Prisons: Banging up the old myths

Prisons: Banging up the old myths

Kenneth Clarke, made a speech about jail that dispatched failed orthodoxies which have locked up penal policy for the best part of a generation

Editorial
The Guardian

There are times, Orwell wrote, in which telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. It almost felt that way yesterday, when the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, made a speech about jail that dispatched failed orthodoxies which have locked up penal policy for the best part of a generation. The taboo took hold after Mr Clarke himself last moved away from home affairs in 1993, to be replaced by Michael Howard – who won easy cheers by declaring that "prison works". That slogan set the tone not just for the Tory conference where it was uttered, but for the long years that followed. The great change of administration in 1997 barely altered the upward trajectory in the tally of inmates, which continued until today's point, where the total has doubled to 85,000.

During the week in which he turns 70, Mr Clarke was even less inclined than usual to mince his words, as he damned this as an "astonishing number which I would [once] have dismissed as an impossible and ridiculous prediction". He damned the appalling reoffending rates – the taxpayer's miserable return on the £38,000 bill that it pays to shunt each criminal off to "grossly overcrowded ... expensive hotels". He did not, as some penal reformers dared to dream, commit to a specific reduction in the use of short sentences, still less an executive release scheme. Indeed, the building programme remains underway, with another jail's expansion set to be announced today. But his remarks remain doubly significant. First, because his admission that custody often proves "a costly and ineffectual approach that fails" may echo right through the courts, just as "prison works" did in its day. Second, because he is reviewing sentencing guidelines starting from the presumption that judges should be trusted to respond to the contours of the individual case, as opposed to having their hands tied with ever more minimum tariffs.

While Mr Clarke is prepared to take on the "red tops", whom he had a gentle dig at yesterday, terrific obstacles still stand in the way of his ambitions to stabilise the number of prisoners, and to change the way they are treated inside so that they might emerge as better and not worse people. After 17 years in which they have been run on bang-'em-up lines, the culture of courts is the first difficulty. The rather grumpy response of the Magistrates' Association yesterday could be an early sign of that, although they were quite right to argue that community sentences must be properly resourced. Mr Clarke will need to answer them, even though he admits he has no upfront cash to offer. The best hope seems to be enticing charities and companies to work with offenders by promising them a share of the savings on imprisonment that will clock up if recidivism can be reduced. The justice secretary has further problems of a political nature, not least because he has to work within a party whose first instincts on crime are often boneheaded. Mr Howard took to the airwaves to defend his dubious record, confident that he was speaking for the Conservative right. But there is a reforming Tory tradition, too, think of Douglas Hurd and Willie Whitelaw. Mr Clarke's hand is strenghthened by government's Liberal Democrats. Their manifesto proposed a presumption against all short jail terms, and although the justice secretary did not go that far, his failure to mention the Conservatives' own pre-election plan to double the sentencing powers of magistrates suggests that the coalition brokering has borne progressive fruit.

All of this creates a dilemma for Labour, which Jack Straw pre-emptively tackled in dismal fashion by decrying "handwringing" in the Daily Mail. Those Labour leadership candidates who talk about pushing the political centre ground in a progressive direction now face a great test. Do they revert to the populist fearmongering of the Blair years? Or do they instead engage with the more enlightened debate which Mr Clarke has boldly unlocked?