Decarceration is the key to better prisons
“Clearly, OUR prisons are not working.” At one level David Gauke, a former Conservative justice secretary, who on October 22nd was appointed by Britain’s Labour government to run a sentencing review, was stating the obvious. Britain’s prisons are scarred by overcrowding and violence. Staff have suffered almost 10,000 assaults in the past year. Unsurprisingly, retaining them is difficult; only half have more than five years’ experience. Instead, teenage officers are being deployed alone on prison wings. Most new recruits do not last even two years.
At another level, Mr Gauke was signalling something more open to dispute—a desire to break with an approach to criminal justice that has been dominant in Britain, and many other rich countries, for three decades. It was Michael Howard, another, more austere Tory, who distilled that approach with his declaration in 1993 that “prison works.” That mantra has prevailed ever since. The number of people behind bars has doubled in the past 30 years; Britain locks up more people than any other country in western Europe. Jails are packed to the rafters, which is why the government this week allowed more prisoners out early on an emergency-release scheme.
Britain is not alone in struggling to run its prisons well. According to the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, a think-tank, Australia, Belgium, France and Italy all have prison-occupancy rates above England’s level of 110%. In France, where it is 127%, thousands of inmates sleep on mattresses on the floor. Such overcrowding exposes an irony: the desire to lock people up eventually overwhelms prison’s purpose and the taxpayer’s willingness to pay for it.
Prisons are supposed to protect the public from genuinely dangerous people; that becomes harder when they are overrun. In Britain 37 men were let out by mistake in September in an initial tranche of emergency releases; one is accused of committing a sexual offence the day he was freed. Full prisons are also a boon to crooks at large because they take police officers off the street in order to manage emergency cells. It makes sense to lock up people who commit serious crimes. But disorderly prisons are unlikely to mete out punishment in a proportionate way. They also do little for rehabilitation: 90% of those sent down in Britain are reoffenders. By making criminals worse, bad prisons add to the need for imprisonment.
In the 1990s and 2000s, governments were able to build prisons as the demand for places grew. That has become more expensive as easy ways to upgrade old sites have been exhausted and local opposition to new ones has mounted. In Britain each new prison place costs around £450,000 ($584,000). As prisons have become grimmer, governments have found them harder to staff; Italy has a shortfall of around 7,000 prison guards. There is little prospect of the prisons budget rocketing when public finances are stretched.
Only one option leaves societies safer and richer: fewer prisoners. Bluntly, too many people are kept behind bars for too long. In Britain Mr Gauke’s review is a step towards recognising that problem, but it is only a step. The real problem is not the diagnosis but what follows: winning public consent for decarceration—hard because “tough” sentencing is often popular—and managing the transition to a less crowded system. An example of what not to do comes from Italy. Rampant overcrowding led the government to release 20,000 prisoners in a couple of months in 2006, unleashing a small crime wave.
Better models are provided by the Netherlands and America. The Dutch prison population fell by 44% in the decade to 2015, helped by investment in community sentencing. Supervising offenders in the community costs around a tenth as much as keeping them behind bars and the reoffending rate is usually lower. America still locks up far more people than other rich countries, but its prison population has fallen by a quarter in the past decade. California, New York and Texas have led the way by reforming sentencing and diverting people into drug and alcohol courts. In both countries the change was popular; in America it was sold as a way of saving money.
Rich countries can also lean more on technology. Many early offender-tagging programmes had a deservedly poor reputation, but the latest devices are much better at monitoring offenders’ behaviour. People can be fitted with real-time drug or alcohol monitors, or made to stick to strict curfews when they are not at work.
Imprisonment will continue to play an essential role in the criminal-justice system. But the public will be safer and better off when cells are less full. That is how to make prison work. ■
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