Prison governors say less jailing not more jails please

Governors call for fewer jailings, not more jails


· Open-ended sentences blamed for overcrowding
· Trivial breaches of parole see offenders recalled

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Tuesday April 10, 2007
The Guardian

Prison governors have delivered an urgent warning to ministers that building new jails will not solve the criminal justice crisis and that too many minor offenders with mental health and alcohol problems are being locked up.

The Prison Governors' Association - whose members face the daily challenge of managing the record 80,000 jail population in England and Wales - has warned that a substantial overuse of new "indeterminate" sentences is creating chaos, and that inflexible "breach" procedures that see released offenders "whisked back into custody" for being late for appointments is driving prison numbers up.

The home secretary, John Reid, has responded to the crisis by ruling out any extension of early release programmes and highlighting the government's plans to provide 10,000 more prison places, including 700 by the end of this year.

A three-month scheme gets under way this weekend to move low-risk offenders into open prisons for the final 28 days of their sentences, to use the last 500 spaces in the prison system. Prison numbers reached 80,309 at the start of the weekend, including 388 people locked up in emergency police cells and six held overnight in court cells.

A parallel crisis in immigration detention centres means some foreign national prisoners facing deportation are also to be moved back to open prisons. The Home Office is hoping the open prison move, described by some as the last throw of the dice, will contain the situation until the new Justice Ministry takes charge of prisons on May 9.

But in evidence to the influential Commons home affairs committee, Paul Tidball, the PGA president, says: "The prison population need be nowhere near as high as it is now ... many thousands of offenders are in prison inappropriately now ... imprisonment is an expensive option and the American experience has shown that as prison costs spiral the budgets of other public services will suffer."

Mr Tidball said a substantial majority of people in prison had significant mental health, drug and alcohol abuse problems and many had committed only minor offences. More treatment and support services in the community were needed to convince the courts that non-custodial sentences for them were viable, he said.

The prison governors complain that breach procedures for released prisoners are part of the problem: "This means that people are being automatically whisked into custody because of a non-show or a couple of late appearances for appointments. It is not realistic or constructive and is making its own contribution to the steep increase in the prison population. The decision to breach should be a judicial one, and certainly not one in the hands of risk-averse offender managers ruled by reoffending targets."

The prison governors are also alarmed that the new "indeterminate sentence" - under which no release date is set by the court - is being "substantially overused". Latest figures show there are 8,759 prisoners serving such sentences - an increase of 31% in the last year alone. Mr Tidball said too often the courts were choosing to leave fixing a release date to the parole board later because it was the "lowest-risk option".

The sentence was supposed to be reserved for those posing a high risk to the public but 20% were only medium-risk offenders, and in many cases were being sentenced without proper risk assessment, such as a psychiatric report.

Mr Tidball said the overall result was the buck being passed to prisons whose offender behaviour programmes were so overwhelmed that nothing was being done until well after the recommended "tariff", when a release date had been passed. The governors' concerns are reinforced by the fact that the parole board has asked the Home Office for more resources to cope with the sharp increase in indeterminately sentenced prisoners.

UPDATE: Related article

Hidden costs of locking people up


Jamie Doward and Denis Campbell
Sunday April 8, 2007
The Observer

The government's prisons policy is under attack this weekend as two influential reports warn that taxpayers are paying a high price for a penal system that isn't working.

Research by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, which will be published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation next month, suggests that the true cost of Britain's burgeoning prison population is much higher than official figures suggest.

The study says that once additional public costs - such as foster care for prisoners' children and income support - are factored in, the cost of imprisoning for a year soars by nearly a third, to almost £50,000.

Meanwhile, the Institute for Public Policy Research claims that 12,000 people have been imprisoned who would be better dealt with outside prison. The IPPR argues that prison is an 'expensive and ineffective way of warehousing social problems', and that it is no coincidence Britain tops the incarceration league in western Europe, with 67 per cent of prisoners caught reoffending within two years of release.

'Prison should be used far less in Britain, but to greater effect,' said Nick Pearce, IPPR director. 'If more drug and mental health treatment was provided outside prisons and women sentenced to less than six months were given community sentences, we could stabilise our prison population to 10 per cent lower than it is today.'

When Labour came to power, the prison population stood at some 60,000. It is now more than 80,000 and the government has pledged to create a further 8,000 places.

But Roger Grimshaw, director of research at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College, said the government was failing to acknowledge the hidden costs of imprisonment on the taxpayer.

'Imprisonment does more than punish the prisoner: our research found that it also has disruptive and impoverishing effects on families,' Grimshaw said. 'Benefit claims are interrupted, partners lose work and find it hard to get back into employment when looking after the children, who often miss the prisoner acutely. Families end up paying for prisoners' clothing, and prison visiting costs exceed the compensation available.'

Overall, the Joseph Rowntree study found the taxpayer was 'subsidising' the average family of a prisoner to the tune of £10,000 a year. Of this, 51 per cent was borne by social services, with most of the remainder coming from other public agencies.

The study also calculated that the average personal cost to the family of a jailed offender came to £175 per month. The study suggests that, if these hidden costs were included, the total cost to the taxpayer of imprisoning an offender would be £49,220 - 31 per cent more than official figures.

'We found that imprisonment imposes hidden costs on families and services,' Grimshaw said. 'Families who can least afford it pay part of the cost of imprisonment, and social services, along with the health service, absorb other costs to the public purse.'