CSJ: Sticking plasters won’t end Britain’s prison crisis

Responding to the Prime Minister’s comments about the prisons crisis, Ed Davies, Policy Director at the Centre for Social Justice said:

“The urgent crisis in our overflowing prisons is no surprise, the prison service has been struggling for years. Much of the estate is in a terrible mess and the court backlogs have seen huge growth in the numbers of prisoners on remand. These two things must be urgently addressed. But no quick fix will solve the deep systemic problems it faces.  Rather, Britain’s prisons desperately need a radical new approach to ending recidivism, a new custodial sentence to be served at home, and an end to sentence inflation.”

Ending recidivism through work

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) report last year, ‘Unlocking Aspiration’, set out a new plan to get reduce pressure on our prisons, saving billions of pounds of taxpayer money by getting prisoners into work when they leave jail.

Nearly 50,000 inmates come to the end of their sentences every year. Yet six months after regaining their freedom, fewer than a quarter have a job.

The vast majority wind up unemployed and at serious risk of reoffending at grave cost to themselves and the wider community.

Research shows that having a job cuts the reoffending rate by between a third and a half. With the cost of reoffending officially calculated to be a staggering £18 billion a year, improving employment outcomes for this group would not only cut the number of victims of crime but generate huge savings for the taxpayer.

Original polling for the CSJ of 2,000 UK adults by Opinium and published in the report found that over four in five (85 per cent) agreed that people in prison should be given the opportunity to get a job once they are released. Three quarters (76 per cent) said they would be comfortable working with someone who had committed an offence, provided they had passed relevant safeguarding checks.

Our plan would boost the number of ex-prisoners moving straight into a job. They include:

• Preparing for employment in prison (better education in prison, greater availability of digital technology, greater control of prisoners and the elimination of drug misuse in jail)
• Enabling a successful transition into work (bigger use of charities to help prison-leavers get and hold down a job, temporary release for work placements and apprenticeships)
• Sustaining meaningful work in the community (better post-release support for prison-leavers including more help for them to find a place to live)

A new custodial sentence for the courts

A new kind of alternative sentence should be made available to the adult criminal courts – the “Intensive Control and Rehabilitation Order” (ICRO).

This new sentence would be served wholly in the community using Electronic Monitoring, curfew requirements and regular periodic reviews before the court. The availability of new technology in the market means that we can go further than ever before in seeking new alternatives to custody, while safeguarding the public and commanding the confidence of sentencers.

Enabling individuals to remain in the community, meaningful rehabilitation can be achieved. The ICRO presents an opportunity for individuals to serve their sentence without being separated from their families  – saving thousands of children from the trauma of parental imprisonment.

It would also allow for individuals to engage in work and education programmes in the community, where 92 per cent of community learning and skills providers have been rated as “good” or “outstanding”. In contrast, 71 per cent of prisons inspected in 2018–19 were rated as “requires improvement” or “inadequate” for the overall effectiveness of their education, skills, and work provision.”

Tackling sentence inflation

The number of people given immediate custodial sentences fell from 98,044 in 2012, to 67,812 in 2022, suggesting that prison overcrowding is not driven by more convictions.

However, average sentence length increased from 14.5 to 21.4 months between 2012 and 2023. This was partly driven by increases in sentence lengths for the same offence over time (sometimes referred to as ‘sentence inflation’). Increased sentence length is a significant contributor to a growing prison population, as people stay in prison for longer.

Changes in sentencing policy have increased minimum and maximum terms for a range of offences. As of 2023, 56% of prisoners were serving determinate prison sentences of over 4 years, compared with 36% in 2008.

In 2020, the National Audit Office asked the Government to “monitor the operational consequences of emerging policies and practices, as well as its capacity and capability to respond”.

Anecdotally much of the increase in sentence length may be down to successful lobbying for certain crimes to be punished more harshly but more research is needed to understand the true drivers behind increased sentence length. There is also little research to say whether they offer any greater deterrent, rehabilitate any better, or keep the public safer. It is not clear that they are good or cost-effective policy and represent a possible avenue for system reform.  Government should resist the urge to continue to increase the length of sentences.