Here we go again, tightening the screw and lengthening prison sentences to please that insatiable appetite among some voters for locking up more criminals ever longer. It is a British disease – born of public ignorance of the fact that for many decades, the UK has had the harshest sentencing in western Europe, with more people imprisoned per head of the population than China. That’s an ignorance that both Tory and Labour governments have pandered to, cynically, for political gain.
A despairing justice select committee, chaired by Tory MP Bob Neill, found 70% of the population think sentencing is too lenient. The committee implored the government last month to “actively engage the public on sentencing policy”. People know next to nothing about how sentences have been lengthened time and again, often underestimating existing prison tariffs for crimes.
There is something touching and a bit desperate about the committee’s plea: “It is incumbent on all policymakers and opinion-shapers to play a role in shaping a more constructive debate and to seek greater consensus on the issues.” Instead, we get rants and scares from grandstanding MPs, and a rightwing press stoking demand for more punishment, using any exceptionally shocking crime as a sign of the country going to hell in a handcart. After the unique James Bulger horror, the then Tory home secretary, Michael Howard, set the age of criminal responsibility at 10. This government, as all governments do, has joined the clamour, using tougher sentences for political gain.
Straight after the committee reported, the king’s speech revealed (yet another) sentencing bill imposing whole-life orders for the worst murders and rapes, leaving judges with no discretion. All criminals who commit rape and other serious sexual offences will now spend every day of their sentence behind bars: they usually spend half their term on probation. That fills up prisons fast – but worse, it means dangerous criminals are no longer let out on licence, closely supervised under threat of recall. Now they will be released later, but with no supervision to help regularise their lives outside. You don’t need to be soft on criminals to reckon that’s a more dangerous plan.
This new toughening up, destined to send prison numbers up yet again, comes despite hair-raising government projections. With a record 88,225 people in prison in England and Wales,the justice ministry projects numbers will rise by up to 106,300 by March 2027. This year alone, it’s up by 7%.
Why? Surely there must be a rampaging crime wave? No, the government itself says it’s due to changes to sentencing, and even longer queues of prisoners on remand waiting for court cases delayed in the great austerity backlog: 16,196 prisoners, according to the latest figures. That’s the most for 50 years, says the Prison Reform Trust.
Bursting, unsafe prisons caused panic last month, so the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, announced that most prisoners would be released 18 days early, in order to free up cells. Good news, you might think, that he says nobody should get sentences of under a year, to stop the rapid churn that does no good, with no time for treatment and prisoners at risk of losing contact with jobs and family. But with only 3,833 on these short sentences, that barely touches the overcrowding problem. Besides, Richard Garside of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies warns that courts will just raise the sentence to above a year when they want to lock someone up.
The Prison Reform Trust reports ever worsening conditions, despite the vast expense. The Institute for Government’s annual public services survey says bluntly that “prisons are in crisis”, reporting acute staff shortages, escalating squalor, violence and incidents of women self-harming, with rehabilitation programmes sunk to virtually zero since 2010.
Far from any crime wave, the government boasts that some crime has fallen by 50% since 2010 – and so it has, according to FullFact. Murder is down, but knife and gun crime are up.
Some try to claim crime only falls because so many criminals are locked up, but there’s no link, says the National Audit Office. The crime rate has fallen similarly over recent decades in countries with high and low lock-up rates.
Labour is right to say 90% of crimes go unsolved, a huge rise since 2010. But Labour has nothing much to boast about. In power, it, too, could rightly claim a dramatic fall in crime. Right across the western world, crime is on a downwards trajectory, despite TV dramas and press reports feeding on crime horrors. Reasons for this fall proliferate among sociologists: more education, a change in teenage fashion? Yet under Labour, prison numbers also escalated as crime fell, with home secretaries David Blunkett and Jack Straw delivering the “tough on crime” policy with ferocity, while programmes on youth employment and Sure Start family support delivered “tough on the causes of crime”.
In our book The Verdict, about Labour’s 13 years in power, David Walker and I recorded exactly the same shameless political misuse of crime and punishment. The prison population swelled by 32,500, to 83,887 as Labour introduced 19 new crime bills – with identical Queen’s speech posturing and the same “eye-catchers”. In 2000, Tony Blair demanded the police frogmarch yobs to cash machines to pay instant fines. The police politely told him yobs didn’t have bank accounts, and it disappeared.
Next time, Keir Starmer, a former head of the Crown Prosecution Service who knows all this better than anyone, will surely not repeat the low politics of appeasing the ignorant, though Tory election strategists threaten a firestorm of bogus Jimmy Savile-type allegations on any cases from Starmer’s time at the CPS. They go low, so he should go high. In office, as the justice committee implores, dare Labour this time educate the nation with some basic truth-telling about crime and punishment?
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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