Truss is right on prison sentences
Liz Truss, the Justice Secretary, is under pressure to “do something” about the state of our prisons. In particular, reformers are urging her to cut the population, which is currently around 85,000. Wisely, Miss Truss is resisting. In order to reduce the numbers in prison it would be necessary to change the sentencing laws that put inmates there in the first place. As the minister said in her speech yesterday, there is no “quick fix” that brings about a decline in the population without at the same time endangering the public.
This is not to say there are no reforms worth considering. There appears to be a shortage of prison staff which makes it harder for those that are left to cope with disturbances and means that too many inmates are kept in their cells for lengthy periods. A recruitment drive launched by the Justice Ministry should help. Schemes to prepare prisoners for life outside need to be improved.
But the contention that the prison population is too high needs to be challenged. The smallest penal estate of recent times was recorded in the early 1990s when the Tories were in office and Kenneth Clarke was Home Secretary. It happened to coincide with an increase in the crime rate to an all-time high. Only when longer jail terms were introduced by Michael Howard in the mid-1990s and strengthened by the Blair administration did crime begin to fall, a decline that has largely continued to this day.
Campaigners who say that prison numbers should be falling when crime is on the decline seem to miss the point. Moreover, they thought there were too many people in jail when the population was half what it is today. In other words, they do not regard prison to be a proper punishment save for the most dangerous offenders. The public does not agree with that.
The prison population has been swollen by a big rise in sex offenders and domestic abusers. Foreign prisoners also make up more than 12 per cent of the total. A scheme to encourage them to serve sentences abroad was a flop, as was an idea to build prisons abroad to house them. But the idea that the courts send people to prison with hardly a thought is false: many first-time inmates are repeat offenders. In addition, most are released at the halfway point of their sentence. Weakening the sentencing regime further risks undermining public confidence in the criminal justice system. Miss Truss is right to understand that.