The riot in Birmingham prison last Friday, which at its height involved more than a third of the prison’s 1,450 inmates, was the worst since the Strangeways riot in Manchester 26 years ago. Moving the perpetrators out of Birmingham so that repairs can begin has put the stability of other prisons on a knife edge. As the justice secretary, Liz Truss, who will make a statement to MPs on Monday, acknowledged last month when she announced that an extra 2,500 officers were to be recruited, many of Britain’s prisons are dangerously understaffed and experiencing unprecedented levels of violence; Birmingham’s annual monitoring report emphasised just those problems. This crisis, like other crises in the public services, has been years in the making. As Britain enters its seventh year of austerity, there is no respite in sight. But prisons offer a real chance to show how to do more with less.
The chairman of the parole board, Nick Hardwick, who was until January the chief inspector of prisons, warned in a BBC interview on Sunday that the current balance between prison population and the number of officers was unworkable, and that on their own the new officers were not enough. More than 7,000 prison officers have gone since 2010 when Ken Clarke became justice secretary and promised a revolution in rehabilitation. Mr Clarke wanted shorter sentences – he proposed halving the sentences of offenders who entered guilty pleas – and a cut in reoffending, to reduce the prison population by 3,000. He offered up cuts of £2bn to the Treasury, nearly a quarter of the department’s £9bn budget; and by early 2013 the figures showed the first fall in prison numbers since the 1990s. But by then Mr Clarke had been replaced by Chris Grayling, with a brief to be tough on punishment, and numbers started to rise again, without any reverse to the shrinking budgets.
After Mr Grayling came Michael Gove, who spoke persuasively about the need for reform. But there was no change in the state of Britain’s prisons – now routinely condemned by the prisons inspectorate, who describe crumbling buildings and rat and cockroach infestations. There are not enough staff, and many are relatively new recruits, so in most jails few prisoners are constructively occupied; many are locked up almost all day, every day. In the year to June, 105 inmates killed themselves. At the same time there is a huge increase in the availability of psychoactive drugs, sometimes flown in by drones, that greatly exacerbate levels of violence. In the words of Peter Clark, Mr Hardwick’s successor as chief inspector, in his first annual report, “the grim situation [described in Mr Hardwick’s last report] has not improved, and in some key areas it has, if anything, become even worse”.
This is the mess that Liz Truss inherited when she was made justice secretary by Theresa May in July. Last month she unveiled a modest plan for reform, and some experts applaud her efforts to get a grip on a fast-deteriorating situation. She persuaded the chancellor, Philip Hammond, to release the cash for the extra staff announced in November. But they will take months to recruit and train – and, as the weekend’s events show, time is one of the commodities she does not have. In those circumstances, she was ill-advised, when she launched her prison reform white paper in early November, to rule out reviving the changes that Mr Clarke was forced to drop four years ago.
She expressly ruled out what she called “arbitrary reductions” to the prison population. That sounds as if she is resisting the demand now made by every one of her predecessors since 2005 to review the cases of the more than 3,000 offenders held on indeterminate sentences for public protection, even though some were originally imprisoned for minor offences and have been detained for far longer than the maximum sentence. Instead she restates the official line that reducing reoffending is the way to cut prisoner numbers. That is a pledge which sounds increasingly hollow in the face of the chief inspector of probation’s criticism last week of some of the private providers who run probation services.
In the Commons Ms Truss will almost certainly pledge to bring down the full force of the law against inmates involved in the Birmingham riot. But that means more prisoners in prison for longer – and the cost is high, yet the regime that is threatening the stability of many more prisons remains unchanged. Almost all prisons are operating at or near 100% capacity. This is just not sustainable. Ms Truss must think again about early release. Prison isn’t working.
