Prisons in England and Wales are overflowing, again. Police cells are being requisitioned, again. Over the years, prison numbers go up and up – even though the Sentencing Council itself finds scant evidence that more time in jail does any good. Prisons are bursting at the seams because of ever-lengthening sentences. Damian Hinds, the minister for prisons, is eager to blame the barristers’ strike for this crisis. That’s outrageous: barristers’ strikes have merely highlighted the existing prison logjam.
Here’s the real cause: the public’s appetite for locking people up seems insatiable. Nothing is ever enough. The more politicians implement tougher sentences, the greater the public taste for even stiffer penalties. Fact-free, tabloid-stoked impulses for vengeance merge with politicians’ desire to out-tough each other on crime.
Michael Howard’s “prison works” speech in 1993 abruptly reversed a brief period of Tory liberalism during which prison numbers had fallen. David Blunkett’s landmark 2003 Criminal Justice Act increased life sentences from an average of 12 to more than 20 years. This led to soaring numbers of prisoners in jail (when Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990 there were 45,000; now, there are 82,000). The chair of the justice committee, Bob Neill, is a rare Tory voice calling for less custody.
This crisis in prisons is a horribly familiar story. Every public service has suffered severe cuts. Abysmal wages make it impossible to retain and recruit staff, and neglected buildings fall into gross disrepair. The public accounts committee (PAC) warns of the “eye-watering” backlog of repairs needed in UK prisons – they will cost £1bn. The government has claimed it will spend £4bn on expanding prisons, but this seems to be slipping away, going the way of those “40 new hospitals”.
What’s needed isn’t bigger prisons with more places in them, but fewer prisons with properly paid and trained staff, and good rehabilitation programmes. The PAC warns of an “expected surge in demand across the criminal justice system from the recruitment of 20,000 new police officers”. That perfectly matches the 20,000 more prison places that have been promised. More police officers with targets to hit means more arrests and more young men jailed; Richard Garside of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies estimates the average cost of locking up a prisoner is £40,000 a year.
HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, is typical. I visited a couple of years ago – it was chosen for me presumably as one of the less awful ones. Its impressive governor was struggling to keep the prison afloat then, but its recent chief inspector’s report paints an even more dismal picture than the one I saw. The prison has been rated poor on safety, poor on purposeful activity, not sufficiently good on rehabilitation and release plans, nor on “respect”. It has an inadequate daily regime (prisoners are allowed only two hours a day out of their cells, and even that is only on weekdays).
Woodhill is running at below capacity. This is not owing to a lack of demand for places, but because one large unit has closed due to a lack of staff. The report concludes that staff shortages are “the single most limiting factor to progress”, making it “inevitable” that outcomes “will deteriorate even further”. This, it says, is “despite committed and enthusiastic leadership”. Indeed the governor, Nicola Marfleet, knew the problems all too well when I met her. Staff leave as fast as they are recruited, and most are inexperienced, yet their work involves overseeing dangerous and complex category-A prisoners. Most stay in post for three years or less.
As in every prison, nearly half of Woodhill’s prisoners will be back. When I asked Marfleet what would reduce crime levels, the one thing she didn’t say was more prison. On the contrary, she said: “Sure Start centres, for all families, catching problems right from birth.” But most Sure Start centres have long gone.
Still, the public want more prisons. As a result, Britain has more prisons per head of population than most similar European countries. Research this year by Mike Hough, a professor of law at Birkbeck, and others shows that people think sentences are getting lighter than they were 25 years ago. Some 76% of those expressing an opinion say sentences are getting shorter and are too lenient, even though in reality average sentence lengths have increased. When asked what punishments ought to be meted out, the public often choose custodial sentences that are very close to what they already actually are.
Ignorance is the blight of democracy, inexcusable when simple information on everything is only a click away on any smartphone. But far more unforgivable are the politicians who keep stoking that “tougher and tougher” appetite instead of explaining the facts. That results in overflowing and squalid jails with criminals who are destined to come back time and again. It’s an absurd waste of money that should be redirected to the threadbare services for early years, children’s mental health and everyone’s education.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 2 December 2022. Due to an editing error, an earlier version said that David Blunkett’s 2003 introduction of imprisonment for public protection sentences had increased life sentences from an average of 12 to more than 20 years. This conflated two separate changes: imprisonment for public protection, and an increase in minimum terms for mandatory life sentences. It was the latter that was the intended reference, and this has been clarified.
