DEBATE

Why Blair won't admit that prison doesn't work

Labour's tough talk on crime is obscuring the benefits of rehabilitation.This week's epic prison figures symbolise what the government is getting so wrong. It's not just the populist cowardice in letting prison numbers soar despite knowing it does more harm than good. No, this is another sign of Labour's utter ineptitude in getting across its best messages. By refusing to promote an honest What Works law-and-order debate, it keeps running ever faster up the down escalators. It is why no one knows one of Labour's best statistics: crime has fallen by 25%. Is it surprising that polls still find people think it's rising when all they hear from ministers is for tough new measures? David Blunkett's taste for new eye-catching punishments is the reason why everyone thinks he must be losing the crime war.

Prison numbers reached 75,191 this week — 20% up since Labour came to power — and still rising. If crime is falling, does that show prison works? Not at all. Home Office research shows that every 15% increase in incarceration reduces crime by only 1%. So this 25% crime reduction would have needed a 375% increase in the prison population.

Optimists wonder if the prison population is rising because the police are better at catching criminals than before. Alas, no. Still only some 3% of crimes are ever brought to court. More police on the street do make citizens happier — which is the proper aim of politics — but the police are not catching more criminals. On the contrary, more crimes are reported and the crime rate can appear to rise with more calls for “bobbies on the beat”.

So why are prison numbers rising? Because judges and magistrates give ever longer sentences: they deny it, yet they send 10 times more shoplifters to jail than a decade ago. Why? Because they get mixed messages from government and a daily bellow from the media. Any judge who wants a quiet life does better to err on the side of long sentences than risk the wrath of the press.

The government does not want more people in prison: it promises to cap numbers at 80,000 — hardly progress. It has set up, under Lord Woolf, a new sentencing guideline council, which met for the first time last week to set better tariffs: judges hand out wildly differing sentences. The government is not short of its own research showing what works, with good community sentences on offer — but it doesn't keep telling the people and the judges about those. Few hear of the great good done by 8 million hours a year of unpaid community service. Charity shops would collapse without that work.

I met an organiser of a holiday home for terminally ill children who depended on the work of people on community service orders. London's riverside has been restored by them: it should be popular. And they have a 70% non-reoffending rate. Judges and the press need to hear politicians praise all this community reparation. But they never do.

Instead, last week Blair boasted at prime minister's questions that the number of first-time burglars sent to jail had risen under Labour. Former home secretary Michael Howard caused alarm with his “three strikes and you're out” for burglars. Here comes the Labour PM boasting about one-strike sentencing.

Prison costs £37,000 a year per head. The Audit Commission in January criticised this waste, with a hard financial calculation of the money misspent by the time a teenager gets sent to prison. The commission estimated that spending £42,000 on early interventions from birth through adolescence would spare £153,000 on subsequent incarceration.

This is not the view of lily-livered do-gooders: this comes from the official body that audits local government. Adding up what help a dysfunctional family could (but rarely does) get, they began with Sure Start, parenting support, language therapy, educational psychology, anger management and a learning support assistant. All that prevention would still save well over £100,000.

The government needs no telling. Its youth offending teams are doing well, pulling together probation, health, education, police and social workers to devise personal plans for out-of-control young criminals. Some 8,000 heavy-duty young offenders have been diverted from prison to an intensive support and surveillance programme (ISSP). Mostly on electronic tags to enforce a curfew, these young offenders get 25 hours a week of education and intensive work with an array of drug and alcohol treatments, and psychological support. Soon the first evaluation of ISSPs is expected to show a marked reduction in crime and the seriousness of crimes committed afterwards - far better results than prison gets.

Six months on, an ISSP costs £8,500, compared with six months in a young offender institution, which costs £21,000. Much against their will, three-quarters of the Youth Justice Board money goes on incarceration ordered by the courts. That leaves a strictly limited amount of money to create more ISSP places and a still graver shortage of residential drug treatment places. This is the economics of madness.

ISSPs should now be made available to most non-dangerous criminals of all ages, instead of filling up jails with illiterate drug addicts and those from care — the state's own failed children denied intensive help when they most needed it. With prisons now at 8,000 higher than official capacity levels - the criteria were hastily changed this week — overcrowding means inmates get little drug treatment or education worth the name, shunted round the country, disrupting what few programmes and home contacts they have.

Gordon Brown has tough choices to make over his comprehensive spending review this July: tight money, hard priorities. His 130 public service agreements demand departments hit targets to qualify for their money. He might enjoy meting out stern discipline to his old adversary David Blunkett. He should order him to reduce the prison population to 1997 levels and send the non-dangerous of all ages on to ISSPs. Do as Douglas Hurd did and release petty offenders to show the judges they are over-sentencing. Impose a new Home Office golden rule: never let the prison population rise again unless more violent criminals are being caught. Spend all the wasted money where it works — or lose it to the education department, which will spend it better.

Meanwhile, Blair and Blunkett continue their destructive twin-track agenda: tough talk in public while pursuing some excellent community programmes in semi-secret. This is not only a cynical dereliction in leadership; it leads the public to assume crime must be far worse than it is. It's time to tell the good news: crime is falling, prevention works. Rob Allen, of Rethinking Crime and Justice, has collated recent polls that show people are ahead of the tabloids: only one in 10 thinks prison works.
 

By Polly Toynbee
10 March 2004
 

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/comment/0,11026,1166114,00.html

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