Eastern European member states, notably the Russian Federation, which currently imprisons 609 people per 100,000 inhabitants. If you include England & Wales’s (generally smaller) western European neighbours in the graph the smaller median begins to be explained:


It all gets a bit messy, but in terms of western European experience, England & Wales, Scotland and Spain are clearly the exceptions, with the Netherlands and Portugal having successfully reduced the proportion of their population in prison in recent years, and the Scandinavian countries averaging well under half the incarceration rate of England & Wales over the series.

Why do I mention any of this? Well, because it is an easy and quick example of how people interested in criminal justice reform can demonstrate how England & Wales’s use of prison isn’t the norm in western Europe, even if we are far below Russia at 609 per 100,000 (or the USA at an eye-watering incarceration rate of 748 per 100,000). But be warned, this approach is fraught with danger, as this recent article from the Spectator demonstrates:

‘Britain is a “crime hotspot”. The latest European Union figures, collected three years ago, show England & Wales to have the third highest crime rate in Europe.

‘Yes, Britain locks up more people than most European countries. But this is because we suffer more crime. The way to determine if judges are issuing too many prison sentences is to look at the number of inmates, as a proportion of the crimes committed. Here, it is 16 – well below the European average of 21. Far from being vindictive, our prison system seems to let go of most of the persistent offenders.’

The figures were not referenced in the article, but I have no reason to doubt their validity. Anyhow, even if the source was provided, in all likelihood I probably would not have the time (nor the expertise) to look further into the figures. But that’s the point. All this talk about numbers misses the argument we should be having. Why are crime rates so much higher in England & Wales? Why do we feel we have to lock away so many more people? There are very different approaches to prison and post-prison rehabilitation, which are far more successful than our own approach. As a recent Time article showed, Norway is a shining example of this, with only 20 per cent of offenders being returned to prison within two years of release. However, the debate should be far wider than how we improve our prison and probation rehabilitation systems. Dame Anne Owers has often noted that the system ‘is a mirror for problems in prisoners’ communities’. Now, more than ever, is the time to talk about how we can build a more equitable society, one which is better for everyone in society.

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The above tables are constructed using Council of Europe Space I Penal Statistics, King’s College London’s International Centre for Prison Studies’ World Prison Brief, and returns from ministries of justice for previous and upcoming research.

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[1] To access the article, Google: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8e6b5fcc-83b6-11df-b6d5-00144feabdc0.html

[2] The above tables are constructed using Council of Europe Space I Penal Statistics, King’s College London’s International Centre for Prison Studies’ World Prison Brief, and returns from ministries of justice for previous and upcoming research. The full tables for prison population and prison population rate are available here.

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.

'What works' in reducing reoffending? A European perspective

A version of this article was originally published in Around Europe on 28 May 2010.

At the end of April, as part of QCEA’s ongoing research into the social reintegration of ex-prisoners in Council of Europe member states, I attended the first conference of the EU-funded STARR project, held over three days in the neo-classical splendour of Downing College, Cambridge. The (almost obligatory) acronym stands for Strengthening Transnational Approaches to Reducing Re-offending, and the conference was the first opportunity for the project to feed back to both academics and practitioners alike. The title of the conference – ‘What Works in Reducing Re-offending’ – unsurprisingly captures only a small part of the diversity of discussion that ensued. It is not possible within the confines of such a short article to provide a thorough review, and thus I will attempt to keep my enthusiasm in check and instead simply offer a flavour of the debates. Suffice it to say, the addition of a question mark to the title at the opening of the conference was an appropriate point of departure.

The talks and workshops covered a whole range of topics and countries: from global perspectives on promising practices to micro-studies on restorative justice programmes in Roma communities in Bulgaria. The transfer of successful programmes from one jurisdiction to another do not always transfer well, and sometimes the stumbling blocks are unexpected: Professor Martine Herzog-Evans of the University of Reims raised a laugh as she noted the particular difficulties Electronic Monitoring schemes are facing from the beaches of Cannes during the summer months. In Sweden, the frequent mention of the word ‘pub’ during situational role plays in British programmes was always one of the first adaptations necessary.

As the conference unfolded, however, it became increasingly clear that the questions we should be asking are even more fundamental than ‘What Works?’. Professor Fergus McNeil of Glasgow University provoked significant discussion as he questioned whether reducing re-offending is a suitable mission statement at all. If probation is a justice agency we need to look at how justice is best served and the differing priorities reflected in the term. A concept of community justice looks beyond the confines of the criminal justice system to look at how the collective interest is best served: in the interest of the victims, communities, as well as the offender. Change is crucially important to the process of ‘justice’, and Professor McNeil concluded, ‘one of the best ways of paying back [society] is turning your life around’.

QCEA’s current research recognises that the social reintegration of ex-prisoners is not directly synonymous with target-driven reductions in reoffending. If the conference confirmed nothing else, there is no single ‘magic bullet’ or gold-standard programme. For that reason, further opportunities for pan-European discussion can only be a good thing. The STARR project is a great opportunity for academics and practitioners from across the continent to pool their ideas and talents. For my part, I hope Friends and Quaker organisations will continue to contribute significantly to this dialogue.

Ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland: Democracy in Action?

This is an unpublished article from the 20 October 2009.

Sixteen months ago only 53 per cent of Ireland’s electorate refused to give the answer demanded of them: now, with the Celtic tiger’s tail curled firmly between its legs, the Irish have returned the result the European establishment expected of them, resoundingly so. In a turnout of 58 per cent – unfortunately strong by European election standards – 1.2 million Irish men and women, 67 per cent of those who voted, said ‘Yes’ to the Lisbon treaty, reasserting Ireland’s commitment to the European project. Despite the perilous state of Irish finances, this result is not, as has oft been suggested, the consequence of a frightened and cowed electorate. A glimpse north to Iceland bares witness to the potentially treacherous waters outside Europe’s protective harbour. Nevertheless, the Irish people’s statement of intent reflects the blossoming of a more democratic future for Europe: a future in which politicians finally engage in the intelligent, grown-up conversation that Europe needs, and her electorate is fervently demanding.

‘I think that there was a respect for the democratic process and the fact that it couldn’t be overturned without returning to the democratic process,’ stated a jubilant Brian Cowen, Ireland’s often embattled Taoiseach, following the 20 per cent swing. Cowen is right, the ‘democratic process’ was fundamental in the ‘Yes’ victory, but this ‘respect’ was new, and entirely absent the first time around. The Lisbon Treaty is a technical, inaccessible document, so much so that during the 2008 campaign Cowen admitted you’d have to be ‘insane’ to read it: he hadn’t, and the electorate responded accordingly to their leader’s incompetence. A year and a half later, and the people of the Irish Republic are probably the most well-informed on the continent, with concerns about the status of Ireland’s European commissioner, military neutrality, and the imposition of abortion laws all firmly discussed and clearly satisfactorily addressed. The political establishment mounted a thorough campaign, aided by both business and Ireland’s Europhile intellectual community. Where the ‘No’ campaign had found traction in the electorate’s lack of knowledge in 2008, a myriad of voices responded during the debates of 2009, so that people could make an informed decision.

In the opinion of the author, the Europe Union has both the potential and necessity to take a more prominent role in world politics, one that none of its constituent member nations alone can take, if a progressive, environmentally sensitive, broadly liberal agenda is to be effectively argued for and implemented on a global level. This will only be possible if Europe can present the united front that shared culture and history, alongside the free movement of peoples, allows for. To realize this potential Europe needs to have an active and engaged citizenry, the keystone of a healthy democracy. The Lisbon Treaty, via far too many twists and turns, is the descendent of the lofty 2001 Laeken Declaration, calling for the European Union to be ‘more democratic, transparent and effective.’ If this unique experiment in European democracy is to achieve even a fraction of its potential, our leaders need to stop preaching and start listening. The Irish experience is a good lesson, and a first step in the right direction.