In his House of Commons speech yesterday, Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk shifted the blame for problems with our prison system, announced liberalising reforms and promised a bright future. Ultimately though he’s only bought a little time.
Chalk began by reaffirming the government’s commitment to public protection. In a significant shift rapists will now spend their entire sentence in prison, as opposed to half of it or two-thirds. While this headline will probably prove popular, it does carry some risk: under this arrangement they will be released without any supervision from probation. There’s a chance they will be more likely to reoffend as a result, but that problem is many years away when someone else will be Justice Secretary.
In reality, all these policies are likely to do is create a little more space in the prison system
Next came the excuses. Although Chalk acknowledged that the prison population is the highest it’s ever been – twice as much as it was three decades ago – he claimed this was ‘principally’ because of the growth of the remand population (prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing). It is true that the remand population has grown from 9,000 in 2019 to over 15,000 now, but this is not, as Chalk would have us believe, due to Covid and the 2022 barristers’ strike.
The National Audit Office reported that the court backlog grew 23 per cent in the year before the pandemic, and since the barristers’ strike concluded a year ago, that backlog has risen from 14,800 to 15,500. Remember that, as Lord Chancellor, Chalk is also responsible for the court system, so this growing backlog is also his responsibility.
The only policy we heard to address the growing remand population was to consider offering a greater ‘discount’ on sentences for pleading guilty. Under the current rules criminals can receive up to a one-third reduction to their sentence for an early plea. The government hopes that increasing this reduction will encourage more accused prisoners to plead guilty, but this can create some perverse outcomes. It is quite possible that a prisoner may find that pleading guilty means being released earlier than they would be if they went to trial and were found not guilty. Instead, the right thing to do should be to increase the capacity in our courts so that justice can actually be done.
We were also told that more prisoners are being ‘recalled’ – that is, returned to prison during their period of release ‘on licence’. Again, this represents a failure. The probation service is supposed to supervise released prisoners so that they do not breach their licence conditions, do not commit further offences and are not returned to prison. If these people are being recalled unnecessarily then it is policy that needs to change. If the recall rate is rising because of greater offending or risk to the public then the probation service needs to do better.
However, the probation service too is struggling with staffing. Although the government has increased probation service funding by £155 million a year, and has exceeded its recruitment targets for the past three years, the most recent annual report speaks of a ‘staffing crisis’. Between 20 and 35 per cent of probation officer roles are vacant, depending on the region. Staff continue to leave at a high rate, with experienced probation officers particularly likely to leave. Again, it is Alex Chalk who is the minister responsible for the probation service.
Excuses out of the way, Chalk presented his solutions. Extensive prison building with 20,000 new places planned. Converting more single cells to double-occupancy. ‘Rapid deployment’ cells; essentially temporary portacabins. None of this was new policy, and although Chalk proudly pointed to the 100 new prison places (really closer to 90) being created every week, he didn’t mention that the prison population is, in fact, growing by up to 200 every week.
The Lord Chancellor made no mention of plans to increase the numbers of prison officers, although the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) did say that staffing is improving, with the total number of officers in prisons up by over 700 since June 2022.
So what new ideas did Chalk have? Early releases: prisoners could be released up to 18 days early, with significant caveats. No sex offenders, terrorists or prisoners convicted of a serious violent offence will be eligible. Those serving an extended determinate sentence (given to offenders who pose a particular risk to public safety) will also be excluded, as will prisoners who committed an ‘offence of particular concern’ – that is to say specified terrorist offences and the two most serious sexual offences against a child.
Ultimately though, prison governors will have to say yes or no, and, as we saw during the pandemic early release scheme in 2020, the bias will be to do nothing. No governor wants to order an early release which results in a new offence and there’s little upside in releasing prisoners early. A governor may free up a few spaces, and please some of the inmates, but those empty cells will quickly be filled. The MoJ have not yet modelled the impact of this early release scheme on prison numbers.
Next in his speech, Chalk talked a good game on cutting crime. He believes that the most dangerous offenders should spend more time in prison, for the protection of the public, and that our prisons should work to genuinely rehabilitate prisoners. However, he provided no detail as to how our overcrowded, understaffed and badly-managed system can hope to do this. When asked, the MoJ drew attention to the employment advisory boards and the new Prison Education Service, which do indicate a focus on the right outcomes.
Perhaps removing some of the over 10,000 foreign national prisoners sooner and faster will solve the problem? Chalk hopes so and his plan is to seek to deport them during the last 18 months of their sentence rather than the last year as is currently the case. Under the current early release scheme only about 1,300 prisoners are deported per year, meaning the government will need to address the process and legal rights of appeal if it actually wants to increase this number.
The most significant policy announced was on shorter sentences. Now the presumption for any sentence under twelve months will be for supervision in the community rather than a custodial sentence. Prison reform organisations have long argued for the abolition of short sentences; in 2019, when he was Justice Secretary, David Gauke called for it too.
The theory is that short sentences disrupt criminals’ housing, employment and lives, making them more likely to reoffend that community service. It is true that over 50 per cent of those sentenced to less than 12 months reoffend, as opposed to 22 per cent of those whose sentences are suspended.
However, the number of criminals receiving short sentences has been declining for years, from 50,700 in 2018 to 35,300 last year. While the number of short custodial sentences is high, there are not many such prisoners in the system at any one time. At the end of June this year only 3,645 prisoners were serving short sentences and over a fifth of those committed sex offences or violent crimes.
The government hopes that increasing the number of suspended, community sentences will reduce crime. But this assumes that criminals currently receiving short custodial sentences are just as suited to community orders as those who now avoid prison. This new policy will also put significant new demands on the probation service, which is already struggling.
Prolific offenders will still receive prison sentences. The government has not yet determined which offences, if any, will be excluded from the presumption against prison and no modelling has yet been conducted to estimate the impact of the policy on prison numbers. There is a risk that abolishing prison for a whole tranche of crimes would be deeply unpopular with the public and if the rates of those offences rose, the policy might be blamed. The MoJ did emphasise that short sentences are not being abolished. Judges and magistrates will retain discretion to sentence when they believe it appropriate.
In reality, all these policies are likely to do is create a little more space in the prison system, perhaps buying another six or twelve months of capacity before the system reaches this point again. Meanwhile the courts will continue to struggle, and an already dangerously understaffed probation service will have to cope with a massive increase in work, raising the risk of dangerous supervision failures. In this context, the best Alex Chalk can hope for is that the next crisis or scandal takes place after the election, when it’s likely to be someone else’s problem.
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