Labour’s prisons reform is a policy of necessity, not choice

Good morning. The policy argument underpinning the government’s new approach to prisons is sound, and indeed in many ways Labour has that most powerful of political arguments: there really is no alternative.

But the proposed changes are still controversial and difficult and will require a considerable amount of nerve. Some more thoughts on the government’s planned reforms to prisons policy below.

End of an era

Does the Labour government’s new approach on prisons in England and Wales represent a breach with a 31-year consensus, or just a belated acknowledgment that the old consensus was dead already?

One can reasonably differ on when to start that consensus — David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary, in the first part of his review into sentencing policy in England and Wales, starts the clock at 1991, with the 1991 Criminal Justice Act. I would probably start it in 1993, with Michael Howard’s “prison works” speech to the Tory party conference that year and with the emergence of Tony Blair as shadow home secretary.

But regardless of when you start that consensus, from the early 1990s until 2010, when New Labour lost power, there absolutely was a shared commonality of approach and method to criminal justice policy. As a result, England and Wales have become global outliers both in our incarceration rates, but also in how we have continued to increase them.

To quote the famous “prison works” passage itself:

Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists — and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice . . . This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.

That could have been said by essentially any home secretary from Howard (who actually did say it) through to Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke or John Reid in 2007. The only reason it could not have been said by Jacqui Smith, Reid’s successor, is that prisons policy was split off from the Home Office in 2007, so Jack Straw would have said it (again).

This split really mattered when it came to undermining the common view because essentially that Blair-Howard consensus (Howairsm? Blairardism? Answers on a postcard please) was united both on ends (sending more people to prison) and a shared commitment to means (actually building more prisons).

The last Conservative government did not build anywhere near enough prisons for the Blair-Howard model to work, though it did continue to add new, longer sentences. Data cited by Gauke’s report showed the average custodial sentence for indictable offences increased from 16 months in 1993 to 22.5 months last year. It’s also fair to say that the last Conservative government was divided on the question of prisons: some secretaries of state for justice, like David Gauke, Ken Clarke and Michael Gove actively wanted to break away from that consensus. Others wanted to keep to it.

While the rhetorical position of the last Conservative government was, a lot of the time, supportive of the old Blair-Howard approach, it wasn’t happy to actually open new prisons at sufficient speed and of sufficient size to maintain it. Its revealed preference was to use prison less. Ultimately your politics are what you actually do, not what you hope to do.

The good news for the UK is that other approaches to prison do also work: essentially everywhere in the western world has experienced a significant fall in crime, regardless of what exact approach they have taken to prison policy.

The challenge doesn’t really change — across the world, crime tends to follow the Pareto principle, with about 20 per cent of offenders being responsible for about 80 per cent of crime — but England and Wales doesn’t have enough prison space to emulate New Labour era solutions like IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentences, indefinite prison sentences that were scrapped by the Conservatives in 2012. We are instead going to have to send fewer people to prison and get better at rehabilitating them, emulating Dutch or Scandinavian solutions.

That was true by the time Alex Chalk, the last Conservative justice secretary, took post. There really is no alternative to the policy proposed by our newish Labour government, given we can rule out “invent time travel and build more prisons in the 2010s”.

But while the policy choices are very easy, the politics aren’t. There are not many votes in building prisons (which is a big part of why the last government didn’t build very many of them). But there aren’t any votes in reducing the number of people you send to prison. Prison reform is one of the government’s best bets for managing to get better outcomes with less money. The big-picture reason why Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, brought in the former Conservative cabinet minister Gauke is to make some of the political battles around this easier. But even with that, it is still going to be a hard road for the government.

Now try this

I saw Captain America: Brave New World. I’ve seen films that I’ve hated, I’ve seen films that I’ve loved, I’ve seen films that have been a complete mess. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that was quite so bland before, a movie that really should have been called Captain America: Will This Do? I’m astonished that Raphael Abraham managed to say anything about it in his review beyond ‘well, that certainly passed the time’.

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