I begin with the proposition that "prison doesn't work". This obviously presupposes the purpose of prison – a debate in its own right. However, in terms of reoffending and cost, prison fails. No other enterprise in human history with a 60% failure rate would be allowed to continue unchallenged, yet we appear to be singularly content with this monstrous rate of reoffending. And footing the bill for that perpetual failure.
Firstly, we should squarely address the issue of who we imprison, and for what crimes. Only then does the utility and cost of imprisonment become stark. In this Part, I will highlight Remand and Women prisoners.
Remand Prisoners. Over 48,000 people are remanded into custody awaiting trial each year. At any given moment, there are around 12,000 Remands (14% of the prison population).
A full 60% of these people are remanded to prison having being charged with non violent crime. Ten percent are outright acquitted, and a further 15% (15,000 people a year) are convicted but given a non-custodial punishment.
With the average annual cost of detaining a prisoner being around £40k, that we are remanding into prison so many people charged with non violent crimes must be questioned.
And where do we keep these Remand prisoners in the gulag? The uninitiated may not appreciate the varied nature of prisons, with categories going from Category A – High Security – to Category D, Open prisons. It is a matter of historical practice that the Prison Service places all Remands into Category B prisons – meant to hold people who pose such a risk that their "escape must be made very difficult". And Cat Bs are extremely secure, with escapes being rare.
But why place all Remands in such secure prisons? Because there is a direct correlation between security category and cost. Cat A prisons are the most expensive, Cat D the cheapest. Why place Remands, most of whom have comitted a non violent crime, into such a secure and expensive environment as Category B prisons? A quarter of a century ago, the Woolf Report made the recommendation that the default security Category for Remands should be Category C. Cat C prisons cost a significant amount less to run.
The Prison Service has ignored the Woolf recommendation, trampled over common sense, and continues to imprison those charged with non violent crimes in extremely expensive and secure facilities. If Remands were made default Category C, then tens of millions of pounds would be saved. The waste of the 25 years since Woolf must run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Women prisoners are another anomaly, making up some 5% of the prison population (just shy of 4,000). It is truly remarkable to note that fully 82% of women prisoners are imprisoned for non-violent crimes. Nearly half of them are sentenced for theft or handling stolen goods.
It must be asked, why are we throwing non-violent women into expensive and secure prisons? If the Corston Report were ever implemented, the reality is that the number of women prisoners could be reduced by some 80 or 90% - with a resulting saving of tens of millions.
In this first part of a series of posts I have made propositions which will save many many millions of pounds. In changing the structure of how Remand and Women prisoners are dealt with, whole prisons can be emptied, the social harms of imprisonment reduced, and the cost of the prison estate significantly reduced.
Thoughts please....
