Sir Keir Starmer says he is “angry and frustrated” over mistaken release from prison of crooks such as sex offenders and fraudsters. His deputy, Justice Secretary David Lammy, has been humiliated. Opposition parties are on the warpath, lashing out at ministerial failures. And a despairing public looks on aghast at the latest sign of breathtaking incompetence on the eve of a Budget in which citizens will be squeezed for even more cash to fund a decaying state that seems unable to deliver even its most basic functions.
This crisis could hardly be any worse for a cash-strapped Government that looks engulfed in a permanent state of crisis. First came accidental release of Hadush Kebatu – the Ethiopian asylum seeker who arrived on a small boat and whose assault on a teenage girl in Essex sparked summer protests against asylum hotels, turbocharging the rise of Reform UK.
Then it emerged that an Algerian sex offender had been wrongly released, leading to Lammy’s farcical parliamentary performance as he tried to dodge questions, followed by disturbing revelations that 262 prisoners were accidentally freed over the latest 12 months for which there is data – more than twice the number of the previous year.
This seems on the surface simply one more example of a government afflicted by terminal ineptitude. Yet it is in reality a far more profound issue that exposes the persistent failures of Westminster that has allowed public services to decay – from courts, prisons and probation through to housing, mental health services and social care – along with the grotesque hypocrisy of tribal politicians, the stifling nature of blundering state bureaucracy and the often-dismal outsourcing of public services to unaccountable profiteers.
It helps explain the alarming rise of hard-right populism – although anyone who thinks the flip-flopping, despot-admiring and self-adoring Nigel Farage to be the solution will be sadly disappointed if he attains power.
The criminal justice system is among the most blatant examples of British state failure. We send far too many people to prison, with highest per-capita jail rates in Western Europe – and many of them have neglected addiction, education, mental health or neurodiversity issues.
Then far too little is done when these people are stuck behind bars to ensure they become better citizens to live among the rest of us when released, leading to dreadful levels of recidivism and increasing the misery that falls most on poorest communities. Report after report warns about dangerous levels of overcrowding, rising violence, high-levels of self-harm and suicide, chronic disrepair. More than one third of male inmates say it is easy to obtain drugs; at one prison last year, inspectors found more people to be stoned than sober. Yet amid all this chaos, governors warn that even crucial education services are being cut.
Court backlogs are at record levels, doubling over the past six years in the wake of austerity and the pandemic, but with spending still lower than 15 years ago in real terms despite small recent increases. An official review found “major problems with maintenance, technology and essential services… with many active courtrooms often out of use due to dilapidation” leading to long delays and doubling use of remand – which another state review three months ago found has “extremely detrimental impact” on both inmates and the wider prison service.
Astonishingly in this digital age, overloaded prison staff often end up using calculators to work out dates due to failures of a computer system designed to automate such procedures – although these can be highly complex for crooks with multiple convictions, such as that wrongly-freed Algerian sex offender.
This Government, like its Tory predecessor, responded to the overcrowding crisis with a panicked early-release scheme and a planned cut in the use of short sentences to free space. This piles extra pressure on the Probation Service, entrusted to protect the public, supervise freed offenders and reduce reoffending.
Yet recent reports have warned about severe staffing shortfalls and deteriorating performance – with the official watchdog rating every region in the country “inadequate” in the key area of public protection. These problems are intensified by housing shortages; destruction of community mental health provision; shameful lack of care support for people with autism and learning disabilities; and flawed outsourcing to unaccountable profiteers of key public services from electronic tagging through to secure psychiatric units.
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It is no surprise to see Chris Grayling – architect of the botched 2013 Conservative privatisation of probation that shattered this system and drove out experienced staff – enjoying a cushy life in the House of Lords. His elevation symbolises the sordid lack of political will to solve these corrosive issues. Instead, we see tawdry tribal games in Parliament as political leaders try to dodge responsibility for collective failures, shout in shrill outrage at rivals, and refuse to share the truth with voters that their hardline and headline-grabbing policies on crime have failed appallingly. So there is growing public fear of crime, despite its fall in recent decades, along with a strong majority of voters wanting to lock up more people in prison for even longer.
Most politicians privately accept our criminal justice system is in disarray. Yet we see continuing sentence inflation, inhumanity towards inmates, money wasted on prison-building, and many more ruined lives. Our recidivism rates are far worse than nations such as Norway that switched to a more sensible approach by locking up fewer miscreants and focusing on rehabilitation of damaged citizens.
Even the divided United States, infamous for sky-high incarceration rates, embraced reform – shown by Donald Trump backing a non-partisan package to reduce sentences and boost treatment programmes in his first term. So its prison population has crashed from 1.6m Americans in 2009 to 1.2m on the latest data – and is predicted to halve again by end of the next decade.
How sad that Britain remains locked in the dark ages with its overflowing prison system and hysteria over criminal justice. These failures should shame Westminster’s deceitful politicians as a symbol of their collective failure.
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