Simon Jenkins is right to highlight the negative impact that overcrowding and staff shortages are having on our prison system (Britain’s prison system is brutal and broken. Why does reforming it seem so impossible?, 14 March). People are spending far too much time in their cells and one of the areas that is suffering is prison education.
Evidence clearly shows that participating in education reduces reoffending and makes it more likely that people leaving prison will secure a job. Yet too often people are locked in their cells when they should be in a classroom or workshop, while the education that is on offer is too narrow and not of sufficient quality. This is a missed opportunity to make a positive difference to people’s lives.
The former Guardian columnist Erwin James, who arrived in prison with no qualification and left with a university degree, said that “education lifted me like I had never been lifted before”. We need to give many more people in prison the same opportunity to get the knowledge, skills and qualifications they need to thrive when released.
Jon Collins
Chief executive, Prisoners’ Education Trust
• Simon Jenkins is absolutely right to say that our penal policy is stuck in the dark ages. The capacity crisis facing prisons is the predictable result of locking up more people for longer. Of course, public protection is paramount and victims of crime should be respected. However, more than half of people sent to prison last year committed a non-violent offence and there is a wealth of evidence that community sentences are more effective at reducing reoffending than a short stay in prison.
The swingeing cuts to the Ministry of Justice’s budget in the decade following 2010 have left too many people in prison living in shocking conditions, stuck in their cells for unacceptably long periods of time.
It’s surely now time for politicians to rethink our approach to prisons and to focus on what works to deliver safer communities. The irony is that the public agrees. A 2018 survey found that fewer than one in 10 people think that having more people in prison is the most effective way to deal with crime, favouring early interventions such as better parenting, discipline in schools and better rehabilitation.
Andy Keen-Downs
CEO, Prison Advice and Care Trust
• In the 1980s, I worked for the East Northamptonshire probation service as a well-supported community service organiser (CSO) and supervisor. The experience was personally rewarding but, more importantly, rewarding for the offenders and their families.
Not only did they do useful hard work in the local community, but it was clear that they had found new routes out of criminality. Of course, it didn’t work that way for everybody and sometimes supervision was lax. It was clear that the CSOs needed more workplace training and higher wages to ensure that they could deliver the underlying vision and mission for community service orders (as originally articulated by Barbara Wootton) and for more suitably experienced people to be attracted to this job.
CSOs are the most effective means of safely reducing the prison population – if the overall quality and funding can be radically improved. There is enormous practical scope for uprating this service to achieve its potential.
Adam Hart
London
