Don’t send criminals to jail, because the jails are already full to bursting.
It almost beggars belief that judges were offered this advice at a private meeting last week with Lord Justice Edis, the senior presiding judge for England and Wales, but ministers tellingly won’t deny the reports. Accustomed as we all are by now to things feeling broken, from the trains to crumbling school classrooms to rivers full of sewage, the suggestion that sentencing for rapists or burglars currently out on bail should be temporarily delayed because ministers have failed to build anywhere to put them feels like a particularly dystopian new low. It’s meant to be a short-term measure, a temporary releasing of the pressure valve, but that won’t be much comfort for victims now hearing that their assailants will get to enjoy their freedom a little bit longer. “What am I going to do if a jury finds someone guilty (of rape)?” wondered one judge aloud to the Times. “Do I release that person who is now convicted back into the community, where the victim might see them? What will the victim think?”
To know that the system is under this kind of pressure chips away, too, at broader public faith in the law, leaving uncomfortable questions hanging even over cases where a judge’s ruling genuinely hasn’t been swayed by such considerations. Any victim who sees their attacker jailed for a shorter time than they would have liked may now find that niggling doubt creeping in: would it have gone differently if the cells weren’t already overflowing? Will prisoners be walking free who shouldn’t be in months to come just to clear some room?
For this crisis isn’t going away. Andrea Albutt, outgoing president of the Prison Governors Association, warned only days ago that prisons were essentially now “bust”, with 88,016 people in England and Wales behind bars in a system whose limit is supposed to be 88,670. Yet still ministers are falling over themselves to promise ever harsher, longer sentences in the run-up to an election in which nobody wants to look soft on crime. (The government is supposed to be building 20,000 new jail places by the mid-2020s, but it will not amaze you to learn that’s well behind schedule; another looming mess a Labour government would inherit.) Prisoners are already being shunted into “rapid deployment cells” – a fancy name for prefab cabins in prison grounds – and police or magistrates court cells, while the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, recently floated surreal-sounding plans to rent cells abroad. But you wouldn’t know it from hearing the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, threaten sentences of “up to life imprisonment” for lawyers caught coaching migrants on how to remain in the country by fraudulent means.
Confronted with all this on the radio on Thursday, the health secretary, Steve Barclay, ducked questions by insisting sentencing was a matter for the independent judiciary. But it’s the government that runs prisons – and if judges’ hands are being tied by overcrowding, then the buck stops firmly with politicians. Given the prison population could surpass 100,000 by 2027 on current trends, some politically unpalatable decisions will have to be made – though probably not by this dying government, increasingly keen to kick cans down the road.
What happens in prisons rarely troubles the headlines, unless tensions actually boil over into riots; unlike beloved hospitals and schools, they’re an easy target for cuts. By 2019-2020, the Ministry of Justice budget was 25% lower than in the first year of David Cameron’s government. Under reforming justice ministers such as David Gauke, tough times did push government towards reforming short sentences, which were seen as a waste of public money: too short to tackle root causes of offending but just long enough to break up families and make it hard for ex-offenders to find work again. But over time, those cuts have made jails more violent, dangerous and unproductive places. Chalk, the justice secretary now grappling with the fallout of all this, is the third man to hold the job in just one year, after his predecessor, Dominic Raab, quit over accusations of intimidating and aggressive behaviour towards civil servants.
What’s to be learned from all this? Albutt argued passionately earlier this year that the public needs to be helped to let go of the belief that locking ever more people up for ever longer will keep us safe: that was, she said bluntly, “a lie and it is perpetuated by government rhetoric”. It’s a striking line from a veteran prison governor – but don’t hold your breath for a political party to make that difficult and unpopular argument, judging by recent skirmishes over crime that have seen the Tories raking over old coals of cases Keir Starmer handled as director of public prosecutions and Labour, equally disingenuously, accusing Rishi Sunak of failing to support jailing child abusers. (The claim relies on figures for convictions dating back to 2010, when Sunak wasn’t even an MP.)
So what’s left is the same old lesson we’re seemingly doomed to learn again and again: that public services don’t just fall from the sky for free, but cost money; and that in the end, cutting corners catches up with you. As for politicians who promise things they know they can’t actually deliver in reality, before scuttling off and leaving someone else to deal with the consequences? Now there’s a crime, though one for which there probably aren’t enough jail spaces in the world.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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