A Ministry of Justice-commissioned review has said an “incoherent approach” towards sentencing in recent decades has fuelled the current prisons crisis, leaving jails in England and Wales dangerously close to full capacity.
An interim report from former justice secretary David Gauke’s review team says the spike in prisoner numbers is not the result of higher crime levels or an evidence-based understanding of how offenders can turn their lives around.
Instead, the review says the increase has been the result of decisions by successive governments that have included a “tough on crime” narrative focused primarily on punishment in the form of longer custodial sentences.
Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood appointed former Conservative minister Gauke to lead the Independent Sentencing Review in October, weeks after new early-release guidelines for prisoners came into effect.
At the time, around 85,000 people were in prison in England and Wales, around 40,000 more than in 1993. Over the same period, the number of offenders being overseen by probation services has increased by around 100,000 to 240,497 – a 51% hike.
The MoJ and HM Prison and Probation Service are partway through a multi-billion-pound programme to deliver increased capacity in the form of 20,000 additional prison places, but it has been subject to delays and significant cost increases. Originally expected to cost £5.2bn, the programme could now come with a price tag of more than £10bn.
Gauke's interim review, published today, points to the MoJ’s most recent annual statement on prison capacity, which indicates that England and Wales could need 112,000 prison places by 2032 based on current trends.
It says that in recent decades, there has been an underinvestment in probation and other alternatives that can provide rehabilitation and reduce reoffending because resources have been diverted towards the increasing cost of rising prisoner numbers.
“Rather than approach sentencing policy based on the evidence of what is likely to be most effective in reducing crime and reducing reoffending, too often the knee-jerk response has been to increase sentence lengths as a demonstration of government action," the report says.
It says MoJ data indicates people are more likely to reoffend after serving a prison sentence than a non-custodial sentence.
The report says that while the overall “proven” reoffending rate is 26.5%, the rate among those who received a custodial sentence is 37.2%. Filtering the data for people given a short prison sentence – one of less than 12 months – gives a reoffending rate of 56.9%.
The report cites the Netherlands as one place that has been able to significantly reduce its prison population, and where psychiatric and psychological healthcare have been successfully integrated into sentencing.
The report says Dutch prisoner numbers fell from 20,463 to 10,115 between 2006 and 2016, against a backdrop of a significant decline in reported crime and a reduction in the length of sentences for all but the most serious crimes.
Gauke’s interim report says England and Wales’s increasing prison population has come at a great fiscal cost.
“Maintaining existing prisons and building new ones is expensive,” it says. “Sentencing has not been grounded in fiscal discipline and has not been constrained by the affordability or the capacity of prisons and probation.
“This has led successive governments to respond to record-demand highs by implementing a range of costly emergency measures. This response has had catastrophic impacts on both the prisons and probation services, diverting resources from parts of the system that could contribute to reducing reoffending and has impacted the overall safety of the system.”
The report concludes that sentencing policy “needs to be grounded in all the statutory purposes of sentencing”. It says that while punishment is an “important aim for the criminal justice system”, imprisonment is not the only form of punishment.
The review’s final report will make recommendations on how ministers can respond to pressure for prison places, including both immediate measures and a vision for the future “rooted in the statutory principles of sentencing and public service reform”.
It is due to be published in the coming weeks.