‘Short term custody isn’t inherently bad, but the way we do it is awful.’ I didn’t expect Justice Secretary David Gauke to start an otherwise thoughtful speech yesterday on prisons like this, but he should have. No one wants people in prison when there are better alternatives that will properly punish them and give them the tools to break away from offending. To do otherwise is stupid. But the debate has been overwhelmed by a fixation on sentence length that wrongly suggests that short imprisonment must always and forever be toxic and counterproductive.
Gauke presented his audience with sobering statistics on rates of incarceration putting us at the top of the league in Europe. We seem addicted to custody in this country, as long as it’s cheap. Let’s try some other data from countries often held up by our criminal justice commentariat as progressive role models. In Denmark in 2017, the average sentence length was 31-60 days. In Finland a year earlier, 40 per cent of all sentenced prisoners had served at most three months. Norway’s average prison sentence is just eight months. Why are we unable to send people to prison for short sentences here without making them worse?
To be fair, all three of these countries lock up significantly fewer of their citizens as a proportion of their population and are (in sentencing terms) less punitive than we are. But they still manage to make short term custody a useful response to unacceptable behaviour as their much lower reoffending rates will testify.
Critics of the British ‘bang-em-up’ school of crime theory are also largely silent on the inconvenient fact that many prison first timers have already been frequent flyers in our creaking criminal justice system; despairing magistrates finally crack after exhausting every community penalty available to them without success. Having a hollowed out probation system, destroyed by a lethal combination of wonkery and cuts doesn’t help either.
So why are we so bad at dealing with people who continually offend and don’t seem to want to stop? Let me count the ways. Primarily, if you want to disrupt offending, particularly low-level acquisitive crime linked to drug addiction – the boom town of incarceration – you don’t send convicted prisoners into dystopian hell holes where it is easier to score your next fix than get a shower. The collapse of almost every metric of decency, safety and humanity in prisons is an appalling indictment of government policy weaponised by corporate incompetence. There’s no way around this. Slashing the numbers of prison staff on the landings has created an environment where it is often not clear who is in charge, never mind whether there is a regime, basic services or, God forbid, rehabilitation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in many of our overcrowded local prisons, home to the majority of short term offenders, where, as the Chief Inspector of prisons recently observed at HMP Bedford:
‘Prisoners became very angry, noisy and challenging and refused to comply with staff when directed to lock up. Staff struggled to deal with the incident, and appeared not to know what to do. Supervisors were not in control. For a period of an hour and a half, prisoners made unreasonable demands and many of them were acceded to.’
The lack of suitable and sufficient prison officers, clearly and confidently in charge, has contributed to rocketing, record levels of violence and self-harm. Gauke devoted a sentence to the latest woeful safety statistics calling them, ‘disturbing.’ On the bridge of HMS good intentions, he opines on sentence reform. In the engine room, his excellent prisons minister, Rory Stewart, tries to sweat a few more miles from knackered engines. If you want prisons to be places of reform in the here and now, abstractions and think pieces won’t help broken staff running broken regimes.
So what can we do to meet the needs of public protection, punishment and rehabilitation? It’s absolutely true that we send far too many people to custody who are more nuisance than physical threat. But away from the cosy world of the middle class liberals and academics who comprise the bulk of the reform lobby, these same people often torture their neighbourhoods. A lack of effective sanction for their behaviour only encourages them and demoralises poor communities that don’t take the Guardian or shop in Waitrose. There are, let’s be blunt, places in our country, denuded of community policing and authority, where lawfulness is not entrenched behaviour. If you want to cut the dismal supply chain of feckless and impulsive young men from the wrong side of the tracks to custody and back again, there needs to be state-led strategic intervention to dig them out of normalised criminality. That’s a lot more than scrapping short sentences will do.
In the meantime, we could explore why Scandinavian countries are so much more successful at short sentences than we are. Prison is an ideal place, uniquely suited, to breaking offending behaviour and getting services around offenders to help them rescue their potential and stop them victimising others. We ought to pay much more attention to the distinction between those in prison because they can’t – and those who won’t – comply, with services and support around them. We need a new generation of ‘enterprise’ prisons solely focused on getting those who are motivated into employment after release. Secure, small scale, community-led detox facilities could do so much more than the bleak penal warehouses that too often accelerate addiction into suicide. There is so much we could do, away from the fixation on short term sentences. But as Gauke says in his speech, the public always want to prioritise hospitals over criminal justice. Which works well as a theory until it’s you in A&E, victim to someone bad and made worse in our blighted prisons.
Ian Acheson is a former prison governor
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