Does prison really work?
Douglas Hurd notes that the sensational increase in the prison population has not been accompanied by a sensational reduction in crime They have changed Armley Prison since I visited as home secretary. The Victorian gatehouse with its axe-head windows and battlements still frowns over the city. I hope that grannies in Leeds still warn their children that they will end up there, in Armley, unless they behave. But the actual entrance to the prison now is at one side, gentler, less emphatic, no longer giving a message of despair to those who come in. Inside, great trouble is now taken over the first day of imprisonment. Armley is a local prison, so a high proportion of those who come in have not been convicted of anything; one fifth of these remand prisoners will eventually be acquitted. Great care is taken to explain to everyone that prison is not an unspeakable catastrophe but a punishment which they will survive — and even emerge from clutching some hope.
Sentimental nonsense? Why not shove them straight in with the other convicts so that they can begin to taste some of the medicine they have been dishing out to their victims? Because last year 95 prisoners committed suicide in prisons in England and Wales, a record number. Almost one third of these suicides happen within the first week. (The figures are relentless but they are necessary.) More than half of those entering prison have been using Class A drugs. In some innercity local prisons as many as eight out of ten men are found, on arrival, to have Class A drugs in their system. Most of these have never received any treatment. Most of the crimes they have committed are connected with the need for money to buy drugs. Each afternoon as the vans arrive from the courts the prison service is confronted, immediately and dangerously, with the failure of society to deal effectively with drugs.
Another big change at Armley has been a comfortable, well-equipped day centre outside the prison for visitors. Here families of prisoners can get help from a Citizens Advice Bureau, a Church advice centre and professional counselling of all kinds. While they get advice their children play. There is a tea and toast bar from nine till five. Describe such a centre and the comments write themselves: why on earth is it a priority to mollycoddle prisoners’ families who — probably if truth be known — are no better than the prisoners themselves? The answer lies at the heart of the whole philosophy of prison.
What is it all for? The slogan ‘prison works’ is often used as if locking up offenders provides the answer to crime. Yet there is something odd here. The number of prisoners has hugely increased. In 1986, when I was home secretary, there were 44,000 in England and Wales; when Labour came in in 1997 the figure was about 60,000; it has just reached a record total of 75,550. If ‘prison works’ in reducing crime, then obviously a sensational increase in the number of prisoners should produce a sensational reduction in crime. But it hasn’t. It is precisely those who argue most fiercely that prison works who go on to argue that crime has increased — at a time when magistrates and judges have been slamming offenders into prison as never before.
‘Prison works’ in a much narrower sense. The convicted burglar locked up in Armley cannot ply his trade burgling the gentle neighbourhoods of Ilkley or Alwoodley. For those who, like most politicians, think about prison as little as possible, the story of a crime ends when the criminal is locked up. But all except a handful of these convicted prisoners will be released. For a few months or a year or two in prison they have, in the jargon, been ‘incapacitated’ from committing crime. But the longerterm safety of society depends on whether they return to crime once they are released.
Here the record is lamentable. Three out of five prisoners are reconvicted within two years of being released. The reconviction rate for young male adults under 21 over two years is 73 per cent. Three quarters of imprisoned burglars reoffend and are reconvicted. These figures are not surprising when you consider the kind of people we are talking about. By their own stupidity or worse they find themselves in a hopeless position even before they enter prison. Their levels of literacy and numeracy are awful. If overcrowding permits, efforts will be made in prison to give them skills so that they have a chance of getting and holding a job when they come out. But the fact of imprisonment in itself damages their chances. Thirty per cent of prisoners lose their homes and more than two thirds lose their jobs because they are in prison.
Even more damaging can be the collapse of a family. How is a wife meant to cope with the children? Or how is a girlfriend expected to keep up the relationship on which future stability may depend? Thoughtless people want to break the link between the prisoner and the world outside; the prison service is anxious to help the prisoner save those links so far as he can. There has been a spirited debate recently on whether convicted prisoners should have the vote. The fact that prisoners have no vote is one reason that the House of Commons, apart from a small minority, is dozy and inadequate on prison matters. But vote or no vote, the essential point is that if his contacts with the outside world are broken, the prisoner’s only recourse on the day he gets out may be to go down the pub and join his old mates in fresh crime. Prison will have worked but the wrong way.
The task of the prison service and the private prison system is made more difficult by overcrowding. This is hard to measure. When I knew the Home Office the standard in each prison was the CNA (certified normal accommodation). This gave the number of prisoners for which the prison was designed. Now the authorities prefer to use a different figure, namely the actual number of prisoners you can squeeze into a prison if you have to. At the end of March, 82 of the 139 prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded. Leicester held 355 prisoners in accommodation intended for 191, Preston 606 in accommodation intended for 331. What this means in practice is that two prisoners live in a cell designed for one. Sixteen thousand prisoners are at present treated in this way.
It is worth pausing to describe what that means. During the 1980s and 1990s we managed to get rid of slopping out. Lavatories were installed in the cell. Some prison wings are now being reorganised en suite, but for most the bowl is separated from the beds by a thin curtain or small plastic screen. The prisoner spends about 15 hours a day in that cell with someone who may be hell to live with. Overcrowding increases the number of hours spent in the cell because it makes it more difficult to provide staff to escort prisoners to work and education.
Often overcrowding is relieved by shipping prisoners further and further away from their homes in what is called the ‘churn’, thus making it more difficult for their families to visit or to sustain a programme of detoxification or education.
The politics of this subject oozes a formidable complacency. Magistrates and judges have been sending more people to prison for longer because they believe that is the wish of the public. The public believe the sentencing system to be substantially more lenient than it is. But you do not help the victim of a crime by making a hash of dealing with the offender. There is no real urgency to look for better answers. The government now provides a wider range of sentences, custodial or non-custodial or a mix of both, but it is not clear whether these are really catching on. In the election the Conservative party talked in a tired way about building more prisons, though no chancellor of the exchequer worth his salt would approve as value for money a negative programme of that kind. Government has correctly fastened onto the crucial need for continuity between the experience of a man or woman in prison and their needs after release. Partly for this reason they are proposing to merge the probation and prison services into a new National Offenders Management Service (Noms). But institutional upheaval itself cures nothing. The prison inspectorate must remain independent and effective. Under David Ramsbotham (now welcome in the House of Lords) and now under Anne Owers as chief inspector, the inspectorate helps to remedy in its forthright judgments the failure of our political system to provide a proper debate on this neglected public service.
There is talent and energy at work in prisons, but too much of it is dissipated in handling short-term crises. Prison governors of real quality are shunted rapidly from one hot spot to another. Prison ministers under this government have been six a penny. We need a home secretary who will galvanise policy and spend time on it. Above all he will need to face down the prejudices sponsored by the tabloid press. Our prisons accurately reflect the dark side of our society. We are in danger of simply making that darkness deeper.
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