Coffee House Shots
Can Labour solve our prisons crisis?
If you enjoy our podcasts, why not subscribe to The Spectator 2 for more from your favourite podcast hosts and guests? You can get three months of The Spectator for just £3 right now if you go to spectator.co.uk/trial Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Katie Bawles and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and me and Acheson, former prison governor and director of community safety at the home office and now a senior advisor at the Tantric Streamers in Project and Rights for the Spectator. Now over the weekend, Keir Starmer gave his first press conference in 10 Downing Street after his first cabinet and he warned that tough choices were coming down the track. Today we're getting a sense of what those tough choices are and we're expecting and as has been briefed overnight, Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary to announce an early release of prisoners. Those on fixed sentences could be released after serving 40% of their sentence as opposed to the current 50% with some exemptions in. Ian, do you think that Shabana Mahmood and Keir Starmer had much choice here? Obviously what Labour liked to say is the Tory inheritance in terms of overcrowding, lack of capacity but so bad they had to take quite drastic action. Action of Rishi Sunek could not take because he was too scared of a backlash of in the parliamentary party. Yeah, thanks for having me on Katie. I mean, this is real, first of all. This is not a confected thing. I mean, Keir Starmer is cross because I'm sure having stood in a platform of change and on the basis of tackling crime and antisocial behaviour, the first change she probably didn't want to make was releasing lots of people out onto the streets. So the right of time, the right of options and the right of space, frankly, in prisons. So we've got to release a significant number of prisoners to give the prison service the breathing space that otherwise could have led to gridlock in the criminal justice system, which would show a new government unable to process people convicted of serious offences into the system because it was absolutely jammed. And that's a political calculation as well. So this has to be done, but the thing to be clear about is that we're not eliminating the risk here by dealing with this in early release terms, by releasing people perhaps only 40% into their custodial sentence. Incidentally, just to be clear about this, we're releasing people at a shorter time into their custodial sentence than the judges decided they have to serve. So you're displacing the risk. So you're moving some of that risk into the community. Everything we know about the probation service, unfortunately, at the minute suggests that it is unable to deal with the workload it has at the minute, let alone a significant number of other prisoners, including those who have at least a propensity to be violent being released onto the streets. And I'm afraid about the Tories, as, you know, as unfair as it might seem, is going to have the shelf life of warm milk on a summer's day. If you have a situation which is, I think, highly likely, where somebody who's been released early commits a further serious offence. Fraser, those around where she's seen it would talk about how they had actively chosen to run the prison system's hot, by which they meant not many places, ultimately checking the number of prison spaces on a daily basis, and trying to tweak the system around it. It was something that the civil servants did not particularly appreciate because they worried about overcrowding and also potentially a situation where you can't arrest those or take uniform courts. Do you think Labour had no choice but to do this? Yes, I do. I mean, if you look at what's happening in Scotland, for example, they've been doing this for a while now. It was a splash of a Scotsman newspaper a few days ago. So this is, we can see the trend mirrored in Scotland and in England, of course, Scotland's in a slightly different electoral cycle. But this is what happens if you, if the prisons are full. And the Tories change the sentencing. For example, there are some animal rights. Offends as now they get four years, rather than the maximum of six months. And if you look at the projected prison population, it's expected to go up by 20, 30 percent of the next few years. Now, what we're not going to get in the next few years is 20, 30 percent more prison spaces. So the Conservatives had put in place before me that for massive expansion of numbers, without any expansion in capacity. And this is said to be one of the reasons that Richard Enoch had his early election. He wanted to go to the polls now before you in the chance of some prison riots during the summer, which a lot of them were worried about. Now, unless you can basically might get some BB stock home or some prison boats or something like that, then you do have to start releasing them early. And the problem, of course, is that there is a debate to be had here about whether we should be sticking to our system of incarceration. And you've got James Timson, a new prison minister, has been mentioning the example of Netherlands, where they let something like a third of the prisoners out. And if you look at prison numbers in the Netherlands, they've gone down a lot over the last six, seven years, as have the number of crimes. Now, this makes the Dutch experience a lot different to that of Italy, which in 2006 also let out a third of its prisoners. But then the crimes went up quite a lot. The mortal of that story was that prison might not be great for rehabilitation. But one thing prison is good at is protecting the rest of us from the crimes that a prisoner would normally commit. I think the Italian experiment suggested that for every year one of these guys spends in prison that stops between 20 to 40 or even 50 crimes a year. Now, it seems, or certainly James Timson will have you believe, that technology has moved on, that tagging, et cetera, is now so efficient that, and you can do far better job at identifying which prisoners are a threat to society, which aren't, that we can move on to a new era, where we can have our version of the Dutch prison crisis. Their prison crisis is not enough prisoners, and returning prisons into hotels. Now, this is, of course, is long been a progressive cause. This is a great left-right split. Does prison work, or not? You can go right back to the days of Michael Howard as home secretary to find this debate taking place. But we're not having this debate. We are simply letting more prisoners out because we've run out of space, and we've run out of space. I'm afraid to say it because the Tories were not competent enough to build enough prison spaces for the census and guidelines that they passed. Ian, if we, I suppose, look at the two parts of Labour's plan. It feels as though what's happening today is something that most would find hard to dispute in terms of the options that Kid Starmer had when he entered number 10. But that point about Timson, there's a hint that actually there's a much more long-term radical prison reform agenda, and one that was less of a feature in the election campaign by Labour. You had Shabal and Mamud and others talking about how they want to build more prisons, and relaxed planning restrictions around this, and that's something they still want to do. But less about the idea of having fewer prisoners in the first place. Do you think we could see voters surprised by what Labour is planning here? Well, we've yet to see the detail, and we've got a short-term crisis that has to be solved. This is the worst thing to do, apart from all the alternatives. Beyond that, actually, there are a lot of complex questions that need to be asked about who we send to prison and what for and what we hope to do with them in a, you know, a system with a turnover rate billion a year that has a failure rate for adult male offenders in prison for less than 12 months of 55%. If prison were only for rehabilitative purposes, this would be the greatest public policy failure of the last hundred years. You know, we're dealing with actually a situation where, you know, I don't absorb the ideological vandalism of the conservative administration since 2010 that sucked thousands of years of experience out of prison systems and slash staff with a static and then growing population. You know, what did they think was going to happen? Every metric of decency, safety and stability and rehabilitation went into the skip. But actually, the genesis of this problem happened really in the early Blair years, where you had increased levels of punitive activity, increased numbers of fences being created, people being put in prison for longer. So you're dealing with the, you know, the pointy end of a strategy that is decades in the making, how we reverse out of that. And whether or not, frankly, in relation to what Fraser said about the Netherlands, culturally, we're in a place where we can, you know, imitate some of some of that policy remains to be seen because we are very different from some of the examples that keep getting thrown out as more enlightened custody, Norway, for example, which has much lower recidivism rates actually imprisons people for offenses that are likely to have very low rates of the recidivism anyway, like traffic offenses proportionally much more than we do. So it's, it's a very complex situation. But the one thing I wanted to say about what's going to happen this afternoon, which is, you know, the theatre of what is happening, we've been softened up for letting lots of prisoners out because of overcrowding. We're told Shabana Mahmud is going to appear at Bedford prison and five wells. Bedford is a Victorian slum, frankly, which has been in free for over years. And, you know, while lots of people want to say, including officialdom, everything will be solved when we get rid of overcrowding. If you look at what's happening in Bedford, you know, recently, like, for example, the Sunday Times undercover reporter who became a uniformed officer there with no vetting at all, you know, half a day's training and was able to walk in off the streets to the center of the prison with security keys without being stopped at any of the screening points or the searching points, because they weren't staffed. That is nothing to do with overcrowding. HMP five wells had really severe problems over, you know, last year, where hundreds of staff were leaving, where they were frightened, where the prison was awash with drugs, with, you know, drunken, sort of, cell parties with corruption. And it's an absolutely modern prison. It's literally one of our most modern that was only built very recently, and it's not overcrowded. So, you know, what I would encourage the people who are not in charge to do is, yes, deal with overcrowding. That is the structural priority that has to be dealt with. But beyond that, you need to look at the organization, competence of his Majesty's prison and probation service. And if you want to do some radical things there, longer term, you might, for example, look at whether or not prison and probation belong together. I mean, I've used, again, for example, of Scotland, where they've got forensic social work in injustice, rather than a probation service, and certainly not one that is linked to what should be, but is not, I'm afraid, a national law enforcement agency, the prison service. So whether or not they could be disentangled, I think it's been a catastrophic shotgun marriage. These organizations are philosophically and organizationally very different, and they've been forced together. And then, probation has been vandalized by, you know, just literally repeated, you know, reorganization since grilling, then they've got the organization that's knees. It's overwhelmed as it is, it's understaffed, it's dropped the ball massively in recent scandals where people on supervision have committed very, very high profile and serious offenses. I'm still concerned about what happens this afternoon, when the gates get open, and how that risk is going to be managed into the community. But, you know, those are long term issues. Short term issues get, you know, get some headroom in the prison system, which is, you know, I think certainly on course for disturbances and riots that if nothing were done, that the prison service is absolutely incapable of dealing with. It doesn't even have the correctly number, correct number of riot trained officers available to be able to deal with problems. And, you know, where are you going to go next, the police? So, you know, there's some short term problems, some long term solutions, medium term, just to finish the point. I'd be looking at removing most of the female offenders from the system. They are in, you know, eight or nine prisons. The vast majority of them being prison for nonviolent offenses. We need a secure prison for female prisoners who are dangerous, absolutely. They're only the rest of them crudely repurposed. Male prisons, we could use that capacity. We could vastly expand our open prisons, which is a really good way of getting people towards the end of their period in custody and semi structured and supervised conditions, able to reconnect their family ties and to be able to go out and work, for example. But, you know, James Timson knows about getting people into employment. I welcome his appointment, if for no other reason, then actually he's the first person that I can remember who actually wants the job for for quite some time. So, he knows about that. And it's one of the few things we know about in relation to recidivism that actually works, getting somebody into sustained employment and keeping them there, turning, you know, takers into givers, restoring dignity, stopping further victims. That's the big focus that we have to concentrate on after we've solved this, this immediate crisis. And just finally, Fraser, do you think there is a political risk for labor and all this, if, you know, Ian just touched on, you know, prisoners who are released early under a labor government? Yes, you can blame the Tories for the situation, but under a labor order, and go on to, you know, cause issues in the community, all laid out in the line if there's a big switch in terms of how many are incarcerated? The risk for labor, of course, is that their manifesto was quite tough on law and order, difficult to segue now into a liberal regime, which is what the appointment of James Timson indicates, although it's not necessarily clear, but that's what it's going to do. I'm also minded, Katie, of what the now justice secretary, Ms. Mahmood said to you and women of all's, she was speaking in quite tough language. She would basically was saying there that prisons are overcrowded, she said we don't have enough spaces. This country hasn't built enough prisons for a long time, and certainly not over the last 14 years, if you break the rules, you do have to be punished. Now, this was her message in opposition. So she was quite comfortable with positioning labor as being tough on crime, and if anything, more pro prisons. She was saying it was a scandal all this early release. Now, to be going from straight from that to pursuing pretty much exactly the policy she was criticizing, that would leave labor exposed if there was much in the way of an opposition. But I think the conservatives, and I've spoken to a few of them senior recently, who actually are genuinely and quite rightly mortified at the room failures here. I think if you listen to Alex Chock, the ex justice secretary, he's pretty much going on radio saying, look, it was a dreadful situation where I wish I could have done more but I wasn't able to. So I don't think he was able to really point the finger at labor as they change position, if indeed that's what they're going to do. Thank you, Fraser. Thank you, Ian, and thank you for listening. [Music]