Prison News

I note the Prison Governors' Association are once again saying our prisons are close to being full, but are almost invariably ignored, despite being correct. The story was covered on Ch4 news extensively last week and reported here on 5th June in InsideTime:-

Prisons will be full by July, governors warn

The head of the Prison Governors’ Association (PGA) has warned that jails will be full by next month – and threatened legal action if the Government tries to squeeze any more prisoners in.

Andrea Albutt said that a rigorous exercise was carried out last year to determine the maximum number who could be held safely at each prison. She said that the PGA, alongside other trade unions, was confident of mounting a successful challenge in the courts if ministers attempt to exceed this capacity.

Instead, she urged the Government to introduce an early release scheme to keep prisoner numbers within the current limit. Ministers have tried this once already this year, when they extended the time prisoners can spend on home detention curfew from four-and-a-half months to six.

Albutt will stand down later this year after eight years as president of the PGA. Delivering a speech at Westminster to MPs and peers on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Penal Affairs, she said: “We have a perfect storm situation at present. Our prisons are full and the prison building programme cannot keep pace with the increase in the prison population.” She added: “There is no more room at the inn.”

In 2021, during the Covid pandemic, there were just under 78,000 prisoners in England and Wales. By the start of 2023 this had risen to 82,200. After 20 successive weeks of increasing numbers, there are now 85,400 prisoners – just 800 short of the nationwide “usable operational capacity”.

Albutt pointed to policies introduced by successive Conservative justice secretaries which had added to prisoner numbers, including lengthening the portion of sentences which must be spent in custody. She said: “For several years, the PGA has voiced concern over the government’s tough-on-crime agenda and the impact on an already-stretched system, which has suffered from lack of investment for well over a decade. Many of our prisons are not providing a safe, decent and rehabilitative environment.”

In a damning assessment of how the Conservatives have managed prisons since they came to power in 2010, she said that jails had been treated as a “political football”, subject to “short termism, party politics, constant changing secretaries of state and personal ministerial priorities”. She said the past 13 years had left “a legacy of dire consequences for all who live and work in prisons”.

She singled out Chris Grayling’s time as justice secretary from 2012 to 2015, during which staff numbers and maintenance budgets were cut, the probation service was part-privatised and facilities management was contracted out. She said that as a result, violence and self-harm increased while “the crumbling estate became so dilapidated that large parts of it were unfit for human habitation but remained in use”. She added: “To this day we have not recovered from this catastrophic reduction in funding.”

Measures currently being taken by the Government to try to head off the capacity crisis in prisons include “Operation Safeguard”, in which 400 police cells have been earmarked to hold prisoners when nearby jails are full, and Rapid Deployment Cells, portable buildings which are being installed in the grounds of some jails.

In her speech, Albutt also criticised the Government’s decision in 2021 not to give prisoners and prison staff priority for Covid vaccination, despite recommendations from public health experts. She labelled it “sinful” and said: “This decision was based on what public opinion would think as opposed to what was the right thing to do to stop the spread of the virus within prisons and out into the wider community.”

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I thought this was interesting from 25th May and 'A Lawyer Writes' :-

Give up prisons, top judge tells minister

An ‘obvious potential conflict of interest’ for the Ministry of Justice

The most senior judge in England and Wales has suggested that the Ministry of Justice should no longer be responsible for running prisons. The department took on prisons and probation when it was created in 2007. Before that, the lord chancellor briefly headed a Department for Constitutional Affairs. Prisons had been run by the Home Office since 1823.

Lord Burnett of Maldon made his suggestion in a speech of welcome to the new justice secretary and lord chancellor, Alex Chalk KC MP, who took his oath of office yesterday at a ceremony in the lord chief justice’s court.

The lord chief justice told Chalk:

The functions of lord chancellor in a modern age might be thought enough to keep a minister fully occupied. The original concept of a Department for Constitutional Affairs did just that. But then along came prisons, bringing with it an obvious potential conflict of interest and problems themselves enough to consume the energies of a superhuman. That marriage may not have been made in heaven.

When political breathing space allows, the time may well have come for the role of lord chancellor to be looked at again. The question is whether the current arrangements appropriately serve the administration of justice, which is one of the building blocks of society…

Should a calm debate about the role of lord chancellor ever be held, I would be happy to contribute from the equivalent of the judicial back benches.

Burnett did not say whether he thought prisons should revert to the Home Office or go to a new department. The allocation of government business between ministries is a matter for the prime minister of the day.

It is unusual for the chief justice call for changes in the machinery of justice but Burnett has little more than two months left to serve before he retires from the judiciary and he appears to be seizing his opportunities.

Without referring explicitly to the “enemies of the people” headline, Burnett also gave Chalk a firm lesson on what was expected of him:

Despite the profound legislative changes to the role, the lord chancellor remains the constitutional lynchpin between executive and judiciary. It is the lord chancellor who is charged particularly with defending the independence of the judiciary and who solemnly undertakes to do so in the oath of office.

That entails a duty to engage publicly on behalf of the judiciary in the rare circumstances when public attacks are launched upon the judiciary as a whole or upon individual judges. It calls for lord chancellors to bring to the cabinet table not only their political experience and judgment as secretary of state for justice but also, as lord chancellor, their enhanced duty with respect to the rule of law and judicial independence.

And there were some good jokes. I had predicted that Burnett would say that Chalk was the sixth lord chancellor he had worked with in less than six years.

The chief justice went one better:

My lord chancellor, you are my seventh in just under six years, albeit one twice. You, I hope, are my last. Otherwise I would find myself, somewhat surprisingly, with something in common with Elizabeth Taylor. She has eight husbands — one twice.

But two can play at that game. “Between 1678 and 1689,” said Chalk, “there were seven lord chief justices. So we all have our rough patches.”

He admitted that his own predecessors had included some “absolute howlers” but the only example he named was Richard Rich (1496-1567).

The one discordant note in a confident speech was a list of the government’s legislative objectives — although Chalk is not the first lord chancellor to have injected a political note into the ceremony. It also gave him an opportunity to commit himself to due process and the rule of law.

This was the passage in question:

We will play our part in operationalising any immigration legislation that parliament is minded to enact. We will do so whilst being careful to provide individuals with the due process which is the hallmark of our legal system. The rule of law requires that illegality has consequences, but it also requires that individuals have the proper opportunity to make representations in their own cause.

It struck me that at least one of his cabinet colleagues would not have put it in quite the same way.

Joshua Rozenberg