When Andy Burnham stood outside Downing Street last week, having achieved his long-held ambition to lead this country, he told us that he was “a circuit breaker for Britain” who would change politics to make it “more about problem-solving than point-scoring”.
We have, of course, heard similar pledges from predecessors who stood outside that famous black door. Yet how depressing that in his first few days, our latest prime minister has indicated he will continue stumbling along the path of perhaps the most egregious example of state failure.
Three days after that speech promising a new politics, Burnham announced he was pausing the prison early release scheme. This followed fury from victims and their families – most notably the widow and mother of Andrew Harper, the police officer killed in 2019 after being dragged along a road by a car driven by three teenagers. Two of the killers, sentenced to 13 years prison for manslaughter, could have been set free next year under a new law – so his family was outraged. Their anger – calling the idea “deplorable” and saying “every victim will be feeling the same” about the scheme – is understandable after such a cruel crime. I would feel exactly the same.
Yet our prison system is a mess, absorbing the consequences of political failures in education, health and social care – and the persistent failure to fix this broken public service leads to misery for more victims. We lock up people at higher rates than anywhere else in Western Europe with numbers doubling over past three decades. They are stuffed into places that are often inhumane, with over-crowded cells and violence, thus unable to deliver effective rehabilitation or treatment for issues such as addiction, illiteracy or mental health conditions that fuel crime.
We see high rates of recidivism. Then timid politicians try to look tough when media firestorms on crime erupt. So this spiral of state failure intensifies and more citizens suffer.
Take the issue of sentencing, which Sir Keir Starmer’s government tried to address with a new law. This followed a call from five senior judges to reverse the recent trend of sentence inflation, sparked by political pressure. Average prison terms for indictable offences rose nearly one-third over a decade, while the number of inmates on life sentences with minimum terms of over 20 years in prison more than doubled since 2013.
Yet even the Government’s own advisory body admits there is no firm evidence to prove longer sentences actually deter criminals.
As the former Conservative justice secretary David Gauke pointed out, this means serious offenders released halfway through sentences today will mostly have been behind bars longer than similar crooks a generation ago. This helps explain why many prisons are hellholes, inmates locked up 23 hours a day in crammed cells at an average cost of £60,000 each – similar to fees for a top private school.
Kieran Mullan, an attention-seeking Tory justice spokesman, reacted by saying he was “ashamed that David Gauke was ever a member of my party”. Clearly, his party now loathes moderates. Yet the Tories slashed prison funding during austerity, shredded probation services with a bungled privatisation, closed half the magistrates courts in England and Wales in a decade – then released thousands of prisoners early before the 2024 election to resolve the crisis they helped to create.
Or take recall – when offenders are sent back inside for breaking release conditions – which accounts for one in five inmates. In 2016, 6,000 people were recalled; last year, in one month alone, there were 5,000 recalls. This is partly down to that Tory wrecking of probation services.
Yet the Prison Reform Trust says one third of recalls are people failing to reside at a specified address, suggesting many are homeless. So prison picks up pieces from our housing crisis too.
Meanwhile the prison officers’ union claims some return to run lucrative drugs rings in prison – another indicator of this broken system’s inadequacy. It demonstrates also grotesque failure of the war on drugs if they cannot be kept out of the nation’s most secure places – yet another example of how political timidity inflames the prison crisis.
The situation is so stark that Reform’s first elected police and crime commissioner is calling for women prisoners – more likely to be jailed for non-violent offences and less likely re-offenders – to be freed.
Colin Sutton, a former senior police detective, says this would be “a radical, outside-the-box way of creating more prison space”. But they comprise only one in 25 inmates, so why stop there? After all, as former justice minister Lord Timpson once rightly said, only one-third of inmates should be behind bars, another one-third really need mental health support and being locked up is “absolute disaster” for the rest – including women.
Our neighbours such as Norway and the Netherlands prove politicians can change course to build a better system with much more humane prisons, fewer inmates and resolute focus on community-based rehabilitation. I have seen this even in the heavily-divided United States – in some of the most Republican regions – with cross-party recognition that there is nothing tough about locking people up in cells all day instead of forcing them to confront personal demons that lead to theft or violence. This smarter approach – revolving around rehabilitation and redemption wherever possible – ends up cutting costs as well as crime.
Politicians must confront their fear of crime to solve this corrosive issue. We must listen to victims and be sensitive to their pain, of course, but they should not dictate flawed policies. This prison crisis, hidden from public gaze, symbolises so many aspects of Westminster failure – yet it can be solved.
Perhaps Burnham, vowing to tackle homelessness and social care, has the bottle to overcome political paralysis, change politics and live up to his brave words outside Downing Street. This is, he said, “the moment we bring back hope”.
Let us see if he was telling the truth – or just another prime minister guilty of betraying Britain.
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