Our prisons are nearly full to bust once again so the Ministry of Justice has been flying some kites ahead of the review of sentencing led by recovered Tory David Gauke. The ‘leaked’ idea involves the reintroduction of remission of time spent in prison for good behaviour. While the Justice Secretary Shabanna Mahmood is said to be impressed with how a similar system in Texas cut the prison population dramatically, the idea of time of your sentence for behaving yourself is quintessentially British.
Most episodes of the BBC comedy Porridge will contain a reference to remission, granted or removed and how it shapes an offender’s journey. That’s because from 1948 to 1991 it was embedded in the system. Prisoners who kept their noses clean, worked hard and complied with the rules got out early. Those who didn’t served the full term. There have been so many sentencing changes since the Criminal Justice Act abolished remission in favour of automatic release and supervision in 1991, I’m not convinced many judges even understand how long people are banged up for.
But the ‘new’ idea advanced by Gauke and released to test the water lands at a moment when cynicism and mistrust of our penal system could not be greater. This is that certain prisoners, normally serving shorter sentences for less serious offences, can be eligible for release at the one-third point in their sentence. This is even less than the slicing of current custodial terms to 40 per cent in a desperate attempt to head off population gridlock. This is likely to be a hard sell to the public who have seen prisoners released early commit further serious offences.
However, there is another interesting dimension to these proposals that ought to be much more palatable. While prisoners who earn remission will get out early, those who fail to comply either through misbehaviour or not tacking their offending behaviour risk serving all of their sentence inside. This is a dramatic departure from the current convoluted system which requires automatic release before the end of a determinate sentence typically at the 50 per cent or 75 per cent mark, however an offender behaves.
There is a huge problem with compliance in our chaotic prison system. Giving prisoners the carrot of early release and the stick of serving a full term behind bars, dependent on behaviour, will be a powerful incentive. Clearing the landings of people for whom prison has had some salutary effect will provide the time and the space for officers to focus on managing dangerousness and risk of those offenders we must get better at rehabilitating.
Public opinion is being softened up, not very subtly, for a dramatic change in penal policy
There are dangers here too. Prisons already have incentives and earned privileges systems which have had only a limited effect on custodial behaviour. The principle of carrot and stick cannot survive in places awash with drugs and the violence they bring. Where will the investment come from to provide workshops and supervisors or teachers or psychologists to provide alternatives to the indolence and nihilism which currently occupies the time of prisoners locked in their cells for up to 23 hours a day? If measuring progress becomes an essentially abstract and arbitrary process because there is nothing meaningful to measure an offenders progress against, these improvements will flounder. Good behaviour cannot amount to ‘didn’t attack staff’, as welcome as that improvement might be in an environment where over the last 12 months an average of 29 prison officers were assaulted every day.
Public opinion is being softened up, not very subtly, for a dramatic change in penal policy. It’s a high-risk strategy given how confidence in the system has been shattered by years of under investment and corporate incompetence. Our reconviction rates speak of a system that is in the words of a former home secretary, an ‘expensive way of making bad people worse.’ We can’t go on as we are with a system running red hot. But the moral injury to those running it at the sharp end requires energy and purpose at least as much as David Gauke’s review. Broken staff cannot help fix broken people. Order and control is foundational to everything, including an environment where pro-social behaviour is possible. It can then be encouraged and rewarded.
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