Our dreadful jails

To The Guardian

The most terrible fact to emerge from Phil Wheatley’s attempt to sound the alarm over the appalling state of our prisons is that the rise in the prison population is due to “the courts’, particularly the crown courts’, increasing use of custody versus noncustodial disposals, and the trend towards longer sentences”. Bluntly put, we have a judiciary in the criminal courts which believes, against all the evidence of the cases which come before it, that prison works.

There were 344 deaths in prisons in the 12 months to March 2017, up 54 from the previous year – 19% overall, with self-inflicted deaths up 11%, and incidents of selfharm up 24%. The Ministry of Justice’s figures show that twothirds of the rise in the prison population between 1993 and 2012 has been driven by greater use of long custodial sentences. The average sentence is now nearly four months longer than it was 20 years ago, at 15.9 months. Yet isolating people in overcrowded, drug-ravaged prisons does nothing to reduce reoffending rates. It adds further damage to chaotic lives.

If this Government was genuinely committed to prison reform it would take active steps to promote non-custodial alternatives to prison, and intervene in relation to current sentencing practice. It chooses instead to do nothing, giving the judiciary a licence to carry on sentencing prisoners to pointless time in factories of suicide and self-harm. Nick Moss, London