Whisper it, but we might be about to see a rational prison policy

Amid ruins, a glimpse of hope

Photo by Devon Wilson on Unsplash

The Daily Mail has a perfect front page today. It is a pure encapsulation of the state we're in and how we got to it. In short, it's unimaginably fucking stupid and therefore a perfect encapsulation of the current Daily Mail worldview. 

"Labour accused of scare tactics over 'full' jails," it reads. Note the quotation marks around the word 'full'. Those quotation marks are a demonstration that the newspaper doesn't have the remotest idea what it's talking about, or rather that it does but has chosen to act with a degree of cynicism which surpasses even its own previous high bar.

There is no controversy here. The jails are full. They have been for some time, and no-one of good conscience can possibly claim otherwise. We are near to the point where the whole edifice collapses. Prisons beyond capacity, police cells maxed out, courts deferring cases and police stopping arrests: a total breakdown in a functioning criminal justice system.

The Mail attack is an attempt to undermine Labour for doing what is necessary to alleviate the crisis. Better to close your eyes and pretend everything is OK. We can increase sentences, demand more arrests, keep on cutting departmental budgets so no new prisons can be built, and then house all the inmates in an imaginary jail cell floating above the face of the earth.

Back in the real world, justice secretary Shabana Mahmood will today unveil plans to release prisoners serving a fixed-length sentence after 40% of their sentence, rather than 50%. She has no choice. It’s not her fault. But they’ll attack her for it anyway.

The Mail headline is not news provisions. It is a political threat. It is not intended to tell readers about the world, but to scare Labour off doing what it plans to do.

This has always worked before. A core reason for how we got here is because of the fear of the Daily Mail. Ministers are anxious about how they will react if they pursue sensible policies on prisons and reoffending. And now here we are. The policies the Daily Mail likes are so disastrous that the system collapses. And their response is to deny the collapse is happening and demand we continue on regardless.

But the problem is not just with the Mail. It is with the public too. That's the truth which people don't like to say out loud. People in general are utterly ignorant about prisons. And that ignorance is a core explanation for the policy breakdown we're currently witnessing.

Austerity hit the criminal justice system like a sledgehammer. The Crown Prosecution Service was hit by 33% cuts. The Ministry of Justice was hit by 25% cuts. 

Cuts devastated the prison service. The reduction in prison officers meant they weren't available to take prisoners from their cells to daily activities. The reality of life for many offenders was therefore 23-hours a day in their cells. The services which help reduce reoffending, like educational courses or skills training, stagnated and disappeared. 

Violence soared. There were more assaults, more suicides, more instances of self-harm, more murders. "There is a simple and unpalatable truth about far too many of our prisons," HM Inspector of Prisons wrote in his 2015/16 annual report. "They have become unacceptably violent and dangerous places."

How could this happen? Because no-one gave a damn. People care about the NHS and they care about education. They care about these things because they expect to use them. They do not expect to use prison, so they do not care about it. Newspaper editors and broadcast news producers consequently provide very little coverage, which meant there was little public awareness. And so, when the spending cuts knife fell, organisations like the NHS were largely protected but organisations like the prison estate got sliced-up good and hard.

Prime ministers don't care about prisons either. The role of justice secretary falls into a very specific mid-range category which is useful in a ministerial reshuffle. It is senior enough to save someone's blushes if they're being demoted from a top job or to give someone a sense of advancement if they're being promoted from a bottom job. It therefore experiences an extraordinary rate of churn. 

Look at how we cycle through them. In the post-2010 era alone, we sprinted our way through Ken Clarke, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Liz Truss, David Lidington, David Gauke, Robert Buckland, Dominic Raab, Alex Chalk. Just an endless cycle of ministers, chucked in and out again as the requirements of the time demanded. There's rarely been any serious attention to prisons because the person in charge keeps changing. 

The quality of the secretary of state also worsened the situation. Grayling was one of the singularly most venal and ignorant ministers I have ever seen. During his time in the role he repeatedly ignored the evidence base. Instead, he tailored his approach to what the Daily Mail likes: punishment, cruelty, ignorance. 

The results were a disaster. A breakdown in viable rehabilitation work in prisons. The introduction of humiliating punishment mechanisms. The destruction of the probation system. An entirely foreseeable and preventable catastrophe. Later on, Gauke, together with then-prisons minister Rory Stewart, tried to undo the damage by making the case for a more liberal system: scrapping short sentences of under six months unless it was for a violent or sexual offence and using community treatment instead.

If that policy had been implemented, we'd have removed tens of thousands of people from the system and might not be in the situation we're in now. But it was not implemented, because Boris Johnson killed it. Dominic Cummings had noticed that Brexit voters tended to be very authoritarian on prison issues. So the direction of policy was changed once again. When the 2019 election rolled around, he scribbled some draconian ideas of prisons on the back of an envelope and chucked it in the manifesto

Instead of fixing the problem, we have worsened it by steadily increasing sentences. Between 2012 and 2022, the average custodial sentence rose from 14.5 months to 22.6 months. This plays into the second category of public ignorance, exacerbated by the right-wing press: the belief that being tough works. In fact, it is profoundly ineffective. 

The Tories are not alone in pursuing this argument. In opposition, Keir Starmer attempted to triangulate the Tories on crime. When 2021's police, crime, sentencing and courts bill was introduced promising longer jail terms, Labour simply said that it did not go far enough. They did not make the empirical case for why this approach would not work in future given it has always failed in the past.

The tragedy of all this is that we actually have a fairly good idea of what works. 

Small local prisons work. They allow inmates to maintain family contact and stay relatively embedded in the local community. Norway's prison system often allows up to three visits from family and friends a week. Some of its prisons allow for conjugal visits. Yep, I know - ha ha ha, special rooms for prisoners to shag, what will the limp-wristed naive Scandinavian liberals think of next. All the usual know-nothing pub-bore bullshit. But the fact is: it works. 

Norway's prisons are humane. Cells have a private bathroom, flat screen televisions and good views over pleasant scenery. They are designed to be conducive to rehabilitation, rather than humiliating and dehumanising. The idea is that prisoners are punished by the removal of liberty, not the removal of dignity. 

Before Norway implemented these reforms, it had a recidivism rate of between 60% and 70%. Today, it is at 20% - the lowest in the world. The key is investment. Getting inmates to invest in their friends and family, in their community, and, crucially, in their work, through the development of additional skills. It is about thinking about reoffending in a rational way by focusing on what achieves our desired outcome, rather than an emotional way by focusing on our need to punish. 

So how screwed are we exactly? Will Labour pursue the same strategy, to the same end, with the same calamitous consequences?

Maybe. There's no point being overly optimistic about it. They didn't show much interest in speaking to this argument in opposition. But there are some reasons to be more hopeful.

The first is that Keir Starmer is really quite a misleading political figure. We saw that during the Labour leadership race. He is not averse to saying one thing while he struggles to secure a position and another thing afterwards. Is that a healthy characteristic in a democracy? No. Might it be positive for prison policy? Yep. 

"We’ve got too many prisoners, not enough prisons," he said during his first press conference as prime minister. Interesting line, that. On the face of it, it is an expression of fact. But it could also be interpreted in a broader way, as a criticism of our general policy approach until now. It's a very Starmer-like mercurial line. It can be read literally or normatively, superficially or structurally.

Everything rests on this rhetorical point. Is Starmer just talking about the current dysfunctional malaise left behind by Tory mismanagement? Or is he making a criticism of an entire approach to penal policy? I suspect the various official reviews into the state of Britain will help Labour conflate these points. They will allow for ostensible emergency action to mask conscious policy decisions. They will conceal the gap between what-we-must-do and what-we-want-to-do.

Starmer has seen the chaos of the criminal justice system first-hand as director of public prosecutions. He is looking for long term solutions rather than short term fixes and infact defines himself on that basis. And look who he has chosen to occupy the position of prisons minister: James Timpson. 

This is what Timpson had to say on prisoners when speaking to Channel 4: 

"A third of them should definitely be there. There's another third in the middle which probably shouldn’t be there but they need some other kind of state support… and then there's another third, and this is a large proportion of women. Prison is a disaster for them because it's just putting them back in the offending cycle."

There are no guarantees here. If that Mail front page is anything to go by, the right-wing press will whip up an almighty storm over any truly progressive reform in this area. Labour could easily get cold feet, even in this period of unprecedented strength.

But all the elements are in play for something genuinely encouraging: The right people are in the key ministerial positions. Someone who is grounded in evidence and a preference for long-term thinking is in the position of prime minister. And Tory incompetence has allowed the government to conceal a radical plan for prisons under the cover of an existing penal crisis.

Whisper it. Maybe even just about believe it. But with a little luck and some strong dollops of ministerial bravery, we might be about to see rational evidence-based prison reform. 

If Labour can’t do it now, in the ruins of Tory policy failure and with a huge majority, it never will.

Odds and Sods

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is an odd little documentary. It follows an 85-year-old sushi master and his tiny restaurant, nestled in a Tokyo underground station. I don't like sushi and I'm not particularly interested in cooking. But two things here are very striking.

The first is how completely alien his philosophy of life is to Western ears. Asked what his son should do, he replies something along the lines of: just keep doing the same thing over and over again every single day until he dies. It's just a completely different framework for viewing the world, and one that obviously means you'd rather watch him on your TV than have him as your father.

The second is that, despite all that, there is something rather beautiful about his worldview. He exhibits a total commitment to his craft. His view is essentially that you must have some natural talent - in his case a sensitive palate - but that the rest comes down to ceaseless work and commitment. He is truly focused on reaching the absolute peak of his particular area of expertise. This is not someone who believes in exploring different facets of yourself. He believes that you find what you're good at and do it forever, really fucking hard. 

It does not seem a life well lived, to be honest. It seems rather cold and mechanical. But there is a beauty to it, and something to learn, if taken with rather more moderation than he applies. I found myself strangely moved by it. 

See you next week.