Ignoring prison crisis won't make it go away

Times

17 hours ago

Of all the bin fires raging across government last summer that might have prompted Rishi Sunak to chuck it in and call an election, the problem of Britain's overflowing prisons was one of the fiercest. And now we learn just how fierce, thanks to a review that reveals jails repeatedly came within three days of being officially 'full' in the two years before the election, until ministers finally came to the rescue with a brilliant scheme simply to release criminals earlier.
Labour ministers no doubt feel sore about it. It was they who ended up releasing offenders like Isaac Donkoh, a gang leader convicted of kidnapping and torturing a teenage boy; or Lawson Natty, convicted of manslaughter for killing a 14-year-old boy; or Jason Hoganson, released early in error and, within a day, back to assaulting his ex-partner. These were not the headlines with which a party in possession of a stunning victory wanted to launch its 'decade of renewal'.
The government can now happily point to the review by Dame Anne Owers in arguing that the lucky breaks handed to Donkoh and co were at least a decade in the making, with more than a walk-on part for Tory cuts and the unfailingly cloddish machinations of one Chris Grayling, a name that shall serve for ever as a watchword for misbegotten numbskull-duggery.
Dame Anne was the doyenne of the jailhouse under Blair, serving as chief prisons inspector from 2001 to 2010. And it's probably fair to say that the 'tough on crime' brigade would not share all her views. But her report reads as bland fact rather than polemic. Besides, she has been warning about a prison capacity crunch since the Blair days. The Tories trumpeted her first warning in early 2007, when David Cameron accused the then-government of having 'stuck its head in the sand'. They don't make sandpits deep enough for the Tory justice ministers and Treasury officials since then who have pretended to believe the prison population is not going to keep growing despite repeatedly adopting policies that fuel population growth and tougher sentencing.
The result, as described by Dame Anne, is 'a cycle of prison capacity crises'. While the prison population rose most sharply under Labour, from 66,300 in 2001 to 85,002 in 2010, it has kept rising since, to 87,726 last year. Whereas there used to be more women, children and young men in jail, and more men serving short sentences, the past decade has seen fewer women and many fewer children locked up, with more capacity filled by older men serving longer sentences. The exception is the backlog of people sitting in jail while waiting for a court date, which now accounts for a fifth of prisoners, compared to a seventh in 2015.
Despite promises to be tough on crime, the 2010 coalition found it convenient to adopt projections saying that more prison space wouldn't be needed. The Treasury had no intention of releasing cash to build prisons — and indeed, was keen to save money by selling them off and laying off experienced prison officers. First Ken Clarke and then Grayling both appear to have connived in the delusion, so that by 2017, the system was running with fewer than 1,000 free places. Under the radar, more criminals were tagged or detained at home under curfew rather than being jailed. For a short time, things stabilised, though another crunch was coming when Covid hit.
Afterwards, with Boris Johnson's thousands of extra police officers on the beat and the courts jammed up, things started to spiral. Day-to-day work at the Ministry of Justice was taken over by all sorts of special committees and meetings, in which frazzled officials crunched the numbers to work out exactly how Donald Ducked the whole system was and then, having found it was indeed just days from catastrophe, sounding the alarm. In these emergency phases, officials, police and prison officers would kick off the first of several rounds of a sliding puzzle game at 5.30am each day, shunting prisoners frantically between police cells, crowded jails and court rooms, a task in which, as the review puts it, 'the marker of success was 'whether everyone got a bed last night''. The costs were wild: filling a proper prison cell costs the Treasury £150 a night, whereas a police cell costs £688, with the result that the government has spent £70 million and counting on not having enough jail space.
The usual congratulations are due to the Treasury for its characteristic forethought in generating such staggeringly expensive savings.
Obviously, something had to give, and that something was the enforcement of judge-given sentences. There were two chaotic early release schemes, the first at the end of the Tory government and the second at the start of Labour's. Already stretched probation officers scrambled to assess who could be released and when, under various overlapping criteria, sometimes at a few hours' notice — followed by a dash to arrange the services meant to help stop an ex-convict falling instantly back into a life of crime, like addiction treatment or temporary accommodation. Similar stress in the probation service means monitoring all this properly is basically impossible.
Even if you are among those who believe in locking up fewer people, it is clear that a country with a growing population and decades of overcrowded jails needs more prisons. Less crowded jails are safer, better able to police violence and drugs and more likely to rehabilitate at least some of the population. So why haven't we been building them? It's a different face to the same old problem: we can't build anything.
It has always been a bit more expensive to house people in prisons than houses, but the cost gap is now absurd. Per person housed, it costs about six times more to build a jail than it would to build them each a one-bedroom flat. There are environmental regulation, shortages of building materials and workers and so on, but even where big capital spending has been earmarked for prisons, it doesn't get spent because of a 'major block', as Dame Anne calls it, within the government's own control: planning. Even with prisons full and dangerous criminals being released prematurely to cope, it is still taking prison projects at least two years to get planning permission. Usually, it takes longer. Three major projects first proposed in 2020 only made it through the process with the help of central government rulings four years later. It does not take a statistician to see that at this rate, more offenders will go free earlier and earlier before anything changes.
A few weeks ago, the Tories were out promising a 'zero-tolerance' approach to petty crime. Unfortunately for them, the country has zero tolerance for this dipstickery. There are neither enough prisons, nor probation officers nor court hours to punish all the people they want to put away. 'Tough on crime' requires building on time, and they didn't.