Good afternoon. It’s been another bumper week for the Crown Prosecution Service, whose tally of rioters charged after the recent wave of disturbances has nearly hit the 500 mark. The clipped voices of judges handing down exemplary sentences have been broadcast on national media, and No 10 is visibly pleased that, under Sir Keir Starmer’s stolid leadership, the state looks to have reimposed order. All fine, as far as it goes (too far, some feel, though like Robert Shrimsley, I hold no candle for the rioters) but there is another leg to this story: the government’s decision this week to trigger “Operation Early Dawn”, its emergency system for managing prison overflows. That provided a reminder that the UK’s justice and prison system, far from actually functioning like a well-oiled machine, is in a state of chronic disrepair. Not unlike the NHS, it can still be made to work in an emergency — if you have a heart attack and pitch up at A&E you’re in good hands — but for day-to-day issues, the waiting lists just keep growing so long as demand increases faster than the resources available to meet them. The message of this week is therefore somewhat conflicted. The post-riot prosecution blitz feeds the idea that “prison works”, both as a form of retribution and deterrent, while Operation Early Dawn is a reminder that the UK penal system generally doesn’t. The government knows this, which is why it appointed James Timpson as prisons minister. He’s the heir of the eponymous shoe repair business that hires prisoners and a former chair of the Prison Reform Trust, which campaigns for better prison conditions. He’s also on record in an interview from February saying that about a third of current inmates — including many women — are needlessly incarcerated. “I think we need a government that’s brave,” he added, in what may prove to be a courageous remark. How brave? Well, consider that, as this Institute for Government report points out, the prison population of England and Wales has doubled over the past 30 years, while crime rates have fallen substantially over the same period. That paradox is explained by what you might call “penal populism” — longer sentences (up 25 per cent in the past decade) for every larger roster of crimes, often driven by a media debate around retributive justice that politicians of all stripes rarely dare to challenge. The result, as we reported this week, is that England and Wales already has the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe, with about 141 prisoners per 100,000 of population — compared with 106 in France and 67 in Germany. And while pushing policies that create more prisoners (the England and Wales prison population is now 87,000 and due to exceed 100,000 by the end of next year, according to government forecasts) successive governments haven’t built the prison to match their own ambitions. The numbers are a dismal testament to the failure of UK public policy on prisons, particularly at a time when the international understanding of what makes an effective prison system is now much more focused on rehabilitation than retribution. The UK pays lip service to rehabilitation, but as this Social Market Foundation paper explains, consistently fails to deliver on those ambitions because the system is undermanned and overcrowded. That means prisoners spend far too long locked in their cells, not doing the education and remedial work that countless studies show reduce reoffending. The result is high rates of recidivism. As is widely known, other countries such as the Netherlands and Norway have fundamentally different approaches yielding vastly superior results. As Professor Francis Pakes, a comparative criminologist at the University of Portsmouth points out here, between 2005 and 2015, while Britain was stuffing its jails with more and more prisoners, the Dutch reduced their prison population by 44 per cent. They now have a prison incarceration rate that is less than half that of the UK, according to the SMF. Norway, which reformed its system in the 1990s to focus on re-socialising offenders, has seen its recidivism rate drop to 20 per cent (having started from levels similar to those seen in the US) and now ranks 196th out of 223 countries for prison population rates, with 53 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The Norwegian system is, it is true, much more expensive — up to £100,000 a year per “inmate” compared with an average of £52,000 in the UK — but then they incarcerate far fewer people. But in truth, discussing the merits of alternative systems and approaches seems somewhat besides the point, given the state of the broader debate on prisons and criminal justice in the UK compared with those countries.
The UK government must learn from the example set by other nations on prisons, where the debate is fundamentally different © ANDY RAIN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock The recent row over the Dutch Olympic athlete sentenced to four years for raping a 12-year-old girl when he was 19 highlighted those differences — both in Dutch and English law, but also public attitudes to rehabilitation. (Good read here on this.) That’s why the IfG report cited above offers only a laundry list of salami-slice solutions in response to the prisons crisis, rather than entertaining the idea of a fundamentally different discussion around prisons. This leaves us with ideas such as revising sentencing policy (upping maximum suspended sentences to three years from two) and various forms of either queueing or crowding prisoners into jails, neither of which really fix anything. Moving past that will require a shift in the public discourse that, on current form, seems deeply unlikely. When Labour announced it was moving to early release of some (non-violent) prisoners who will now serve only 40 per cent of their sentences, the Conservative shadow security minister Tom Tugendhat rushed onto social media to condemn a proposal his own party planned to introduce two months previously. “In what world is releasing 20,000 criminals onto our streets a good idea,” thundered Tugendhat on X. And he’s touted as the moderate candidate to be the next Tory leader. The even crazier part is that, as the former Tory justice minister Alex Chalk pointed out after he’d left office, the early release order will only buy the current government about 18 months of breathing room . . . before the jails start to overflow once more. There needs to be a different debate on prisons, but in truth the familiar “lock ‘em up’ and throw away the key” narrative of recent weeks is one that is more palatable to the public and a class of contemporary politicians that no longer dares to make difficult arguments to the public. As Timpson said, “we need a government that’s brave”. In the current environment, I’m not holding my breath. This week’s chart is an off-cut from a deep-dive that I wrote this week with my colleague Amy Borrett on the “long tail” of low-skilled workers created by a British education system that fails many of those who do not follow a university track after leaving school. The result is that British children stand level or even ahead of their French or German counterparts at the age of 15, and yet by age 24, they’re behind their European peers because far too few are in any form of training. The Labour manifesto talks about “one in eight” young people not being in education, employment or training — so-called NEETs — but given that “employment” usually means a dead-end job with no training for this category of worker, the actual picture is far bleaker than that. When you look at NETs — those in no form of education or training — more than one in three young people in Britain are essentially flatlining from a skills point of view. That’s bad from both a social and economic perspective. Like the prisons situation, none of this is new. Whitehall, the Treasury and the media (all run by and for graduates) has for decades starved further education and technical colleges of both funding and, as importantly, affection. The government has a big headline agenda on house building, tech industries and delivering the green revolution, which should make the perfect platform for a huge push around skills linked to its industrial, green and devolution policies. As with prisons, the problems are deep-seated and the solutions — as much as being about more money — demand a genuine remaking of the public narrative that surrounds them. Once again, the government needs to be brave. I’m now off for a week’s holiday, to gather my strength before the coming autumn news storm. In the interim, I’ll be leaving you in the capable hands of Jen Williams in Manchester, who as always will provide a view from beyond the SW1 bubble. The State of Britain is edited by Harvey Nriapia today. Premium subscribers can sign up here to have it delivered straight to their inbox every Thursday afternoon. Or you can take out a Premium subscription here. Read earlier editions of the newsletter here. | Labour gives green light to 20mph zones | Local councils will have ‘full support’ to roll out speed-reduction measures | | | How this Yimby was taught a lesson | I learnt the hard way: it is easy to support development in the abstract | | | UK rejects calls for EU youth movement deal | Campaigners say allowing 18 to 30-year-olds to live and work in Europe would be popular | | | | |