Britain’s ballooning prison population is a disastrous mess. It is folly in a severe financial crisis to keep on jailing so many people

Harry Woolf

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7137358.ece

It is almost 20 years since I led an inquiry into riots at Strangeways and other prisons. The Government accepted all our recommendations except one — to prevent overcrowding, which was seen then by ministers, the Prison Service and almost everyone else, as a cancer destroying our criminal justice system.

The average prison population in England and Wales at the time was 44,000; now it is more than 85,000, and overcrowding persists, leading us to put aside billions of pounds to build new prisons and to pay about £4 billion a year to house the current numbers.

Given that about half of adult prisoners reoffend within a year of release, costs of this scale are hard to justify — particularly in a financial crisis. Yet successive home secretaries have refused to heed the message.

How do we get out of this disastrous mess? We can first explode the myth that judges are to blame and ministers are not responsible for sentence lengths.

As the Prison Reform Trust has made clear, 75 per cent of the increase in imprisonment is attributable to harsher sentencing by judges. But sentences are determined by a framework laid down by government. To take one example when I was Lord Chief Justice: schedule 21 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which set in statute the minimum terms for life prisoners, increased dramatically the time to be served.
The catalyst was the annoyance of David Blunkett, then the Home Secretary,at the Human Rights Act, which had been held to mean that judges, not the Home Secretary, should determine how long a lifer would serve.

It is clearly essential to have prisons to which prisoners are sent, sometimes with no real prospect of release. Judges can identify such cases without statutory provisions that needlessly and arbitrarily force them to impose longer sentences than they would otherwise.

In such a severe economic crisis it is folly to have policies that make the prison population substantially higher than is necessary.

Many US states are introducing policies to cut the number of prisoners, which, in turn, has cut reoffending. We must do the same.