Former justice secretary David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review (ISR), running since October, was not due to report until the spring. However, following the latest published prison population statistics, which showed there are only just over 1,000 spaces left in men’s prisons and soaring numbers for serious further offences, an interim report has been published. It makes for revolutionary reading. As Gauke says, he is confronting ‘the consequences of decades of haphazard policy making and underinvestment in the criminal justice system – bringing it to the brink of collapse.’
Our justice system catches and jails fewer people, yet the prison population continues to soar. Why?
The report is brutal, tearing into the entire political narrative around crime and justice over the past thirty years. Gauke claims that the ISR found that a ‘belief that longer incarceration is the only effective means of punishment has left the system overwhelmed and ineffective’. He acknowledges, ‘that the rise in the prison population cannot be attributed to a considered strategy focused on cutting crime’. Instead, Gauke blames:
Decisions made by successive governments in response to the growing ‘tough on crime’ agenda which has focused on punishment – understood as longer prison sentences – over effective ways of cutting reoffending.
The ISR claims that this has diverted resources away from ‘effective alternatives to custody’, forcing government to ‘adopt costly and high-risk emergency measures in an attempt to stabilise the system’. They’re right about the emergency measures. In September, the government’s SDS40 scheme began, under which prisoners were released just 40 per cent of the way through their sentence. Unfortunately, in that time frame, for every 100 people released from prison 67 were recalled. To be fair to Gauke, he does recognise the issues around recall, acknowledging that ‘factors including the introduction of a mandatory supervision period for shorter sentences, and heightened probation officer risk aversion…have contributed to this increase’.
Considering all of this, the ISR wants to understand what is behind the increase in the prison population. There is no ‘considered strategy’, the report says. Gauke claims that the prison population has grown because of an ‘increased use of custodial sentences’. This claim is based on the fact that ‘custody rates for indictable offences…[are] up by more that 16 percentage points’ between 2024 and 1993.
This, however, is a misleading statistic, as in 1993 a quarter of crimes were solved, These days, only around 5.5 per cent of crimes with a victim result in a charge. This means that while people convicted of crimes are more likely to be jailed, the actual number of prison sentences has fallen. In 2010, around 30,000 people were jailed per quarter, but this has fallen to around 18,000 per quarter – despite the significant rise in the British population over the same period. In reality our growing prison population is not due to us sending more people to jail.
Our justice system now catches and jails fewer people, yet the prison population continues to soar. Why is this? To a great extent this has been driven by longer sentences, the expanding remand population (those who are awaiting trial or sentencing), and the significant increase in the probation service ‘recalling’ people to prison (often when they haven’t committed a further crime). The issues around probation and remand can’t be solved by changes to sentencing: they require us to solve problems in other parts of the justice system.
Is the problem, as Gauke asserts, the ‘ill-considered and knee-jerk sentencing reform implemented by successive governments’? Perhaps to an extent. The report is right that mandatory minimum sentences have driven up the prison population. But what will solve the problem?
The ISR claims that to tackle capacity problems in prisons ‘we must have an honest conversation about who we send to prison, and for how long’. I can see why they believe that. Over 37 per cent of released prisoners reoffend.
But what I learned in my time as a prisoner is that the length of a sentence is less important than what happens during it. Almost every prisoner is jailed because they have broken society’s rules. An ideal prison system would teach them to live a different and better life after release. Unfortunately our jails often do almost nothing to transform people’s lives, while regularly ensuring they leave with new addictions.
The ISR may well decide to recommend that we scrap minimum sentences, make recall harder and reduce the use of imprisonment. But unless we find a way to make our prisons work, the crisis will only be delayed rather than averted. While the interim report shows some bravery, it still seems unwilling to engage with the complete reality of our justice crisis.
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