Fellow Romans

The speech Starmer won't give.

The first duty of any government is the safety of its citizens. That requires an efficient, moral and reliable criminal justice system.

I stand here today because our criminal justice system is not achieving these aims. I have to explain to you what this difficult situation is, how we arrived at this point, and what we are compelled to do to address this situation.

The criminal justice system is in crisis. We have all seen the stories around prisons. But criminal justice is far more, it is an interlocked system encompassing the police, probation, courts and prisons. They rely on each other, and a weak point in that chain can damage the whole system.

The police have all but abandoned dealing with crimes they feel are less important. But a person breaking into your home and taking your goods IS important. You rightly expect this to be dealt with quickly and efficiently. The police are failing in their core duties of detecting and solving crime.

The courts service is straining at the limits of its capacity. Court buildings are crumbing. We have insufficient numbers of Judges, and lawyers are overburdened to a shocking degree. Waiting times for trials can now stretch into years.

The probation service has been fragmented, overburdened by bureaucracy, and is short of staff. We rely on the work of the probation service to monitor those offenders in the community, and they are unable to fulfil this to the extent we would desire.

And then prisons, the centrepiece of our criminal justice system. Our prisons are full. They do not rehabilitate offenders well. There is also a shortage of staff to do this difficult job of trying to work with people who obviously don't want to be there.

We have entered government to find all these problems coming to a head, and unlike the Conservatives, we WILL address the problems, we MUST address the problems. It is fundamental to good government and a stable society that people have a criminal justice system that detects crime, catches criminals, and gets them before the courts for due punishment, with space in prisons to take them.

We currently don't have such a system. We have inherited a shockingly underfunded and neglected criminal justice system.

This brings us to the immediate crisis - there is no more room in prisons. The Tory government KNEW from their own statistics that this was going to occur, and they decided to avoid addressing what is now a crisis. They ignored the problem and handed it to us. Well, WE are competent and confident enough to address what the Tories created then ran away from.

We are bitterly disappointed that the party of law and order has reduced criminal justice to disorder and lawlessness. People now have little faith in the system to keep them safe. This is fully a result of Conservative neglect. They chose not to deal with the prison population. They produced a plan to build new prisons, then failed to implement it. And in winning your votes, it is now left to us to pick up the pieces.

These are the difficult decisions, decisions no government should be put in the position of having to make. We are going to have to continue the Tory plans to release more prisoners early, and delay sending some people to prison from court.

I can understand how this will be shocking. People sentenced to prison should go to prison, and those in prison should serve their sentences. That we cannot now guarantee to do that shows the deplorable state of the system the Tories have left us all.

We will make every effort to ensure that the prisoners we release will be low risk. These will NOT be violent or sexual offenders. We are determined to use the space we have in prison to protect you as best we can.

The prisoners we release will be low risk, non violent criminals. Nevertheless, there is a chance that something will go wrong, that one of them will cause significant harm. We will use every lever in our power to prevent this. But we must also face this sad reality.

This decision will be condemned by some. And these are not decisions we would ever make in any other circumstances. We can only apologise that we are in this position and stress that it is not one we created. This mess was a Tory creation, but now our problem as a society to deal with.

This scandalous situation highlights many problems. But it also provides opportunities. We could just keep building ever more prisons, with each cell costing tens of thousands to build, and each prisoner in them costs 40 thousand pounds a year. And what do we get for this huge investment of your taxes? A shocking rate of reoffending.

We don't believe that this is good enough. You deserve better outcomes for your money. We need to reduce crime effectively. And prison isn't delivering what we need.

We are going to use this Tory created crisis to examine every part of our criminal justice system. Every nook and cranny. And we are determined to make it better. And I dont mean merely making the current system more efficient. The present system fails to cut crime. We must look at every avenue, every idea, every nation, to discover ways where we CAN cut crime, not merely recycle criminals endlessly through prisons.

This period of crisis is the best time to have a national conversation on crime and punishment.

I need your help to do this. I need your support and your patience while we carefully examine all the options. No government has had the courage to do this in decades. Now we have been led into crisis by the last government, it is time to face hard realities and search for affective solutions.

Crime is a blight on society. It causes huge harm to those effected. Let us use this moment to determine the future of an effective criminal justice system.

Thank you.

Hard v Soft

One of the pleasures of General Elections is that they clarify the minds of politicians. All of a sudden, blather has to be turned into policy that they can actually sell. One of the disappointments of Elections is that Labour and Conservative will retreat into an arms race on criminal justice. Any idea that Labour are reformists was shattered by New Labour and Jack Straw, who helped lever themselves into power by being tougher than the Tories on crime. Straw led up to the election trying to out-Howard Michael Howard. Once in office, Labour created ultra harsh “two strikes” laws that the years have shown to be so disastrous that even their creators have renounced them. Labour isn't instinctively harsh on criminals, but it will never forget the electoral lessons of new Labour. The myth that Labour is soft on crime should be long dead.

The Conservatives need no electoral nudge to be bilious against criminals. It is their natural home and one they invariably retreat to in the face of elections. This rests on a view of human beings and their decision making that criminology dropped about five minutes after criminology became a field. The Tories hold to the view that people are rational actors, and as such a calculus of benefits versus punishments can influence crime rates. Harsher punishments should invariably mean criminals rationally deciding it's not worth the candle. That over a century of knowledge shows us that this isn't true is not a detail that hinders Tory splenics.

And so we return to the perennial issue of being “hard” or “soft” on crime. The Overton Window doesn't seem to allow us to see outside of this criminological dimorphism that we are sold by our leaders. And it is deeply depressing. Everyone is pretending that the rise in sentencing that has been constant for decades has seen a concomitant fall in crime. This hard v soft discourse is deeply dishonest, partly because we insist it is. Its nice and simple. And we seem to be insisting that our politicians lie to us and feed us simplistic pseudo solutions rather than tell us “this is complicated, we can't guarantee we will get this right but we will do our best”.

And so the escalation continues, the waste of lives and billions of pounds, with no reduction in crime or social harm. The question of whether a measure is hard or soft is meant to relate to crime, but in reality applies only to criminals. Being hard on crime itself would mean measures that reduced it. Being hard on criminals means inflicting harsher punishments. The two are not connected, leaving us in a spiral of increasing sentences without any effect on crime rates. An absurdity. One we seem content to support.

Abandon hard v soft. Walk away from this dead end. The only question should be - Is this policy EFFECTIVE? Does it cut crime? Most current policy does not, it is expensive and stupid. And we will continue to vote for it.

Prison Slave Labour

The few people who think about these things assume that we are made to work. This is partly true, in that about half of all prisoners are in paid employment. A fair proportion of these jobs are really made-up jobs, created to fulfil a managerial employment target. It is rare that a prison job involves more than a Neanderthal level of cognition and even rarer that a job offers any type of meaningful training that can be carried through into future life.

The days of treadmills are long gone. Their modern equivalent is 'contract services' - the Governor sells our labour to outside companies, and we get the smallest proportion of the income.

The largest employer in this prison is the company Bulk Hardware, who pay the Governor to force us to work an average wage of around 75p an hour. If we refuse to do this work, we are subjected to disciplinary procedures that include solitary confinement (http://www.againstprisonslavery.org/).

Such is the desperation of management to keep this contract with Bulk Hardware that nothing is allowed to get in its way -including the law and a semblance of decency. The Governor has targets for getting us out of our cells and in 'purposeful activity’ and the Bulk Hardware contract helps meet that target. It also brings him a nice top-up to his budget. Losing this contract would hurt.

So when one of the most regular and productive prisoners in that workshop was accused by the supervisor of producing shoddy work, it was a big deal - big enough for formal charges to be made against him. These were thrown out, due to evidence that all was not as it seemed. So far, so fair. Except that another manager decided that the allegation was true and rather than risk upsetting Bulk Hardware, sacked him.

Why should you give a damn? Apart from the small matter of prisoners being made slaves for private companies to profit, of course? You should care because you are being robbed in this scheme. Robbed twice, in fact. Where you fork out over £30,000 a year for each of us to be 'treated', made better before we're turfed back into your communities, the reality is that the Institution trousers this chunk of taxes for staff wages. These staff supervise our labour for outside companies. These companies then sell you their goods at a massive mark-up, as they have the advantage over their competitors of cheap forced labour. You get robbed of your taxes and robbed by the prices on the goods we are forced to produce.

Bulk Hardware packs items for DIY stores. Screws, bolts, hooks, are counted into little plastic bags by prisoners for you to buy at 1000% mark-ups. Your ignorance of the realities of prison labour allows you to play your little part in this sordid game. But now you don't have any excuses.