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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is former chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform
If the government came to you and said, here is £250mn to build anything you like for your local community and we guarantee a further £20mn every year for the next century to help run it, what would you do? Build a prison? No, I didn’t think so. Yet this is what is happening every time a new prison is built.
Remember Wrexham, where an industrial centre was allowed to decay along with all the jobs; in its place the biggest prison in the UK was built. Remember the Victorian mental hospitals that surrounded London, pulled down to be replaced by prisons. Public resources have been consistently diverted from industry, health, education and housing into prisons.
Local communities would like a new hospital, a school or college, or perhaps investment in a factory to create renewable energy; many places would be grateful for the annual grant to pay the wages for an ongoing project or for a nursery or decent care home. Towns and cities would like to invest in crime prevention but that would take only a small portion of the money.
But this government, just like the one before, committed to spend billions on expanding a failing prison system, which does nothing to prevent or deter crime and certainly does not make us safer.
Meanwhile, the courts and probation service are also in chaos: underfunding of the fabric and staff is responsible for delays and risky care and custody of dangerous men. The money is being poured into a bottomless pit of prison building while the criminal justice system is still failing.
It has become a platitude to claim that this is a crisis. But the overcrowded, dilapidated prisons, together with those released early committing more crimes, has led to warnings that the situation is so bad it is endangering public safety.
The recent inspection of Wandsworth prison revealed it was rat-infested and violent, a foul and stinking holding pen. It is not alone — even relatively new prisons are imposing similar conditions on inmates and staff.
Probation is also facing impossible challenges. Men (over 95 per cent of those in prison are men) released from long prison sentences are often dumped in filthy hostels with nothing to do all day and underpaid, disaffected staff.
The National Audit Office revealed this week that there was a backlog of more than 67,500 cases in the crown courts. This means victims and defendants waiting perhaps several years to have serious issues resolved — including rape and murder.
I attended the launch of a citizen-led review of the magistrates’ courts this week, conducted by a voluntary organisation called Transform Justice, which found courts where the accused couldn’t hear, with procedures not explained so that the process was mysterious to everyone except the professionals.
The most telling point was made by the representative from HM Courts and Tribunals Service, who reported that he’d never found a “real criminal” in the magistrates’ courts — the defendants were people who had been failed by health and mental health services, with lives derailed by poverty and poor housing.
Our magistrates’ courts are stuck in the 18th century, using unforgiving procedures and punishments against the poor and the unhappy. The challenges in the prisons, courts and probation are well known but no politician has the courage and honesty to come up with a comprehensive plan for these endemic problems.
We cannot keep pouring good money after bad, damaging people in the name of a justice system that is rotten to the core. Wholesale reform is the answer and with a lengthy general election campaign we have an opportunity to have a grown-up debate about doing this differently.
A US scheme, Justice Reinvestment, improves public safety by reducing prison use and the related spending across the criminal justice system, directing the savings into reducing crime. This leaves fewer people in prisons, some jails can be closed and money funnelled instead to local communities.
A prison population of 95,500 in the UK is unsustainable. We have one of the highest uses of prison in western Europe. More than 230,000 people are on probation. The criminal justice system is an insatiable beast that is sucking money out of health, housing and education.
Of course we must be protected from people who commit the most heinous crimes, but they are not the majority of those in prison or probation or the courts.
Taxpayers, victims and local communities deserve better and we should demand it.
