Texas. Big country, big ideas. The new Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has become enamoured with an intriguing idea from the Lone Star state – letting prisoners out early for good behaviour.
Those of you who still watch reruns of Porridge on BritBox will be having déjà vu. Back before the Criminal Justice Act of 1991 ended it due to preference for a more risk-based approach, remission was a central feature of prisoners’ lives. Good behaviour could earn you days off your sentence up to one third of time you were due to serve. The penalty of misbehaviour was lost remission. The prison population in 1991 was about half what it is now.
We also need action to restore order and control
Necessity, however, is the mother of invention. Over in Texas, that necessity was a system that had incarcerated north of 150,000 people and counting in bursting facilities. The majority of these prisoners were pre-trial detainees. There was no money to build the state out of this crisis and reoffending was sky high – at a rate of about 43 per cent at the height of the crisis about a decade ago. There are some similarities here in form if not scale.
But there are some obvious risks associated with changing a system that pivots towards good behaviour at the expense of risk management. These are apparent to those of us who have worked with very dangerous people – from terrorists to serial rapists – who are sometimes adept at what is known as ‘disguised compliance’. In Texas, I’m sure this would be called ‘lying.’ I have vivid memories of highly compliant sex offenders who were superbly behaved in prison, compliant in every respect, diligent about tackling their offending behaviour who promptly offended again on release. There are far too many examples of a professional practitioner class, soused in ‘reclamation theology’, ready to believe that polite compliance by prisoners has far more significance to future risk than it should.
For all that, there are plainly also far too many people in prison, some driven to suicide and madness, who are there because of extreme risk aversion. As with many aspects of our own failing criminal justice system, it’s a curate’s egg – good in parts where the balance is maintained. When I ran a small country jail temporarily before the probation service was vandalised, we had a wing of lifers. I thought the senior probation officer there wanted to release everyone and he thought I wanted to keep everyone in. Somewhere in that creative tension, good decisions got made. Mercy and justice rhymed. That’s at the heart of any good risk management process.
Back here, I’m not suggesting that the Justice Secretary is ready to throw away risk management for the sake of a good headline. No doubt reintroducing a system like remission would extend ‘good behaviour’ to successful participation in offending behaviour programmes. This is the way it operates in Texas. I’d rather have a sex offender that behaves like a prat but won’t harm anyone else than a slyly compliant recidivist. But all this seems like magical thinking when we have a system so mired in overcrowding, incompetence and invisible leadership that it’s easier to get your hands on crack than toilet paper.
We should look elsewhere in the world for solutions that will help us return prisons to being places of safety, purpose and hope. We should never underestimate the power of the carrot to people only used to getting and using the stick. But sometimes the wheel can be reinvented here without the necessity of transatlantic assistance.
Unfortunately, the corporate memory of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service now matches the goldfish because all the people who knew about or operated remission were thrown out years ago. It is highly dubious that officers with little experience of working with prisoners locked up 23 hours a day could administer such a system. Before hope, we need to retake control of what goes on inside prisons themselves. Nothing else will work without safety. While we need a healthy debate about why our prisons are failing and what can be done to reverse the chaos here, we also need action to restore order and control so we have places where the reintroduction of remission might work off the page.
In Texas, corrections officers are respected by the community and the state system, and the staff welfare is widely regarded as world-class. What a contrast to our own battered front line. Texans have a pithy phrase for those using empty rhetoric without anything to show for it: all hat and no cattle.
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