Howard League for Penal Reform

The Howard League for Penal Reform has published the latest edition of its quarterly newspaper, The Howard.  Visit the Howard League's website to download a copy and read the latest news in criminal justice and penal reform.

Prison suicides rise as hopes for reform fall

The figures for prison suicides, or ‘self-inflicted deaths in custody’ to use official terminology, leapt by an unprecedented 37% in 2007. 92 men, women and children died in custody last year, compared to only 67 in 2006. An analysis by the Howard League for Penal Reform shows that eight women killed themselves, an increase of 167% on the previous year, while seven under-21s - including a 15 year old jailed for only six weeks – committed suicide, an increase of 250% on 2006. Although suicide figures had recently been in decline, thanks to a focus on safer custody within the prison service, the intolerable pressures of overcrowding on regime, staff and resources have finally seen the banks of this particular river burst, and the resultant flood is one of human lives.

The annual suicide figures are a reliable barometer for the health of our prison system, and by extension society as a whole. It is one reason the Conservatives were prepared to put the boot in to the government in the new year coverage of 2007’s prison suicides, because it plays into the theme of the ‘broken society’ they have assiduously cultivated.

There is a brief history lesson worth outlining here. New Labour, by seeking to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, was always more enthused by the former than the latter. Tony Blair heeded the example of Bill Clinton in avoiding accusations of being ‘soft on crime’ and utilizing triangulation to adopt policies more associated with the right. Clinton, in turn, had taken his lesson from the treatment meted out to Michael Dukakis by George Bush Snr during the 1988 US presidential elections – when the infamous Republican attack ad based on the Willie Horton case helped Bush to the White House and Dukakis to political oblivion.

The government’s ever-tougher sentencing and pandering to tabloid conceptions of criminal justice is all a symptom of the events of 1988 across the Atlantic. The long view, the truly progressive option, has at every turn been ignored for short term fixes and headlines. While it may seem strange to claim that helping to secure ten years and counting in power was a short term outcome to New Labour’s attitudes to criminal justice, the chaos and desperation of a system now heaving under the weight of 81,000+ prisoners is only the beginning of what may be some particularly nasty chickens coming home to roost for society.

There are the horrendous reconviction rates for ex-prisoners, with an average of two thirds – rising to more than three quarters of men aged 18-20 - being reconvicted within two years of release. There is the damage to families when parents are locked up. There are the host of mentally ill people languishing in prison, with more than 70% in custody suffering from mental health disorders and self-harm, particularly among women and children, rife. There is the failure to tackle drug addiction, a major motivator for criminal activity, and the failure to provide real work opportunities – not simply training - for those in custody that might raise them from a life of crime.

I could go very easily go on. But the government knows all this. Not so very deep down, ministers know that an overuse of custody is creating as many social problems as it temporarily solves by warehousing people who commit crimes. Ministers also know that their sentencing policies have seen more people jailed than ever before, and that the system will never be able to cope with these people until the policies are reformed and the numbers entering custody are reduced.

Yet in early December, we learned that the Ministry of Justice’s response to the prisons crisis would be to build even bigger warehouses, three Titan prisons which will house 2,500 inmates each and be built, ominously, with “optimal sight lines which would result in better staff utilization and deliver staff savings.” Not just giant jails, but giant jails on the cheap. The lack of imagination, the lack of foresight, is appalling.  At least they secured a good headline - 'At last it's time to cell-ebrate' - in The Sun, though.

The government is in danger here of being outflanked by David Cameron’s Conservatives. The opposition have recognised that the general public are dimly aware that Labour has been ‘tough on crime’ and yet in poll after poll people express how they feel unsafer than ever. There is an appetite out there for some kind of criminal justice reform. And while the Tories appear as unwilling as Labour to grasp the nettle of reforming sentencing to reduce prison numbers, and risk any suggestion of reducing public protection, they are talking – and more to the point, really thinking – about how to reform the experience of custody itself and make it more rehabilitative.

Contrast this with a government currently pushing through 3% budget cuts throughout criminal justice, despite the fact that the courts, prisons and probation service deal with more people than ever before thanks to their policies. Contrast this with a government still obsessed with attempting to perform Clinton-style triangulation on the Conservatives and crime and blithely ignoring the problems for the future that it is storing up in our jails.

As I write this, the media is gorging on Hillary Clinton’s humiliation in the Iowa Democratic caucuses and the sudden elevation of Barack Obama. Hillary, once described as ‘Mrs Triangulation’ by the New York Times, may yet win the Democratic nomination and yet win the White House. But perhaps there truly is a new mood sweeping through America that it would be worth the government, and the Labour party as a whole, to take note of. Perhaps triangulation has had its day. It certainly has in the field of criminal justice.

Is prison working? The progressive case for reform

Progress's event tomorrow on prison reform follows some high-profile interventions on the subject in the past few days.

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, spoke out against prison overcrowding in a speech to the Howard League last Friday.

And yesterday's Observer carried two stories on prisons. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's speech today makes a similar point to Lord Phillips', linking overcrowding with the level of prison suicides. There have already been more this year than in the whole of 2006.

The paper also featured details of a leaked Ministry of Justice memo, warning of cuts in the number of prison officers.

Prison reform has been off limits for New Labour since 1997, in the face of a hostile tabloid press and the memories of four election defeats - where Labour was hammered for being 'soft on crime' - still fresh. But is momentum finally beginning to build behind the idea?

Speaking at tomorrow's event will be:

Baroness Jean Corston
Author of The Corston Report: A review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system

Bobby Cummines
Director, Unlock - The National Association of Reformed Offenders

David Lammy MP,
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities & Skills (with responsibility for offender learning)

Ben Leapman,
Home Affairs Correspondent, The Sunday Telegraph

Lucie Russell,
Director, SmartJustice

Fiona Mactaggart MP (chair)

Join us tomorrow in the Wilson Room, Portcullils House, between 6 and 7.30pm. To register, please send your name and email address to mark@progressives.org.uk, or call 0203 008 8180.

Never mind the anarchy

David Cameron didn’t specify when exactly anarchy broke out in the UK, although he decided to tell us when he got back from holiday, just when he needed to regain the political initiative from a bouncing Brown.

But how much worse have things actually got? As Polly Toynbee notes in today’s Guardian, Home Office figures show that, while there has been an increase in gun and knife carrying, there were more deaths from shootings and stabbings in 1995 than there were in 2006.

Furthermore, the sight of rude youths hanging about on bikes is hardly new. I’ve lived for two years in north Islington, which has one of the worst reported crime rates in the country, and daily walk past the kinds of kids supposedly throwing our country into anarchy. When one of them nearly collided with me on his bike as I crossed the road, he apologised and rode on.

If your only experience of such people is through the lens of the media – library footage of kids jumping on burnt out cars, CCTV pictures of hooded gangs roaming the streets  - it is easy to become paranoid. But day-to-day life in these communities is not like being in a war zone: it is more mundane than that. Which is one of the reasons that bored teenagers get involved in petty crime and confrontations that occasionally escalate into acts of bloody violence, all the more shocking for their rarity.

When Cameron talks about anarchy in the UK it looks suspiciously like he’s playing on people’s fears to make political capital rather than trying to find a solution to why there are problems in the first place.

Home affairs - going nowhere fast

I came across two contrasting home affairs pieces in the media today. First, this morning, on Radio 4, the latest instalment of Mark Easton's excellent history of British postwar crime.

The overarching lesson seems to be that government policy, not least the 'get tough' policies of the 80s and 90s, have had very little impact on the level of crime. Tabloid hysteria has been, as a rule, a terrible text book for tackling lawlessness.

And yet, Jacqui Smith, interviewed in today's New Statesman, cites one David Blunkett as her role model as Home Secretary ...

Let's protect children - not demonise them

We heard in the news this morning that the African pastor who accused children of witchcraft will not be facing any charges. This will come as a blow to children’s rights campaigners. We don’t know the true number of children in the UK who have been abused because their parents felt they were possessed by evil spirits; but in Africa such abuse is becoming more common, and as Eleanor Stobart’s report for the Government last year showed, it’s growing here.

At the time Stobart’s report was published, there were concerns that the ‘liberal elite’ were worried about acting to stop such abuse because of concerns about aggravating race relations with the black African community. Little has been done to act on Stobart’s recommendations - and the new guidance to be issued to child protection agencies in response to today’s news is simply not going to tackle the problem.

It seems surprising that while the Government quite rightly stands firmly against those who incite racial hatred – the Prophet Mohammed cartoon protestors spring to mind – there is a reluctance to introduce legislation to prosecute those who pray for children to die. Some campaigners are suggesting that there should be a criminal offence of demonising a child.

This reflects a wider reluctance among the political class to act on violence against children. Despite 170 MPs signing up to a Commons motion on the need to protect children from assault, the Government maintains that it’s not the state’s role to get involved with punishment of children in the privacy of their homes. The recent report of the UN’s Study on Violence against Children calls on all countries to prohibit all corporal punishment in the family by 2009: maybe the next Labour leader should make this a feature of his first 100 days?

Doing Cameron's triangulating for him

Since the birth of New Labour in the 1990s, the received explanation of the party's law and order policy has primarily been political. On crime - as well as for other issues of traditional Labour weakness - the strategy has been 'to neutralise them and then change the topic of conversation'. Indeed, this remains a stock justification used by Ministers when justifying to their own side the continued growth of the prison population, or the macho posturing aimed at the tabloids.

And now, with the prospect of a Queen's Speech dominated by more, 'tough' Home Office measures, the government thinks it can move beyond merely 'neutralising' by making the area one of Labour strength and Tory weakness. They are encouraged in their view by two notions: firstly, that in a changed, post-9/11 world, the public feels generally less safe, be it from terrorism, crime, immigration. The ID card proposals are the apotheosis of this - a kind of panacea for the vague collection of insecurities the public are held to feel.

The second notion is that the Tories' repositioning exercise, incorporating such slogans as 'hug a hoodie', leaves them fatally exposed to the charge of being 'soft on crime'. See, for example, the attempts to exploit the Tories' opposition to what are basically technicalities over extradition arrangements with the US.

In fact, Ministers would be well advised to tread carefully here. We risk doing Cameron's triangulating for him, based on a ten year-old triangulation of our own.  Surely, nothing would assist Cameron quite so much in softening his party's image than by painting him as, well, soft. What better way to shed 'the nasty party' image than by taking exception to the bullying, threatening, frankly scary rhetoric of the Home Secretary?

It is surely time for a rethink. As Jackie Ashley rightly points out in today's Guardian, the government has much to be proud of on crime. A 44% drop in the overall rate since 1997 cannot be the result of more people being locked up in a prison system that clearly sustains criminality as opposed to solving it.

To continue the talk of stock responses, limp-wristed pinkos generally attribute the government's behaviour to what Ross McKibbin describes as 'hyper realism':

Realism assumed that the electorate was itself hyper-realist: that it had no time for morality, fairness, liberal attitudes to crime, immigration or asylum-seekers ... Hyper-realism also demanded a recognition that the popular press determined party-political allegiances. Public opinion was in fact the opinion of a handful of newspaper owners – principally Rupert Murdoch – and reality was what the Daily Mail and the Sun said it was.

Surely the realistic thing to do now is to recognise that Cameron poses a different problem: attacking him from the right on law and order will not work. The government's current rhetoric encourages the public to feel less safe, not more, and as a result may have exactly the opposite electoral effect to that which is intended.