Guess which public service is hardly ever mentioned in stories about austerity? The answer is prisons. Last week, prison governors were told by the justice minister, Alex Chalk, to send prisoners home two months early to free up cells because 99.7% of prisons were full. He must have been desperate. Imagine hospitals being told to send patients home two weeks early because car parks were full of ambulances. Imagine schools leaving students unattended in classrooms because there weren’t enough teachers. For a sign of a society in decay, you need to look no further than our booming prison population.
In 1960, there were 30,000 people in prison in England and Wales and the government of the day declared it “a crisis”. In 2000, there were about 60,000; the present total of 85,000 is predicted to rise to up to 105,000 by 2027. The UK as a whole has almost 150 prisoners per 100,000 people; by contrast, Germany has 70 per 100,000. The nation is prison-mad, and has the largest prison population per head in western Europe. The total number was boosted in 2020 when normal sentence remission was reduced from half to a third in what seemed a fatuous bid to “get tough on crime”. To that was added 25,000 immigrants and asylum seekers in detention – in effect prisoners awaiting Home Office bureaucracy at the taxpayers’ expense. Such is the chaos in the court system that there are also 15,000 prisoners on remand, legally innocent until they are proven guilty. This is not cheap. Prison costs £48,000 a year for each inmate. That is almost the same as Eton, perhaps a preferable source of rehabilitation.
British penal policy is stuck in the philosophical dark ages and obsessed with retribution rather than rehabilitation. Our prisons are not havens of recovery, but academies of crime. In a speech last October, Chalk seemed to understand this, saying that prison should not “ruin the redeemable” or turn minor criminals into hardened offenders. Indeed, he wanted to reduce the number of short sentences of under a year on the grounds that 58% of short-sentenced prisoners in Britain reoffend. The rate in Norway, where prisons are devoted to rehabilitation, is 20%. Chalk pointed out that reoffending by convicted Britons on parole or community service was similar to the Norwegian rate. British prisons patently do not cure crime, they promote it.
Overcrowding has made prisons even less able to do their job. Two and even three prisoners are being confined to cells designed for one. Staff shortages mean that they can be locked up for 22 hours a day and denied exercise, communal contact or rehabilitation. In the year to last September, the suicide rate in prisons rose by a shocking 24%. To visit many prisons – as I used to do – is to feel as Florence Nightingale must have done on visiting Scutari hospital. They seem utterly archaic and counter-productive. An estimated half of all prisoners use drugs while inside, and 15% become addicted while in prison. Supply is attributed to families, prisoner gangs and staff. One prison governor admitted to me that drugs were his chief defence against prison violence.
Since a third of imprisonments are said to be either directly or indirectly related to Britain’s drug laws, it is hard to see if in prison terms these laws are a force for good or evil. Clearly the institution of “drug-free wings” in some prisons, where prisoners can recover from drug use, may be the least bad substitute for much-needed addiction centres in the community. But despite the drug-free wing at Hindley prison in Lancashire, more than 52% of prisoners tested positive for drug use on a recent inspection, due to a “near tsunami of drugs”. Whatever prisons are doing, they are not stemming drug use.
To those who have followed prisons over the years, the most depressing thing is that, while all agree that penal policy is outdated, reform of any sort seems impossible. When the one-time junior minister Rory Stewart spent a brief few months trying to change prison conditions, he felt a great wall of opposition descend: bureaucracy, the Daily Mail, Tory backbenchers. When Tony Blair peddled his glib cliche, “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, no one noticed the omission. He never mentioned the cure.
Britain’s prisons fall squarely into that unproductive no man’s land of political debate, where whatever one side proposes the other must fiercely oppose. Issues where ideally all sides should agree – once put into the hands of royal commissions – are simply stalled. Whether on parliamentary reform, local taxation or today’s definition of extremism, parties seem able to agree on nothing. Such kneejerk partisanship is no longer a check on the executive. It is the enemy of progress.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
