Time for a moratorium on prison building

With the new coalition government facing tough choices, a Prison Reform Trust briefing published today says reversing the unaffordable trend in ever expanding prison numbers will be an urgent priority.

The last time Ken Clarke was in charge of prison and penal policy, as home secretary, the average prison population (1992-93) was 44,628. Figures just released by the Prison Service show that prison numbers for England and Wales have now exceeded 85,000. In France, with the same population as Britain, prison numbers are 59,655 and in Germany with over 20 million more people, 72,043.

In the current climate it would be a form of economic madness to allow the prison population to continue to spiral out of control. Each new prison place costs £170,000 to build and maintain, and the cost per prisoner per year is £45,000. Total prison expenditure increased from £2.843bn in 1995 to £4.325bn in 2006 (2006 prices). The National Audit Office estimates that reoffending by all recent ex-prisoners cost the economy between £9.5 billion and £13 billion a year.

A moratorium would give the new government time to learn the lessons from abroad and, closer to home, to encourage local authorities, voluntary organisations, police and probation services to work closer together to develop community solutions to crime that inspire public and judicial confidence.

The success of justice reinvestment and prisoner re-entry programmes, driven by economic necessity in many states in America, and the impressive reduction in crime achieved by integrated offender management schemes here in England and Wales, provide a rich source of information.

Ken Clarke has previously criticised ministers for allowing an unprecedented rise in the prison population since his tenure as home secretary. In a debate with the former justice minister, David Hanson, in the House of Commons in June 2007, he said:

Does the Minister accept that in the past 10 years four home secretaries have responded to media pressure by taking away discretion on sentencing from the courts and putting them under pressure, which has dramatically increased the prison population to almost double what it was when I was home secretary, without paying the slightest heed to the inevitable moment when they would hit the buffers and there was no accommodation?

He continued:

Will the new department produce a change of culture in which the platitudes about community sentences and making prison only for those who need it are turned into reality by returning proper discretion to the courts and ensuring that prisons are used only for violent, dangerous and recidivist criminals in conditions in which there is some hope that some of them will be rehabilitated?

In March 2007, in a debate with the PPS to the Solicitor General, Jim Cunningham, he said:

Maintaining a freeze on Home Office spending after years in which the government have been doing their best to increase the prison population at a fantastic rate seems to me to be almost impossible. If the prison population continues to rise at the rate at which it has risen in recent years, as the home secretary has tried desperately to get the right headlines in all the most popular right-wing newspapers, it will merely mean a tremendous squeeze on spending in every other part of the criminal justice system, including the police, the probation service and the courts service.

Under plans inherited by the new justice team from the previous administration, the net capacity of the prison estate would increase to 96,000 by 2014. This would take the rate of imprisonment in England and Wales to 178 per 100,000 – the highest in western Europe, and higher than Bulgaria (124), Romania (126), Slovakia (151) and Hungary (152).

Between the Liberal Democrat and Conservative election manifestos there is broad consensus on investing in getting children out of trouble and nipping youth crime in the bud, diverting addicts and people who are mentally ill into effective treatment and, at the other end of the spectrum, improving prisoner rehabilitation and cutting re-offending on release.

New ministers will need to review the growth in indeterminate sentencing – which has increased from 3,000 indeterminate sentences in 1992 to 12,822 in March 2010 – recalls for breach of license and any unnecessary use of custodial remand.

Commenting on the launch of the briefing, Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said:

As the new justice secretary has previously acknowledged the current growth in prison numbers is unsustainable. A moratorium on prison building would be a first step in reversing the disastrous legacy of the past two decades which has seen the prison population almost double, while rates of reoffending have rocketed. A measured, evidence-based approach to justice would deliver the prize of increasing public safety while at the same time reducing the cost burden imposed by over use of imprisonment.