PRISONS POLICY IN MELTDOWN

Crisis Caused By Years Of Inaction

IT IS hard to understand why John Reid is concerning himself with
his promised criminal-justice reforms, such as ending life
prisoners' automatic consideration for parole and putting a stop to
the offer of sentence reductions in return for guilty pleas.

For it is increasingly clear that prisons policy is dictated not by
the finer points of criminal justice but by the desperate need to
thin out Britain's overcrowded jails.

The suggestion that the Home Secretary is prepared to take the risk
of more escapes and increased drug abuse, as a result of
transferring more convicts to open prisons - revealed in a leaked
memo - is merely the latest indication of the appalling costs of
the Government's complacency on prisons.

This latest crisis, the result of the prison population reaching a
new high, was predicted as long ago as April. However, Dr Reid's
options for dealing with it are limited because the Government has
created so little new prison capacity during its nine years in power.

For most of that time, the various Ministerial occupants of the Home
Office have believed that their hyperactivity in announcing almost
daily initiatives and new crackdowns would be enough to fulfil Tony
Blair's pledge to be tough on crime.

Meanwhile, sentencing has been subject to a needlessly complex set
of rules which seem influenced not by any philosophy of criminal
justice, but by the need to keep offenders out of prison in order to
save money and ease overcrowding.

Yet this also undermines the second half of the Prime Minister's
infamous promise, about being tough on the causes of crime. For if
reoffending is to be addressed, prisons must not be mere places of
punishment, but also cradles of rehabilitation, in which criminals
can be weaned off drugs and taught skills that would give them the
chance of a new life. There is no earthly hope of this happening,
however, if jails are crammed so full that there is scarcely room to move.

There should, therefore, be common agreement on all sides of the
criminal-justice debate that more prisons must be built. However,
although Conservative leader David Cameron has acknowledged this,
the tragedy is that no one in the Labour Party has persuaded
his likely election rival, Gordon Brown, of the need to plough
money into prisons and quickly.