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Prison policy runs on four theories. The punitive: if you’ve done something bad, you should be punished by being locked up. Deterrence: you are less likely to do something bad if you fear that you’ll be locked up. Preventive: if you’re locked up, you can’t commit more crimes. And rehabilitative: while you’re locked up, we ought to do something to make sure we don’t need to lock you up again.
But the legitimacy of the criminal justice system runs on three things. Reassurance: it needs to reassure people that they are kept safe. Fairness: people need to think that prison sentences and prison policy are broadly speaking fair. And cost: it has to be delivered at a price, in terms of tax rates and public spending, that people are willing to pay.
In the 1990s and 2000s, UK prison policy was a three-legged stool, in which punishment, deterrence and prevention were the major aims, with rehabilitation a poor relation. There are good political reasons for this: punishment and prevention in particular are popular with the public. The presence of tough and long sentences is both reassuring and seems fair.
And it seems to have worked — crime has fallen dramatically since Michael Howard, the most influential Conservative home secretary since 1945, declared in 1993 that “prison works”. (I say “seems” because across most of the rich world, any number of different approaches to criminal justice “seem” to have worked: it may be that no government has really uncovered the secret to fighting crime other than “being a government in the back half of the 20th century”.)
But the Howardian approach comes with a cost that governments have to be willing to meet: the UK incarcerates more people per head than anyone else in western Europe. To do that, you have to be willing to build and maintain more prisons — and retain more prison officers — than the Tories were willing to do during their 14 years in power.
Indeed, one problem of the past decade and a half is that criminal justice policy has been the subject of bitter division, in private and sometimes in public. Liberal-minded justice secretaries, such as Ken Clarke, agreed to sharp cuts in their budgets on the condition that they be able to send fewer people to prison. They were then replaced by headline-chasing ministers and overruled by authoritarian home secretaries.
In practice, what has happened is that warring factions in the Conservative governments agreed that what they would do is pursue draconian ends when it came to prisons, but on a reform-minded minister’s budget.
The results are, as you’d expect, a disaster. When Alex Chalk, Rishi Sunak’s final justice secretary, took office, he quickly realised that the only way to stop prisons in England and Wales from becoming too full to function was to begin a programme of early releases. But his efforts to bring this about and to reform the system where blocked by Sunak. That programme is now being adopted by his Labour replacement, Shabana Mahmood.
What unites Chalk, Mahmood and Sir Keir Starmer is that they see this move not just as an expediency, but as part of a transition to a new approach to prisons policy that, while retaining an important role for deterrence, prevention and punishment, focuses more on that elusive fourth leg: rehabilitation.
This is actually the biggest difference between the UK and its neighbours. As Ian Acheson, a former prison governor, explains in his excellent new book Screwed, the UK doesn’t use short sentences more than its peers. The reason why the country imprisons more people is that it is more likely to imprison the same person multiple times: because they are more likely to reoffend. As Mahmood noted in a recent speech, close to 80 per cent of offences in the UK are second offences.
The challenge for the UK’s prison reformers is that the short-term expediency of releasing some people early — something that any government would have had to do given the 14-year failure to build enough prisons to put them in — may end up derailing a broader programme to shift to rehabilitation.
What undermined what you might call the Howardian consensus on prison policy is that while the public found it both fair and just, they also elected a government that was not willing to make them bear the costs for it. The difficulty for Labour is that although they have an approach that could in time cost less, it may not provide the public with either the reassurance or sense of fairness that has made longer jail sentences so popular for so long.