A new dawn for prison reform?

But there is much to welcome in the white paper. 2,500 new officers and a commitment to a personal officer scheme with a ratio of 1 officer to 6 prisoners is, on the face of it, a startling reversal of policy and practice. The paper is right to assert that rehabilitation can only be delivered from a platform of safety, that measuring this involves asking people how safe they feel, and that time out of cell is a crucial measure of whether a prison is operating as it should. Hurrah for a network of small units for women and a commitment to reduce the number who go to prison in the first place. There is reason for cautious optimism in the promise to involve parliament in setting and monitoring standards for what prisons do—and in the clarity with which the accountability of the Secretary of State for delivering those standards is acknowledged. Fundamentally, Liz Truss is right to feel that the pendulum has swung too far to central prescription. Giving it a shove back towards local discretion is probably overdue, even if it is the political failure of her many predecessors to control the demand for imprisonment that has actually necessitated the top-down cost cutting of recent years.

So I really want not to be an old git, and to believe that this is the start of doing reform rather than just talking about it. What will it take to show that we really have turned that corner?

First, most obviously, it needs some of the target driven rigour heading for governors to be applied to the central strategic task of matching demand to supply. In her speech launching the white paper, the Secretary of State mentioned several times that legislation already requires government to provide enough prison spaces for the demand the courts create. But of course the government doesn’t, and hasn’t done in living memory. Around 20,000 prisoners sleep in overcrowded cells. Overcrowding isn’t just about unpleasant conditions. It is what forces the system to operate to the needs of the system not the benefit of the people it cares for. Overcrowding is why prisoners making good progress in good relationships with key staff have that process interrupted. So when the white paper says on the same page (page 58) that its ambition is first a “less crowded” estate, and then that it has a vision of an “uncrowded environment”, I simply want to know which it is, and when and how it will be delivered. Above all, the complete silence in the white paper on the sentencing and administrative changes needed to reduce our prison population to fiscally responsible proportions has to be broken. This is the pass or fail political challenge of prison reform. No government in 25 years has passed it, and most have simply ignored it.

Second, there needs to be a much more explicit description of how the provision of decent conditions in prisons is to be standardised and made accountable to parliament in the same way as safety. This is not optional. There’s little scope for discretion, and there’s a yawning gap between where many prisons are and where they should be. The white paper mocks an instruction that requires prisoners to have ten pairs of socks – but the government currently presides over a system that cannot reliably provide toilet paper for a prisoner to wipe his backside. Decency might not need an instruction but it does need a standard and it should be parliament, not the government or the inspectorate, that sets it. Parliament should decide whether it finds it acceptable for prisoners to eat in their toilet, ever to spend 23 hours in a day behind a cell door, or ever to go 16 hours between meals, and the Secretary of State should be required to answer for this every bit as much as she answers for the targets she sets herself on safety and rehabilitation.

Third, exactly the same process needs to govern fairness in prison. Some have said that the last two years in our prisons have been equivalent in seriousness to the riots which prompted Lord Woolf’s seminal and still massively relevant report in the early 1990s. It is a fair comparison—many more lives have been lost and the scale and scope of the emergency have been, if anything, larger. So Lord Woolf’s central finding that prisons must be places founded on justice deserves repeating. Safety has not been the only casualty of the last two years. Successive inspection reports show complaints not adequately answered and equality duties neglected. The Prison Reform Trust’s own study into segregation units, Deep Custody, showed basic safeguards failing on this totemic element of a prison’s duty to act lawfully towards those most vulnerable to its authority. The white paper says almost nothing about the hundreds of careful judgements that will be needed to ensure that autonomy, and the destruction of common processes, do not lead to injustice. By far the most important question to ask about autonomy is not what prescription you are prepared to let go, but what it is essential that you keep.

Fourth, if the government’s ambitions are to become reality, they are going to need prisoners’ help. It’s a cliché that prisons operate by consent, but it’s true. Take a practical example: getting a drug test from a prisoner at the start of a sentence is not difficult. But why would a prisoner do the same on the day they have to be released? The answer, of course, is not to test on the day of release, but 6 months before it, with a clean test opening the way to release on temporary licence to a job in the community and a wage to go with it. Just as a sensible Governor consults prisoners and involves them in delivering change, so the government must find a way to consult and involve prisoners in delivering its strategic ambitions for prison reform.

Finally, the defeat of scepticism requires a mountain of detail still to be delivered. Virtually every page of my copy of the white paper is now defaced with scribbled comments—mainly of the “how”, “what” and “when” variety. Sections on measurement that you might expect to be more developed, given the enthusiasm for a model based on accountability against targets, are especially disappointing. The afterthought chapter on the shape of the prison estate—perhaps the one aspect of all this that our successors in 20 years time will see as having been most significant—is desperately under-developed for a public infrastructure strategy of this size and importance. The list of issues on which “work is under way”, or a dilemma is acknowledged but not resolved, is very long. The uncomfortable truth is that Liz Truss will be relying on her Ministry of Justice bureaucrats to work out this mountain of detail, at the same moment that they are being told they may be surplus to requirements.

But, at the very least, the Justice Secretary deserves credit for acknowledging so explicitly that she personally, as Secretary of State, is accountable for the state of our prisons now and in the future. She says that she wants to draw on the experience and expertise of others to make reform work. We owe it to all those affected by imprisonment—those who live and work in prison, their families and the past and future victims of crime—to help her succeed.

Peter Dawson
Director