The Prison Reform that Wasn’t There
Civitas, 28 September 2010
Yesterday, Jack Straw defended his record on prisons at a Fabian event at the Labour Party conference (via Next Left). Juliet Lyons of the Prison Reform Trust felt let down that New Labour had not put a stop to rising prison numbers when they were in office. The problem with her complaint is the lack of a viable alternative to prison in a great many cases. Despite years of campaigning, reformers have yet to come up with a solid evidence-based reform to our current prison system.
Self-identified prison reformers tend to start from a set of controversial assumptions. One is that people are more likely to re-offend once they have been sent to prison. As discussed here, the most scientifically rigorous evidence suggests this (probably) isn’t true and certainly isn’t predictably true. It turns out that the sort of people who are given custodial sentences are also the sort of people with a higher propensity to re-offend. This means that prison, though undeniably a harsh and expensive sentencing option, is unlikely to be contributing to higher crime rates.
A second assumption is that, with our higher than average prison population, we are somehow out-of-step with the rest of Europe. As Lyons says, ‘people from other European countries look at us as if we’re mad’. I don’t know how many Europeans actually think of us as mad, but they need not. We also have higher crime rates than much of the rest of Europe. This means we see more offenders, and more serious offenders, coming before the courts who are deserving of punishment and pose some threat to the public.
Given these circumstances, we have a choice. We can either sentence people according to what they deserve and accept that Britain (for now) needs a higher prison capacity than many other countries in Europe. Or, we can please the ‘prison reformers’ and reduce the number of offenders in prison regardless of the crimes they have committed. As discussed before, the international evidence does not suggest that we have a punitive sentencing policy compared to the rest of Europe. This means that dramatically reducing our prison capacity would make us remarkably soft on crime. That would place our policy out-of-step with the rest of Europe in a much more obvious way than the situation as it stands.
A standard manoeuvre from prison reformers is to point to an arguably less punitive sentencing regime somewhere else in the world which is associated with reductions in crime. The winter wonderlands of Canada and Finland now make frequent appearance in their reports. Canada reduced its prison population at the same time as witnessing a significant drop in crime. This is taken as evidence of success. What reformers are less likely to notice is that a similar (but even more dramatic) drop in crime took place across the border in the United States at the same time where their prison population was growing significantly (See Tonry and Farrington, p340). This suggests that other factors, not directly related to prison policy, common to both the US and Canada were actually responsible for much of the drop in crime. Similarly, the argument that the Finns managed to cut crime by reducing its use of prison tends to discount Finland’s unique history, a country that faced a particularly brutal 20th century civil war and, as a result, inherited a much more (and unnecessarily) severe criminal justice system than comparable countries in Northern Europe.
Finally, it is assumed that there are some off-the-peg alternatives to prison just waiting to be introduced. As Peter Kellner chimes in: ‘What people want are results and if you have the confidence to pursue a policy that delivers results – and then it does – then people will support you.’ Who could possibly deny that they want a results driven sentencing policy; one that tackles re-offending and genuinely rehabilitates individuals? No-one. The problem is that policies with demonstrably better results, compared with even a standard prison sentence, are fairly thin on the ground.
Just as therapists usually need patients to be invested in their own recovery, successful sanctions seem to work best with offenders who already want to stop their criminal activity and need some structure to help them achieve that. There is no substitute for an offender deciding that they want to end their criminal career. Unfortunately, no government policy is able to influence that decision in a straightforward way. Before a successful prison reform can be implemented, it still needs to be developed.