Can the criminal justice system be reformed?

As the latest figures reveal the scale of the crisis in our prisons, Sean O’Grady asks if the political and public will exists to make the necessary changes

Assaults on prison staff are more numerous than ever and – not unrelated – overcrowding of inmates is also showing a marked deterioration. The latest figures on conditions in jails from the Ministry of Justice, covering England and Wales, come after a particularly violent assault by Hashem Abedi, the accomplice and brother of the Manchester Arena bomber, on three officers, using a homemade weapon and hot cooking oil to inflict serious injuries.

The scale of the overcrowding crisis, meanwhile, first became very clear to the public last summer when the incoming government had to implement an emergency programme of prisoner releases to avoid the collapse of the criminal justice system. Britain’s prisons seem doomed to permanent crisis.

How bad is it?

The figures speak for themselves: 10,605 assaults on staff recorded last year, up 15 per cent on 2023; seven murders of inmates by inmates; and HM Inspector of Prisons earlier this year reporting thriving illicit economies of drugs, mobile phones and weapons. And basic security measures such as protective netting and CCTV have been allowed to fall into disrepair.

Does prison work?

Arguable. It’s what Michael Howard, home secretary in the 1990s, famously claimed, unashamedly placing retribution ahead of rehabilitation. It certainly doesn’t feel like inflicting inhumane treatment and dangerous conditions on miscreants has helped society.

Why are we here?

Unlike the NHS, schools, libraries or even the courts, in prisons the effects of past austerity and continuing constraints on the prisons budget are not apparent to the general public, and even if they were they might not trigger much concern. The British public has a classically cakeist attitude towards crime and punishment: demanding to bang up offenders for longer sentences but refusing to pay the taxes that would be required to pay for a radical expansion of the prison estate.

Indeed, creating many more spaces would mean higher taxation long into the future, because keeping a prisoner safely detained and alive in even the most basic way is extremely expensive – famously comparable to the cost of sending a child to Eton.

Given the public, and especially media, hostility to anything approaching a humane way of rehabilitating offenders, and the fact they are denied any electoral role, it’s fair to say there are no votes in prisons, in any sense of the phrase.

What could be done?

There are at least two substantial ways in which the pressure on places could be relieved relatively rapidly. The first is to start a process of reviewing the sentences of those still held under the archaic and discredited “indefinite public protection (IPP) orders”. These were designed to detail someone considered “dangerous” but whose offence didn’t merit a life tariff for an unlimited period until they could somehow prove they weren’t a threat to the public. Some of those put away for stealing a mobile phone have been left in custody for a decade or more. About 1,200 IPP prisoners are still stuck in the system – a sizeable number given that the system only has about 500 spare prison spaces available.

There are also more than 19,000 foreign offenders awaiting deportation, up from almost 18,000 when the Conservatives left office, the latest figures show. That number should be placed in the context of a total prison population of 84,210 men and 3,554 women.

Some foreign criminals are objecting to removal on human rights grounds, such as right to family life, a perennial problem for any minister who faces a virulently vengeful media but who feels obliged to obey domestic law and abide by the European Convention on Human Rights. Keir Starmer is reportedly keen to limit such rights.

Any chance of reform?

It’s early days to make definitive judgments but the appointment of Lord (James) Timpson as prisons minister in the new government last July did raise hopes. Timpson, as chief executive of Timpson Group, successfully pioneered the recruitment of ex-offenders, and as chair of the Prison Reform Trust he was an outspoken advocate for reducing pointless and self-defeating custodial sentences. He’s on record as saying that the UK is “addicted to” sentencing and punishment, and thinks a third of prisoners, especially female offenders, inappropriately serve custodial sentences. He wants more alternatives for the courts, such as sophisticated tagging (eg to detect drink and drug abuse) and community punishments.

However, save some sympathy for the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who’d face a tsunami of attacks for “going soft on crime” from her vindictive shadow, Robert Jenrick, and the adamantine resistance of most of the media. There is no political space foreseeable for the kind of liberal reforms we saw when the death penalty was abolished, for example, in the 1960s.

In a sense, the British criminal justice system is itself under a kind of “whole life order”, condemned to a never-ending cycle of ever-tougher sentences creating ever-more hopeless, hardened criminals ready to break the law again and again.