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A former chief inspector of prisons has urged the Labour government to abandon Tory plans for new prisons - spending the money on crime prevention and rehabilitation instead.
Nick Hardwick, now a professor of Criminal Justice at Royal Holloway University, wants a radical rethink on how to save the justice system.
Before the general election, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood had said the party would use emergency powers to provide 14,000 extra prison spaces.
It followed delays in the Tory plan to expand the creaking prison system, with just 6,000 out of the targeted 20,000 places by the mid-2020s having been created.
Labour has so far announced an early release scheme that will see around 5,500 prisoners freed at the halfway point of their terms in September and October.
However, the pressure on prisons has further increased with the jailing of rioters convicted for their part in the recent nationwide unrest.
But rather than building more prisons to cater for extra inmates and ease the pressure, Mr Hardwick, the former HM Chief Inspector of Prisons from 2010 to 2016, said the money would be better spent elsewhere.
Mr Hardwick, who was also a former head of the Parole Board, told The Guardian: “Labour have said they were going to spend billions, literally billions, on new prisons. But if they bought themselves a bit of time, would it be better to reinvest that money in trying to stop people going into prison in the first place – working in schools, in health, in mental health?
“You could ask people: do you want people to go to prison for a few months longer at a cost of billions of pounds, or spend that money on hospitals and schools?”
Back in January, Mr Hardwick made similar comments in an interview and an editorial written for The Independent.
He said: “The reason for the increase in the prison population is not that we are sending more people to prison but that we are sending people to prison for longer.
“If you think of it like a bath, the water is coming in at the same rate but the outflow is blocked, so the bath fills up and simply scooping some of the water out does not solve the fundamental problem.”
He told The Guardian that the average custodial sentence had risen from 18 months in 2013 to 23 months in 2023.
He said that by building more jails, prisoners would spend more time inside which was unlikely to act as a deterrent to crime.
He added: “I don’t think it’s a good way to spend money to build big new prisons. We are spending billions on an untested model that we don’t know works.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “This government is committed to addressing the crisis in our prisons, and ensuring our jails make better citizens, not better criminals.”
