Gove's Honeymoon Over

As Harold Wilson once famously said, 'a week's a long time in politics'. Michael Gove went from the darling of penal reformers to pariah in less than four days. Having wowed the throng at the Howard League on Thursday, he was being roundly denounced by them on Monday when this statement was released by the MoJ:-

Prison building revolution announced by Chancellor and Justice Secretary

Chancellor George Osborne and Justice Secretary Michael Gove have today (9 November 2015) unveiled a major new prison reform programme including plans to build 9 new prisons. The radical reforms will ensure Britain’s prison system is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century, and the new prisons will allow the government to close old Victorian prisons in city centres and sell the sites for housing.

This will allow over 3000 new homes to be built, boosting house building in urban areas and helping thousands of working people achieve their dream of owning a home. The Victorian prison site at Reading will be the first to be sold. Around 10,000 prison places will move from outdated sites to the new prisons, significantly improving rehabilitation, and saving around £80 million per year due to the reduced costs of modern facilities.

Chancellor George Osborne said:

"This spending review is about reform as much as it is about making savings. One important step will be to modernise the prison estate. So many of our jails are relics from Victorian times on prime real estate in our inner cities. So we are going to reform the infrastructure of our prison system, building new institutions which are modern, suitable and rehabilitative. And we will close old, outdated prisons in city centres, and sell the sites to build thousands of much-needed new homes.

This will save money, reform an outdated public service and create opportunity by boosting construction jobs and offering more people homes to buy. Five of the new prisons will be open before the end of this parliament. The government will also complete the new prison being built at Wrexham, and expand existing prisons in Stocken and Rye Hill.

Currently half of criminals re-offend within one year of being released, and nearly half of all prisoners go into prison without any qualifications. The Chancellor and Justice Secretary made the announcement ahead of a visit to Brixton prison, a Victorian prison in South London."

Justice Secretary Michael Gove said:

"This investment will mean we can replace ageing and ineffective Victorian prisons with new facilities fit for the modern world. We will be able to design out the dark corners which too often facilitate violence and drug-taking. And we will be able to build a prison estate which allows prisoners to be rehabilitated, so they turn away from crime. It is only through better rehabilitation that we will reduce reoffending, cut crime and make our streets safer."

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So, despite all the warm words about "helping thousands of working people achieve their dream of owning a home", this statement by the odious George Osborne was as much about a mega-property deal aimed at providing some trendy accommodation for the wealthy in London as it was about any serious attempt at penal reform.

Russell Webster wasn't too keen:-

Is building nine new prisons good news?

WHAT WILL BE THE IMPACT ON THE PRISON POPULATION?

Those in the criminal justice field are seeing the announcement in the context of Mr Gove’s recent announcements that as a country we could make less use of prison.

But why do we need to build new prisons if our goal is to reduce the prison population?

In the 15 years between 1993 and 2008, the prison population grew by an average of 4% per year (despite crime falling steadily over the same period.) Surely, we could just reverse this process, send fewer people to prison and close the most out-dated prisons in a methodical, planned way, with the added bonus of garnering extra money for the public purse by selling the land (much of it prime inner city sites) to developers.

Modern prisons are cheaper to run. But that is often if they are super-sized “Titan” prisons like the new one being built at Wrexham. Titan prisons are notoriously difficult to run safely and inevitably mean that the majority of prisoners are held many miles from home, making family ties hard to maintain and resettlement plans difficult to achieve.

The fear of many penal reformers is that we will suffer from a paradoxical “Field of Dreams” scenario:

"If we build it, they will come."

In other words, our history shows that when new prisons are built, sentencers usually ensure that they are too filled with new prisoners while old prisons are not decommissioned at all, resulting in still more people in prison.

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This from David Raho, Napo London Branch:-
Prison can never be 'fit for purpose' whilst the government does not appear to know what the purpose is. The prisons we have are overcrowded, understaffed, and run down - staff want to be there even less than the prisoners. We simply imprison far too many people needlessly and doing so actually increases the risk to the rest of the public upon their release. An increasing prison population is a sign of a failing justice system that is out of control.

Countries with a more enlightened justice systems are actually reducing their prison populations and putting a great deal of effort into closing their prisons. They invest heavily in rehabilitation and community based options and only use custody as a last resort. This in fact means more money to spend on crime prevention and helping victims too.

Politicians need to grasp the nettle and stop investing in a broken prison system and selling off prison services to revolving door private companies with no motivation to reduce the prison population that has never in fact been tasked to tackle the real causes of offending and learn from those systems that do actually appear to work in concert with a number of other initiatives to help people to lead law abiding lifestyles. That means no more extended fact finding trips by MoJ officials to the US and Canada and perhaps a little more research closer to home in say Sweden or Norway where their approach appears to be far more innovative and humane and incidentally much better value for public money.

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Here's some highlights from Oliver Wainwright writing in the Guardian on the architecture:- 

Pile 'em high: Britain's £1bn plan to build nine warehouse super-prisons

“The style of architecture of a prison,” states the 1826 Encyclopaedia Londinensis, “offers an effectual method of exciting the imagination to a most desirable point of abhorrence.” Spelling out the principles of good jail design, it goes on to add that “the exterior should, therefore, be formed in the heavy and sombre style, which most forcibly impresses the spectator with gloom and terror”.

You would be forgiven for thinking this was the government’s current guidance on prisons, judging by the £250m “super-prison” currently rising amid a jumble of industrial sheds on the outskirts of Wrexham in north Wales. As the architects’ design statement proudly claims, one of the principal objectives was “to ensure that the design of the proposed prison aligns with the character and appearance of the surrounding industrial estate”. Just as the nearby warehouses have been designed for the stacking and processing of goods, so the super-prison appears to be conceived as a pile-’em-high battery farm for 2,100 inmates. A relentless grid of small square windows will run along the grey walls of the vast accommodation blocks, with cells arranged in long radial corridors around a central hub – in the same way that prisons have been configured since Victorian times.

The historic similarities are poignant, given that Michael Gove, justice secretary and lover of simpler times past, has just announced a £1bn plan to close down inner-city Victorian prisons, sell them off to housing developers and use the money to build nine new super-prisons like the one in Wrexham, to hold a total of 10,000 prisoners. “We will be able to design out the dark corners which too often facilitate violence and drug-taking,” he said, suggesting that architecture might actually have a role to play. This marks an about-turn from his view of school design, a process from which he sought to remove architects entirely when he was education secretary, accusing them of “creaming off cash” with their fancy plans.

But what of Gove’s new fleet of prisons? The Treasury says its “new for old” plan will save £80m a year, suggesting that the new generation of super-prisons will be squeezed to a level of maximum efficiency of which even Jeremy Bentham would be proud. The Victorian reformer’s famous panopticon prison design, never fully realised, proposed to arrange cells in a circle around a central point, allowing a single guard “to survey the whole establishment in the twinkling of an eye”. It would aim to create “the sentiment of an invisible omniscience”, while all the time keeping inmates in lonely isolation, following Bentham’s theory of “reformation through solitude”.

Sadly, his principles seem to be enjoying a resurgence. Wrexham follows hot on the heels of Oakwood prison, another 2,000-capacity behemoth built near Wolverhampton in 2012, also designed around a central point, thereby needing fewer staff to keep an eye on inmates. Offering cut-price incarceration courtesy of private security firm G4S (costing £13,200 an inmate per year, compared to the UK average of more than £31,000), it was plagued by design problems soon after opening. With only a single fence, drugs and phones could be thrown in – indeed, inmates told prison inspectors it was easier to get drugs there than soap.

By prioritising efficiency over rehabilitation, this new generation of bargain-basement holding pens are cutting out crucial spaces. Communal dining rooms are increasingly rare because they require more supervision, so inmates generally eat alone in their cells, giving them fewer opportunities to socialise. Fixtures and fittings are all tamperproof and wipeclean, making the prison environment feel more institutional and less like a normal place. It’s not hard to see how a reduction in staff combined with an increased sense of institutionalisation has led to jails in England and Wales being in their worst state for a decade, with rises in violence, self-harm and staff attacks, according to the chief inspector’s report in July.

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Thanks to Inside Times and HMI Prisons News, this is what new jails look like, HMP Brinsford:-