Prison Reform - Two Views

As famous former prisoner Ben Gunn tweeted the other day, it's amazing how many experts on prison have suddenly emerged since the PM's speech on Monday. He also made the rather telling point that the voice of prisoners is conspicuously absent in the on-going debate. Before everything dies down and the political caravan moves on, I've chosen these two views from two very different newspapers, first the Independent and second the Daily Telegraph.  

Cameron’s right to tackle prisons, but his answer is wrong

One problem with the debate is the simplistic juxtaposition of tough versus soft. In challenging this, Cameron is breaking new ground

In the final phase of his leadership, David Cameron dares to highlight one of the great scandals of our times: what happens in prisons and, equally important, what happens when prisoners are released.

The context in which Cameron made his speech to the Policy Exchange think tank could not be darker. The prison population has doubled since Margaret Thatcher was in power, and she was not known for being “soft”. Now there are around 100,000 prisoners crammed into cells.

While the prisoners are incarcerated, the prisons float freely in a chaotic structure. How typical of modern Britain that there has been a political appetite for decades to lock up as many people as possible and yet no desire to address the wider anarchic context in which prisons are supposed to function. How typical of Cameron that he bravely and admirably breaks a taboo by insisting that the approach to prisoners must change, but does not fully address the issues of how prisons should be organised and resourced.

As Cameron notes, part of the scandal is that nearly half of prisoners reoffend when they are released. This is a mind-boggling statistic. All that taxpayers’ money putting offenders in cells and then they return to another crammed prison before very long. What is even more horrific is that the statistic has been known for a very long time. The scandal is both hidden, in that few live to see the inside of prisons, and at the same time right in front of our eyes if we choose to look. Some former Home Secretaries and chief inspectors of prisons have been trying to shine a light for decades.

In 2003, former chief inspector of prisons David Ramsbotham wrote a shocking book, Prisongate. Based on Ramsbotham’s own direct experiences, it highlighted forensically and vividly the nature of the scandal, the causes and the consequences. In some ways the most alarming section of his book relates to his discovery that there were no connections in the system, from the Home Office to the cell. During a visit to Holloway Prison, the women’s prison in north London, he was appalled at the filth, the poor quality of management, the presence of a large number of mentally disordered people and the shortage of staff. Subsequently, when he asked to see the director for women at the Home Office, he was told that the post did not exist and that no one on the Prisons Board had worked with women in prison.

Ramsbotham had been an army officer and was struck by the contrast between the clear lines of accountability in the army compared with the anarchy of the prisons. As I argued last week, in relation to the collapse of Kids Company, if the question is asked “Who is responsible to whom?” and the answer is “Well... it’s all a bit complicated” there is trouble ahead. Ramsbotham concludes: “There is an absence of responsibility and accountability. There is no director of women’s prisons, no director for children’s prisons, no director for ‘lifers’, no director for sex offenders. In short, no one in charge of ensuring the most modern management of very different categories of prisoners.”

Cameron’s answer is to give more autonomy to prison governors. Taken alone, this is a risky move and fails to address the wider structural issues. Because of the current anarchy, governors have inadvertent autonomy now – which is fine if they are good and disastrous if they are not up to the immense challenges. But Cameron adds some other good proposals that amount to forms of accountability based on the relatively successful introduction of school academies. He suggests league tables of prison performance, schemes to encourage graduate high-fliers to work in prisons and innovative ways to deter reoffending. Out-of-sight prisons could be badly run without anyone noticing. He envisages much greater transparency, a form of accountability.

Cameron deserves praise for making a speech in which he argues that prisoners must be seen as “potential assets to be harnessed”. This is subtler than the usual demand that virtually everyone should be locked up. No Labour Prime Minister or Home Secretary would have made the case in the New Labour era, paralysed by the fear of appearing “soft” on crime.

Part of the problem with the debate around crime is the simplistic juxtaposition of tough versus soft. In seeking to even challenge these assumptions a little, Cameron is breaking new political ground as a Prime Minister, even if more enlightened former Tory Home Secretaries like Douglas Hurd have been making this case for a long time. He also echoes an excellent speech on the issue from the Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, soon after the election.

But breaking new political ground is not necessarily the same as sweeping policy changes. Prison budgets have been cut when regional groups of prisons are needed to keep prisoners in local areas and to continue education after release, as well as work training and medical or substance abuse treatment. Such an overhaul was recognised by the then Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, who proposed clusters of prisons in a White Paper, in 1991. Nothing happened.

Will action follow now? Evidently a determined Prime Minister and a resolute Justice Secretary are potentially a powerful force within Government. But Cameron is moving towards the final phase of his leadership and successors might feel obliged to show how “tough” they are on crime. For Cameron, time is running out and he proposes mainly incremental change. But he did not have to address this highly sensitive policy area. In highlighting the scale of the scandal he at least creates the space for a change of approach even if he is not the one implementing urgently needed new policies, structures and attitudes. A Conservative Prime Minister has made clear that, as currently run, prisons do not work. Given the reactionary nature of the debate on prisons, that is a lot of space to create.

Established as one of the most influential political commentators in the country, Steve Richards became The Independent’s chief political commentator in 2000 having been political editor of the New Statesman. He presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

--oo00oo--

From the Daily Telegraph:-

Reforming British prisons can be the great progressive cause of our time

Our prison system is a conveyor belt producing hardened criminals at enormous public expense. How can we allow it to go on?

Not so long ago a recently retired prison officer told me of a former colleague who used to keep a single word stitched onto the inside of his hat. Whenever he was approached by a prisoner with some request or other he would take off his cap and, before the hapless petitioner could finish his sentence, present his answer: “No”.

As recently as the 1990s the then chief inspector of prisons, General Lord Ramsbotham, told of his experience walking out of HMP Holloway after his first inspection, having discovered female inmates kept in chains whilst giving birth.

It is therefore testament to how far we have come when a Conservative prime minister can take to the airwaves to describe prisoners not as “liabilities to be managed” but as “potential assets to be harnessed”, while announcing his intention to make prison reform “one of the great progressive causes” of British politics.

On Monday, the Prime Minister set out his latest proposals for reform, amongst them an overhaul of the prison education system and protection of its £130 million annual budget, as well as the introduction of "reform prisons", in which governors will be given full control over how they operate and spend their budget.

But the government minister really driving this agenda is the justice secretary Michael Gove, who has set to the task with an almost puritanical zeal. From reversing the ludicrous cap imposed by his predecessor on the number of books inmates are allowed to read, to genuinely radical proposals such as the introduction of weekend prison terms to enable prisoners to stay in work during the week, all his reforms have one thing in common, namely a sincerely held belief in the necessity of prisoner rehabilitation as not only a practical but also a moral public good.

Mr Gove is deliberately seeking to recast the whole debate on prisons away from one in which the need for rehabilitation is set in opposition to the need for justice and punishment, and in which any initiative to give offenders a second chance is perceived as being "soft on crime".

“I’m not sure that members on the opposite benches would agree that I’ve become a sandal wearing, muesli munching, vegan vapester,” Mr Gove informed the House of Commons on 26 January, responding to just such a critique from one of his Conservative colleagues.

"It’s because I’m a Conservative that I believe in the rule of law as the foundation stone of our civilisation. It’s because I’m a Conservative that I believe that evil must be punished. But it’s also because I’m a Conservative, and a Christian, that I believe in redemption. And I think the purpose of our prison system is to keep people safe by making people better.”

It was on a visit to Pentonville prison last November that I witnessed a striking example of this new philosophy in action, in the form of a jolly-looking fellow in a bright red cape and a large tricorn hat, ringing a bell and yelling at the top of his voice.

This gentleman, it transpired, was the Islington town crier announcing the results of the first official democratic election to have been held in a British prison, complete with oversight from the Electoral Commission. Prisoners had been permitted to organise into different parties, each on their own platform, with a representative from the winning party given a direct line into the prison management to advance that agenda, along with other issues or grievances inmates may have. Appropriately, perhaps, the party that won did so on an education platform.

This is not to pretend that British prisons are all now places of industry, harmony and genuine reform. The impact of £900 million in cuts to the prisons budget since 2010 have been keenly felt, not least in the reduction in prison staff by a third. When the chief inspector of prisons describes too many jails as places of “violence, squalor and idleness”, his words must be urgently heeded. What is encouraging is that the government, together with those involved in managing prisons more broadly, do now appear to be heeding those words, and with some urgency.

Above all what is needed are efforts to reduce the scandalously high rates of reoffending, with 45 per cent of offenders currently reconvicted within a year of release, rising to 58 per cent for those who served sentences of 12 months or less. The cost of this reoffending to the public purse is estimated at anywhere between £9.5 billion and £13 billion every year. And these are just the economic costs of crime.

Amongst the most innovative new actors in this particular space is Tempus Novo, a small Yorkshire-based charity founded in 2014 by two prison officers based at HMP Leeds. The charity exists with the explicit purpose of moving offenders out of crime and into employment. Drawing on their intimate knowledge of both the prison system and prisoners themselves, Steve Freer and Val Wawrosz identify and then mentor serving and ex-offenders genuinely committed to turning their lives around.

In its first year of operations, Tempus Novo has succeeded in helping 44 of the 65 offenders on its books secure job interviews, of whom 39 made it to interview and 37 got the job. And these are not just the soft options. Between them, this group had no fewer than 750 prior convictions and 1,288 arrests. Since joining Tempus Novo, the reoffending rate amongst them has dropped by almost 95 per cent.

Some may argue that in these straightened financial times, public and indeed private money could be better spent than on helping the life chances of those who have deliberately sought to do others harm. Yet for society to take this approach, as it has done in the past, is merely to cut off its nose to spite its face. Consider that you can educate a boy at Eton College for less than it costs to house a single inmate for a year, and that there are now some 95,000 inmates in prisons across the UK.

The inescapable fact of the matter is that economically, socially and indeed morally, reform of our nation’s prisons is the right thing not just for those on the inside, but for all the rest of us living on the outside as well.

George Grant is a Trustee of Tempus Novo and the former Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Bradford West