Can we afford the cost of prison sentences?

Written by Peter Chapman on Tue 16th Dec 2003

The facts about Britain's prison population are astounding. It has now gone over 72000 or 139 per 100000 population. The EU average is 97 per 100000 and Britain is at the top of the EU league for locking up its citizens. France has 30000 fewer prisoners and yet Britain and France have similar populations.

Whichever way you look at it our prison population has increased by over 50% in the last ten years and a prison sentence is a hugely expensive way of spending public money. It costs £37500 a year for an adult and £42000 for a young offender. You can understand just why it is so expensive when you realize that apart from the costs of the buildings, we employ some 45000 people to look after our prisoners. If the prisoner was previously in employment and/or was the mother of small children then you can add the costs of welfare benefits for dependents and the costs of taking children into care to the total bill for a prison sentence.

It might be money well spent if reoffending rates were low but they, too, are frighteningly high. 58% of adult offenders and nearly three-quarters of young offenders are reconvicted within two years.

All the alternatives to a custodial sentence are far cheaper. A basic Community Punishment Order (where an offender does unpaid work in the community) costs £2000 a year to administer. Even a highly supervised and intensive Drug Treatment and Testing Order (which helps an offender get off drugs) only costs £8000 a year.

So why are we sending more and more offenders into custody? The drawbacks are obvious and well-known - overstretched budgets, overcrowded prisons, stressed prison officers, less humane treatment for prisoners and fewer opportunities for their rehabilitation and constant criticism of the Prison Service by the Chief Inspector of Prisons and others.

A recent study by the Prison Reform Trust found that the main reason was simply tougher sentencing, both longer sentences than before and custody instead of non-custody. The study found that there had been "inflation" in the criteria used to fix custodial sentences and that this had been driven both by new legislation and by guideline judgments. An example of the former would be the mandatory minimum three-year sentence for burglars convicted of a third offence. Examples of the latter would be the widely publicized four-year sentence imposed on a young man convicted of the violent robbery of a mobile phone (his trial was the day after the Lord Chief Justice called for longer sentences for mobile phone robbery); and the recent (October 2003) decision of the Court of Appeal to increase the sentences of several child abusers, and to tell judges that they had not given enough weight to the concerns of victims and the public. The latter decision sent to prison an 82-year old man to whom the trial judge had given a non-custodial sentence.

This "inflation" in sentencing has happened despite the fact that judges and magistrates do regard prison as the sentence of last resort, a sentence they impose only when nothing else is appropriate. All this has happened against the background of a "tough on crime" approach by politicians and the media who hardly seem to realize that judges and magistrates are passing harsher sentences. There is a section of the media who continually push the view that any alternative to prison is a soft option. This comes in the form of criticism of individual judgments regarded as being too lenient and, most notably, in the furore unleashed in the press when the Lord Chief Justice gave guidelines that a community sentence should be the starting point for the lower end of the burglary scale and for a first conviction.

There are four major objectives to be met in sentencing policy. We want to protect the public, to punish offenders, to deter others from committing similar crimes and we want to rehabilitate offenders and prevent them offending in future. There is a popular view that the first two objectives automatically secure the other two, ie that locking people up deters others and persuades offenders not to reoffend. We have heard it from politicians ("short, sharp, shock treatment" and "prison works"), from distraught victims of crime and from the media. Sadly the statistics show this not to be the case, except to the extent that people in prison are not committing further crimes. It is a statement of the obvious but they only start reoffending once they have been released, sometimes within days.

Overcrowded prisons and overstretched prison officers have little hope of rehabilitating inmates, many of whom are almost unemployable because of mental health problems, lack of literacy and lack of numeracy. It would be a tremendous achievement if inmate received the education in basic reading and writing skills which they have mostly missed in their previous existence. However no one believes that we can build and staff prisons fast enough to achieve this objective. And why would we want to when we could have additional hospitals and schools instead?

A prison governor with 27 years'service has told the author that he is now seeing the sons and grandsons of inmates he knew when he started his career. That must mean that it would be better to spend money not on building more prisons but on more schools, on more parenting skills courses, on more community mental health schemes to reduce the prison population in the long term and on more early release schemes and curfew orders to reduce the numbers in the short term.

Overcrowding has become so bad that the daily chore of prison governors and their staff is to juggle the number of inmates and stop it exceeding the number of beds for the coming night. Five newcomers arriving from court may well mean that five others have to be uprooted and sent elsewhere. What hope do prison staff have of teaching people to read and write if they do not know from one day to the next whom they will be teaching? In fact it is common knowledge that they do not make any serious attempt at all to rehabilitate those who are going to be in prison for less than a year which may be spent in several different prisons.

The former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham, estimated that the number of prisoners could be reduced by 20000 by removing children, the elderly, the mentally ill, asylum seekers and those imprisoned for shoplifting and drugs offences. One can argue about the exact numbers and whether these are the right categories to remove. However we need politicians who have the courage to lead the electorate to fresh thinking on prisons. Putting more people in prison at huge expense is not consistent with cutting public expenditure and taxes. Putting more people in overcrowded prisons is not reducing crime. Getting people off drugs does reduce crime. Keeping people in employment does reduce crime. Teaching people new skills and changing their thinking does reduce crime.

If we could have a lead from politicians which changed the "lock 'em up" philosophy we could begin to reverse the inflation in sentencing severity mentioned earlier. We already have the reports of the Chief Inspector of Prisons and the reoffending statistics which tell us that prisons are expensive, ineffectual places. The Lord Chief Justice has also told judges and magistrates to use imprisonment only when necessary and for no longer than necessary. Therefore, in theory at any rate, the prison population is at the minimum it has to be, on present rules. That makes a powerful case for changing the rules. Yet we have the Home Secretary trying to impose mandatory, longer sentences through legislation and we have the media still railing at soft options. Judges and magistrates do not sentence in a vacuum and in most cases they do have the discretion to arrive at the sentence which seems appropriate to them. They absorb all that is going on around them and seek to balance the requirements of the law, consistency with other cases, public attitudes, victims' concerns and the impact of prison on the offender. They would begin to send fewer people to prison if the public and the politicians who represent them were better informed about what community sentences are, how effective they can be and argued for the cost savings of using prison less. It will be a courageous politician who takes up this cause but the public should be told the facts about our present prison policy.